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DiggThe Way of the Desert: A Traveler’s Guide to Reconciliation
“Relation with eternal truth and love doesn’t happen without mending our relations with Tom, Dick, and Harriet,” writes Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. In exploring the sayings of the Desert Fathers, Williams suggests that we can be the tools of our neighbor’s reconciliation with God — if we allow ourselves to be.
One thing that comes out very clearly from any reading of the great desert monastic writers of the fourth and fifth centuries is the impossibility of thinking about contemplation or meditation or “spiritual life” in abstraction from the actual business of living in the body of Christ, living in concrete community.
We are always faced with the danger of trying to think about this odd thing called spiritual life as if it were a matter we could deal with in isolation, and it is often very attractive to attempt this, simply because the facts of human life together are normally so messy, so unpromising and unedifying. Other people in their actual material reality do make things a lot more difficult when what we think we want is spirituality — the cultivation of a sensitive and rewarding relationship with eternal truth and love. And this is where the desert monastics have an uncompromising message for us: relation with eternal truth and love simply doesn’t happen without mending our relations with Tom, Dick, and Harriet.
The actual substance of our relation with eternal truth and love is bound up with how we manage the proximity of these human neighbors. The early monks and nuns moved off into the communities of the desert because they weren’t convinced that the church in its “ordinary” manifestations showed with any clarity what the church was supposed to be about; they wanted to find out what the church really was — which is another way of saying that they wanted to find out what humanity really was when it was in touch with God through Jesus Christ. In the literature associated with the early generations of desert ascetics, they report back from the “laboratory of the Spirit” not only about how prayer is to be experienced but also about how humanity is to be understood — about life, death, and neighbors.
The phrase derives from a saying of Anthony the Great, the earliest and most influential of the Christian desert monastic teachers: Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we win our brother, we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble, we have sinned against Christ.
The desert monastics are keenly interested in diagnosing what sort of things get in the way and block someone else’s relation with Christ. They seem very well aware that one of the great temptations of religious living is the urge to intrude between God and other people. We love to think that we know more of God than others; we find it comfortable and comforting to try to control the access of others to God. Jesus himself speaks bluntly about this when he describes the religious enthusiasts of his day shutting the door of the Kingdom in the face of others: “You do not enter yourselves, and when others try to enter, you stop them” (Matt. 23:13).
Among the longest collections of sayings attributed to particular desert fathers are those around the names of Macarius the Great and Poemen (granted that Poemen, “the shepherd,” may be a name concealing several different figures). Of Macarius we read, in an unforgettable image, that “he became like a God on earth,” because when he saw the sins of the brothers, he would “cover” them, just as God casts his protection over the world. Informed of a selfconfident old monk whose counsel has depressed others, Macarius pays a visit:
When he was alone with him, the old man [Macarius] asked, “How are things going with you?” Theopemptus replied, “Thanks to your prayers, all is well.” The old man asked, “Do you not have to battle with your fantasies?” He answered, “No, up to now all is well.” He was afraid to admit anything. But the old man said to him, “I have lived for many years as an ascetic and everyone sings my praises, but, despite my age, I still have trouble with sexual fantasies.” Theopemptus said, “Well, it is the same with me, to tell the truth.” And the old man went on admitting, one by one, all the other fantasies that caused him to struggle, until he had brought Theopemptus to admit all of them himself. Then he said, “What do you do about fasting?” “Nothing till the ninth hour,” he replied. “Fast till evening and take some exercise,” said Macarius. “Go over the words of the gospel and the rest of Scripture. And if an alien thought arises within you, don’t look down but up: the Lord will come to your help.”
Self-satisfaction is dealt with not by confrontation or condemnation but by the quiet personal exposure of failure in such a way as to prompt the same truthfulness in someone else: the neighbor is won, converted, by Macarius’s death to any hint of superiority in his vision of himself. But we can find something like the opposite extreme in the stories as well. What about those who judge themselves too harshly? Abba Poemen is confronted with a brother who admits to having committed a great sin and wants to do three years’ penance.
The old man said, “That’s a lot.” The brother said, “What about one year?” The old man said, “That’s still quite a lot.” Some other people suggested forty days; Poemen said, “That’s a lot too.” And he said, “What I think is that if someone repents with all one’s heart and intends never to commit the sin again, perhaps God will be satisfied with only three days.”
To assume the right to judge, or to assume that you have arrived at a settled spiritual maturity that entitles you to prescribe confidently at a distance for another’s sickness, is in fact to leave others without the therapy they need for their souls; it is to cut them off from God, to leave them in their spiritual slavery — while reinforcing your own slavery. But the plain acknowledgment of your solidarity in need and failure opens a door: it shows that it is possible to live in the truth and to go forward in hope. It is in such a moment that God gives himself through you, and you become by God’s gift a means of connecting another with God. You have done the job you were created to do.
Saint Anthony of the Desert says that gaining the brother or sister and winning God are linked. It is not getting them signed up to something or getting them on your side. It is opening doors for them to healing and to wholeness. Insofar as you open such doors for another, you gain God, in the sense that you become a place where God happens for somebody else. You become a place where God happens. So if we can shift our preoccupations, anxiety, and selfishness out of the way to put someone in touch with the possibility of God’s healing, to that extent we are ourselves in touch with God’s healing. If we ask how this literature contributes to any kind of contemporary understanding of Christian life together, the answer must lie in two of the words at the heart of that saying of Saint Anthony’s with which we started — life and win. To find my own life is a task I cannot undertake without the neighbor; life itself is what I find in solidarity, and not only in a sense of togetherness (talking about solidarity can easily turn into no more than this) but in that willingness to put “on hold” the perspective I want to own and cling to and possess, so that something else may happen through my presence and my words — the something else that is the announcing of the gospel. And winning is a word not about succeeding so that other people lose but about succeeding in connecting others with life-giving reality. Together, these words challenge us to think about common life in radical ways.
So a properly functioning human group, doing what human groups under God are meant to do, would also be one where we were engaged in learning quite intensively about the pressures that make us run away from this presence. This prompts some uncomfortable thoughts about the sorts of disagreement we are so used to in the church. It isn’t that the desert tradition knows nothing of controversy; these documents come to us from an age compared with which many of our squabbles are pretty tea partyish. It is simply that they leave us with the question of whether any particular victory in the constant and supposedly invigorating life of debate leaves some people more deeply alienated from God — and the nastier question of what we are going to do about it if that is so.
The plain acknowledgment of your solidarity in need and failure opens a door: it shows it’s possible to go forward in hope.
The church is a community that exists because something has happened that makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant. God’s truth and mercy have appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, in his death and resurrection, have worked the transformation that only God can perform, told us what only God can tell us: that he has already dealt with the dreaded consequences of our failure, so that we need not labor anxiously to save ourselves and put ourselves right with God. The church’s rationale is to be a community that demonstrates this decisive transformation as really experienceable. A healthy church is one in which we seek to stay connected with God by seeking to connect others with God, one in which we “win God” by converting one another, and convert one another by our truthful awareness of frailty. And a church that is living in such a way is the only church that will have anything different to say to the world; how deeply depressing if all the church offered were new and better ways to succeed at the expense of others, reinstating the scapegoat mechanisms that the cross of Christ should have exploded once and for all.
If we trivialize the depth of our human need for God, we shall never be instruments to others of reconciliation. If we are unaware in ourselves of this need, because we have no disciplines for recognizing who and what we are, the church becomes ineffective.
The ideal of finding your life by putting yourself at the service of another person’s reconciliation with God could conceivably be taken as a recommendation simply to stop having a self in the ordinary sense. Of course, this is a misreading; but you can see why it might look plausible. Here we have to be reminded of why the desert fathers and mothers valued self-awareness. The specific facts of your experience may or may not be helpful to another — you should not assume that you always need to share the details, but you need to know them yourself. To be the means of reconciliation for another within the body of Christ, you must be consciously yourself, knowing what has made you who you are. And knowing what your typical problems, your brick walls are, and especially what your gifts are. The neighbor is our life; to bring connectedness with God to the neighbor is bound up with our own connection with God.
The neighbor is our death, communicating to us the death sentence on our attempts to settle who we are in our own terms and to cling to what we reckon as our achievements. “Death is at work in us and life in you,” as Saint Paul says (2 Cor. 4:12), anticipating the themes of the desert. He is writing about how the apostle’s suffering and struggle make the life of Christ visible in such a way that others are revived in hope. We love with God when and only when we are the conduit for God’s reconciling presence with the person next to us. It is as we connect the other with the source of life that we come to stand in the place of life, the place cleared and occupied for us by Christ.
From Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another by Rowan Williams; © 2005 by The World Community for Christian
Meditation. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., www.shambhala.com.
