Living with the Desert Fathers and Mothers |
The
'old men' have often found their way into my poetry and it is perhaps in this
way that I find myself able to most deeply meditate on them of the Desert FathersThey have come, the old men
And pitched a camp in my heart Finding a dry cave And a quiet place They have made a home for good Here in my heart They patiently plait ropes and weave baskets They are in no rush Their prayers demand no action Everything is done at the right time Long ago they learnt the virtues of waiting They have forgotten how to judge Even though their eyes see clearly: They wait and they pray And one day I will come home This is probably my favorite poem about the Desert Fathers. It identifies some of the facets of their life that I have found most important: the weaving of baskets which made them economically self-sufficient but also became an important medium for prayer; the centrality for them of Jesus's words "do not judge, that you be not judged" and the complementary ability to discern the hearts of people. But at its heart and in my heart (for the Desert Fathers are about nothing if not the heart) is that ineffable longing to know God as they knew God. Central to this, as also it was to them, is the cell The CellThis is my cellHere I must breathe Air I cannot choose; Here I must live Days I cannot master. It is the struggle Uncomfortable Like the old monks But different More affluent, less harsh Less solitude, more noise But the Same Struggle With demons Inside and out And prayer, and work And the body lived for God This
poem embodies the tension which comes when your heart is captured by the words
of people who lived centuries ago in an utterly different world! I cannot
re-create the Egyptian desert but can I perhaps find a cell where the work of
transformation can happen? CellIn the wildernessI must find a cell, A safe place Hidden from world-noise It may only be A corner A cranny A crack In the shiny surface Of seductive rationality But still it hides The pearl of prayer No need to be perfect Only obscure Off obvious tracks And free The
purpose of the cell is to find freedom. Very few of us truly desire freedom:
that freedom which liberates us entirely from the unstable passions of the
heart and enables us to live as fully grown-up human beings. Rationality, as
the old atheist David Hume was well aware cannot liberate us. We need to do
business with the heart and this is where the Desert Fathers are most
significant, for whether they succeeded or not, they knew life is always a
matter of hard. GatherWithdrawGather Withdraw to the wilderness to the high hills in the time of expectancy Solitude you find there, Peace, The rhythm of the uncluttered earth. Withdraw Gather to your senses the sensations of your flesh the sinews of your mind the soul-sense Strangely attractive And you will be drawn back To the scattering of the multitudes. The Welsh hills are my Egyptian desert, drawn to them, I have found a distance from the Cosmopolis where I can, perhaps, heal the damage I have done to myself in the enticing, mechanized world of the city. If some healing can be achieved then, maybe, we will find we really do have something to offer to the city which, at least for the time being, is the future of humanity. RetireI shall retire to the desertnot out of desire but because of the sheer exhaustion of any other possibility I will be driven into the desert anxious but secretly longing for what always seemed fantastical Here I will stumble in the footsteps of Anthony and Syncletica spend much time trying to pray and listen intently to the wisdom of birdsong I shall learn the secrets of inaction, discover the modern equivalent of basket-weaving: a task not far removed from the discipline of loving my wife For the desert knows the necessity of community: our utter interdependence and that the only meaning of the journey is to learn to love After 10 years we may find a misguided pilgrim coming to hear from my lips one drop of wisdom But I shall disguise myself as a loitering yokel and tell him abruptly to have nothing to do with that old fraud Or, perhaps, more likely I will welcome the admiration and know at that point that I have achieved nothing The
lure of the desert (however we experience it) is in all of us but, perhaps, we
can only go there when we have no alternative. Then we can begin to learn for
ourselves the wisdom which became second nature to the 'old men': that we are
interdependent, that we need each other, that self-promotion is a sure way to
spiritual death and that it is through failure that we grow AnachoresisThere was no choiceno decision no conversion The fleeing from the world came in my body with anguish with angst with wild anger It flared in skin hostile and taunt It groaned in muscles tightened trapped It came... in weariness in the world-weariness of weak flesh and I made the leap not with a mind clipped and clean not in a heart faint with fear but here in the gut-self body and flesh and eyes-weeping For
me the wilderness has been my chronic illness and disability. It has been a
wilderness thrust upon me which I have resisted at every point and, yet,
occasionally, I find myself being able to embrace it, managing, for a while,
able to stop talking and listen to those old men who have made a home in my
heart. In particular my way of life is to bear my illness and yet remain
thankful in the midst of the frustration and disability. It is a way of life
which lacks the heroic struggles of the desert hermit and the practical
usefulness of the ways of love, but we must live with what we have. IslandI love the idea of earth’s solitary placesLundy, Sable Island, Rona Rock and sand Moated by the ocean’s hugeness I imagine a house built their Snuggling down into the earth Like the beehives Where the monks drank sweetness Mine would drink energy From sun and wind and earth, Welcome a visitor or two on balmy summer days, But in the wild of winter Be utterly alone and silent Frugal and uncomplaining Seeking back through time to the Old Men: Arsenius and Poemen and Moses with his old white beard and black, black skin But I have never been alone here Though as a child, a friend’s boat would drop us on Tean And left there, we were masters of the rock and sand and blazing silence of the place; Fishing shrimp and drinking lemonade. And on a remote peninsula My wife would walk and leave me for the day Alone with the plunging gannets In the last inhabited place before America Still, I have never been alone with sea Perfectly alone on these rocks which God made for solitude and wild monks and as haven for seekers after the eternal city There
is a romanticism in the desire to withdraw. A romanticism, perhaps, encouraged
by the way the modern world exhausts us with its relentless appetite and desire
to squeeze every last drop out of life. For me this romanticism has been
focused on remote islands, such as the iconic island of Rona which lives alone
in the North Atlantic between the Orkneys and the Hebrides. The island is not a
genuine option but a fantasy I occasionally allow myself, much more important
is the real task of ropemaking. Ropemakingfor Circle WorksThey needed to find a way to live Otherwise how could they be free? The desert is all very well: space, quiet, free real estate and no institutions to devour you But we are no angels; food is necessary and minimal amounts of ready cash Prayer does not turn stones into bread and solitude does not clothe freezing bodies So these practical men applied themselves: Burning with a fiery piety, they took The providential gift of rushes And learning to twist them into the ropes of their freedom They found, in this repetitive, hand-blistering work, A simple way to still the heart and finance their solitude. So now in our mechanical age Where such a simple wilderness seems altogether too remote We seek again that solid interweaving of prayer and work Which will free us from new demons. The
spirituality of the Desert Fathers is precisely this solid interweaving of the
divine and human. They were tough people who were seeking an alternative, but
practical way of living. Much of its apparent harshness comes from the
harshness of the peasant lives out of which it was born and they were
sympathetic to individuals such as Arsenius who had had a more pampered
previous life. What we need now, perhaps, is the emergence of an alternative way
of living which takes the best aspects of modern life but reshapes them into a
spirituality which is practical and challenging, yet also attractive. For there
is no doubt that the Desert Fathers became so important because they did in
significant ways crystallize the deep desires of their generation. Now we are
looking for a new way of life which enables us to step back from a consumerist
lifestyle which is hurtling, so we are told, into a paradigm shift in the
ecology of the planet which will wreck an awful vengeance on our noisy and
rapacious species. WithdrawNow withdraw To the wilderness Withdraw Place of silence and stillness Habitat of saints and angels and demons Withdraw now to the empty place distant from the babble of the worlds Withdraw into the wilderness Now in the silent place Stillness Empty but for the hum of angels’ wings and demons Withdraw Now Into... Listen It is
difficult to capture silence, or rather it is impossible to capture silence:
that stillness which can enthrall the heart and which the Desert Fathers
sought. It is easy to think of it as a selfish pursuit but in the transfiguring
life of Jesus, and the way of Jesus which we read in the Gospels and see lived
out by the Saints, it is nothing less than the discovery of the true source of
love. And it is this love which can genuinely transform the world. It is a love
which has compassion on the weak. It is a love which turns the curiosity of
humanity into the search for sustainable solutions to the problems we have
created for ourselves. It is a love which demands justice and peace and good
government. It is a love which creates and constantly seeks to improve and
develop the complexities of community. It is a love which, above all, seeks to
transform the human heart. The SourceBack to the source, back to the sourceAlways back to the source To the Old Men and the little cottage high in the hills where there is no anger and no greed and only life live day by day: the daily tasks and breath breathed and the Young Man on the hills far away pierced in his heart by the necessity of love. |