Prayer - Lesson 13

Professor James Houston

Prayer

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Desert Spirituality

Lesson Transcript

We must remember that where this tradition so richly developed was largely desert. Nine tenths of the Near East is either steppe, as it is in Asia Minor, is wilderness, as it is in Syria and Palestine, or is indeed the desert, as it is deeply in the Egyptian Sahara, with only riverine strips of land like the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates or the Jordan, which are very small in comparison to the whole scale of this landscape of desert. But it's in this landscape of desert where this tradition developed. And of course, the landscape of the desert was also metaphorically the spiritual condition of the soul. It's so arid without the presence of God. It is so infertile without the spirit of God. And so this theme that we find so dominant in the Old Testament of the Exodus and of the wandering in the wilderness is that the purpose of living in the desert or wandering in the desert is an ethical purpose. It's not a purpose of deliverance from pharaoh. It certainly was that. But it's much, much more.

The desert with the desert ways are the ways that you're prepared for entering into the Promised Land. You cannot enter the Promised Land unworthy of what that Promised Land is. And so this metaphorical awareness is that there's an ethical challenge by living in the desert. You have to change your ways. One of the ways that the Israelites had to change their ways was that they had to leave the Egyptian mentality. The Egyptian mentality was like that of our technological society. You have the assured flow of the Nile, but the hydrology of the Nile is controlled by the lakes in the Rift Valley. And they provide therefore a constancy of flow that was very different from the hydrology of the Euphrates and especially the Tigris that came from steep run-off from the mountains and where you got floods. But no, there were no floods normally in the Nile because it was all controlled hydrologically by its catchment area of lakes.

Now, in the assurance of that water supply, there's an assurance about the Egyptian psyche. It's a happy psyche. Life is prosperous. Life is good. Life has no disasters. That’s the nature of the Egyptian psyche. It's the land, as the scripture says, where you water the land with your foot, that is to say with the shaduf, the bucket, that you simply mechanically draw up the water that is regularly and steadily flowing at the same level for much of the year. And so it's a technological society. Oh no, says our Lord, you're going into the desert. You're going into the land that’s watered by the rains from Heaven. It's uncertain and you may have to cry for rain. And so one of the things that Judaism developed was that you were waiting for those spring rains in September/October. If those first rains didn’t come, you started praying. And if they hadn't come by late October/early November, you were praying even more incessantly, so there was a kind of climactic rhythm to Jewish prayer life. You prayed all the more, the less the rains were coming. But that’s a mechanical view of God. That’s a mechanical view of prayer. And so the Israelites were taught no, you're living utterly dependent on the God who brings the rains from Heaven.

That’s a very interesting indictment, you see, of the mentality that we need to have in our tech world. There are times in our life where we have to say if we're really going to get to know the presence of God, we have to cleanse ourselves from our tech mentality. We've got to be in despair; we've got to be in deep distress; and that’s when we'll know the presence of God. I've used this, as you know, already by saying in mentoring that when you have a relational wound and then you develop a compensatory behaviour, that in a sense that compensatory behaviour is competing with the Lord as our redeemer and so we know the presence of the Lord when we’re in distress. And so what these Hesychastic practitioners were saying you have to live in the desert in order to have the presence of God.

What were those qualities that they saw as the merit of living physically in the desert? Well, first of all, there's a paramount theme of solitude. You're alone in the desert, so you flee from everything that would distract you from His presence. You live alone to have a large space for God in your heart and in your life. And I have known this very much in my own life that so often the crowds outside distract us from the presence inside. So St Anthony, who’s the archetype of this desert exemplar, is one who wishes to live in solitude that he might be delivered from conflicts which are occurring to distract him from God's presence. There's the conflict of hearing: you hear too many voices; of speech: you're saying too much; of sight, which is also distracting you again. And so it's an admirable experience that even to this very day, as I mentioned, there are Cistercian priests in this experimental abbey outside of Curitiba in Brazil, who have decided to simply go as hermits into the Amazon forest and just completely cut themselves off. We can ask is that really necessary, or can we actually do it metaphorically? Well, I think it depends on who you are. There are those of us who are much more dramatic and therefore we need a kind of Amazonian hermitage or a desert hermitage. There are others of us whose lives are more hid in Christ where we don’t need to be dramatic. We still practise the reality of it within our own hearts every day.

So there is the story of one of the Desert Fathers who had become a bishop and he realised that to become a bishop was a tension between fulfilling a call to serve the Church on the one hand, but at the same time it was a degrading or handicapping of his inner spiritual life. He wondered if God's grace had left him now that he was in the position of being in the episcopacy. And the answer that he received is no, you can still live in solitude. You can still live in your own cloistered room, even though you’re busy with the crowd in the bishopric. So where we’re in the world and yet not of the world is an issue that is very personal for all of us.

One of the things that we ourselves experience is that the place of moral realism is destitution. I'm most real when I'm stripped of everything. When there's no other help, there's no other distraction, there's no other visible, tangible life, then we're most open to God. It's very sad that we have to have that kind of experience, but there's a very strong correlation between the need to have a desert in our souls and the exercise of the life of prayer. In other words, in this Hesychastic tradition the Fathers would tell us that we find prayer difficult because we’re too worldly. It's our worldliness that blocks us from our prayer life, but the desert is a place of solitude where we find God when we’re alone. And so one of the Desert Fathers, Father Moses, says that the man who flees and lives in solitude is like a bunch of grapes that are ripened by the sun, but he who remains among men is like a sour, unripe grape. It's a vivid picture, isn't it?

Yes, when I was writing the book Joyful Exiles I realised for quite a phase of my life when I was writing it I needed to have a hidden life. I needed to be hid with Christ in God. The fact that my fellow Christians didn’t understand me was a bonus for this life. I had to live in this awareness that I had my own desert within my own heart. But of course, this solitariness can itself be overdone. And so as we see again and again, there's always so much need of balance because even solitude can be a form of escapism. The fact that I hold my tongue and don’t say anything could be that I'm just sulking, or rather I'm really filled with pride. So you see, there are always so many facets of ambiguity and paradox about every image, about every metaphor that we use. Sometimes we have to advise each other that a change of scene doesn’t necessarily bring a change of heart, so we may need that solitude for various other purposes, as we’ll see.

Another feature, a second feature, of the desert is it's the place of silence and this certainly attracted the ascetics. According to a famous senator, a worldly Roman patrician with lots of wealth who had become a Christian, Arsenius, he fled from his wealth. He fled from his political position in Rome and he went to hide in the desert of Egypt - that extreme form of desert. And he saw that silence as next to solitude is very important, for to be solitary, he said, and to be silent is then to have peace. Why does peace come to us? How does it come to us? It comes to us from being unpossessive. What gives us fear is possessiveness. We’re afraid of losing things. We’re afraid of losing our reputation; we’re afraid of losing our popularity; whatever it is that we're afraid of. But detachment liberates us. To be unpossessive is to be free: free from things.

So one of the things that we find that was characteristic of the Desert Fathers was that you don’t even need many words, that you can be free from even verbal communication because you’re saying too much. But pithy words are like grenades that can be explosive in their revelation. They can so profoundly be challenging. And so one of the favourite formula of a disciple speaking to a father was speak a word, father, just one word. And of course, the disciple would be asked if I give you a word - it's like saying if I give you an insight - then don’t swamp it with a lot of other communication, you see. And so I find even in mentoring that I say, you know, we've just said it, haven't we? So there's no need for more conversation. It'll drown the efficacy of the insight of the word. And so one father asked will you promise me that you won't come back until you fulfil that word. What was the word? Well, love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind. It was more than one word; it was a phrase. Well, 25 years later he came back and said, with somewhat false courage perhaps, now father, give me another word. He was rather obviously audacious. He says thou shalt love they neighbour as thyself. Well, he had learnt his lesson. He never came back. Now he had to live those two aspects of the commandment and that was the end of it. There was no need to say any more.

Now, of course, is this indictment about our weekly preaching? Do we drown our congregation with words? We probably do. And then, of course, our congregation gets hardened in conscience because they’ve heard it all many times and they’ve been drowned without one word just knocking them off as it should do. In other words, the essence of desert spirituality is that it doesn’t lie in words. It lies in deeds. It lies in life. It's a life that cannot be taught or communicated. It can only be caught and received like a ball in the game. It's exemplified.

The story is told of a young monk who went to learn from Father Theodore and was puzzled that the old man was doing all the work around the place and never asked for help. And even when he offered to help, the father kept silent. And so finally, the truth emerged that what the old man was pressed to explain was his behaviour. He says as far as I'm concerned, I do not tell him anything, but, if he wishes, he can do what he sees me doing. So the practice of silence is an abstinence that enables us to have embodiment. When I say can I help you, well of course, politely he might say yes or no, but just do it. So this silence to be real has, like solitude, to be interiorised. It's not exteriorised. It's in one's heart. Again however, even silence can be misused, as we've said already. And so one father, Father Poeman, says a man may seem to be silent, but he's really condemning others and so he's actually babbling unceasingly and being judgemental. And so there's nothing profitable about silence per se. So what we're finding is there's a lot of enigmatic conditioning going on in the desert.

Thirdly, with solitude and with silence, a third trait of the desert is poverty of spirit. The desert is this fear of deprivation. We’re stripped. It's a place where all ways end. The terminal is a wasteland. And solitude and silence are kinds of deprivation: the deprivation of company, the deprivation of words. Yet the desert life demands other forms of deprivation and poverty of spirit is a summary of these deprivations. How fond were the Desert Fathers of the Beatitude 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.' When you come to think of it, it's not really deprivation, it's liberation - liberation from our addictions.

So deprivation for liberation is a great theme of the desert. We've seen how in the Enneagram we all have addictions. And so according to our addiction, we know how our desert should be defined. If you're addicted to being always busy then your freedom is to stop being busy. And just this August when I was speaking to a group of pastors in a retreat, I said if you were a Desert Father, you would learn that what people recognise you to have as your usefulness and ministry is what is keeping you from being truly your ministry. So we had a fun game going round the circle and one would say well yes, I'm always busy. Oh, well then, why don’t you now change that you’re not the pastor of all these events, but you become the retreat pastor that is asking people to stop being busy - and having a time of solitude and quiet? Well of course, that’s turning things upside down. Or the youth pastor, who's full of humour and fun, is now asked to attend to those who are dying, which is the antithesis of what he ever felt he was capable to do. And so you can use your imagination to see how you could try that sort of game on pastors' retreat and you're turning them upside down and inside out, you see.

But that’s what the desert spirituality is about. In other words, it's self-renunciation of one's abilities. That sounds very strange. So you see, if I was to adopt that, I would stop all lecturing and become a listener. But of course, the pulse beat that you do have, fortunately, if you are a teacher is that most of your time you’re not teaching. Most of your time, you're listening. And so this is what I've learnt, that the tutorial time that I have in mentoring with my students is not talking at all, just listening. And they say well, you’ve said nothing now to all of this and then you give them a bombshell and out of the door they go. As I think I told you some of the stories about doing that kind of advice.

Well, of course, the fruit of the desert experiencing is having a Sabbatical rest of the soul, that it's a place where you recline like John on the bosom of the Lord and you say my soul find rest in God alone.