Desert Fathers (Part 2 of 2)

(By Kreg Yingst)

“Yet many will be surprised by the insistence of the Sayings on what seem to be incredible feats of physical endurance. Are these at the centre of a spiritual life? Why not tell us more about the secret, inner life of these men and women? Because the life of the Spirit cannot be conveyed, except in images and analogies which are deceptive: those who know do not need them, and those who do not know are only led by them to partake imaginatively, but not really, in a world which to many is still out of reach. Many can live either by the Word of God or by deriving his precarious existence from the earth, which ultimately will claim back what is its own; the more one is rooted in God, the less one depends on the transitory gifts of the earth. To describe to what degree the dwellers of the Desert were free from our usual necessities is the only way we possess to convey both how perfectly rooted they were in the life-giving realm of God, and also how different the world of the Spirit is from what we imagine it to be when we confuse the highest achievements of the psyche with the life which God the Holy Spirit pours into the soul and body of the faithful; ‘among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist, yet he who is least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he’.

The men and women of whom the Sayings speak were Christians who received the challenge of the Gospel with all earnestness and wanted to respond to it uncomprisingly, as generously as God, with their whole selves. Some built their whole life on one Word of the Gospel, some on one glimpse of Eternity seen in the eyes, the behaviour, the whole personality of an Elder. Men of high rank in the world and of high culture came to monks without any worldly knowledge because ‘they knew not the first letters of the book of Wisdom which the others possessed’.

We have a great deal to learn from their integrity and their unrelenting courage, from their vision of God—so Holy, so great, possessed of such a love, that nothing less than one’s whole being could respond to it. These were men and women who had reached a humility of which we have no idea, because it is not rooted in an hypocritical or contrived depreciation of self, but in the vision of God, and a humbling experience of being so loved. They were ascetics, ruthless to themselves, yet so human, so immensely compassionate not only to the needs of men but also to their frailty and their sins; men and women wrapped in a depth of inner silence of which we have no idea and who taught by ‘Being’, not by speech: ‘If a man cannot understand my silence, he will never understand my words.’ If we wish to understand the sayings of the Fathers, let us approach them with veneration, silencing our judgments and our own thoughts in order to meet them on their own ground and perhaps to partake ultimately—if we prove able to emulate their earnestness in the search, their ruthless determination, their infinite compassion—in their own silent communion with God.” 

~Anthony of Sourozh (from the Preface to The Sayings of the Desert Fathers)