And Where The Desert?

Part One

"There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town; they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one's mind while living in a crowd; and it is possible for those who are solitaries to live in the crowd of their own thoughts."

Amma Syncletica

It’s happening more and more now in the Q & A’s: people asking about Orthodox faith. And not to trip me up or volley a slagging, they really want to know. It’s a lovely thing to see emerging. The room doesn’t suddenly grow tense, not any more. It just gets quiet. It may be that it’s been long enough now and that I’m sticking with it, and don’t seem any crazier than I usually do. Metropolitan Kallistos once said it’s not appropriate to strong arm your belief and practices on others (especially other Christian denominations), but if they really want to know, that’s a lovely door to walk through together. Having been outside the flock, I appreciate that kind of maturity. As we know, there’s a great deal of difference between an invitation and an imposition.

Knowing that the Orthodox have bit of a ghrá (love) for early Desert Fathers and Mothers – to put it mildly – one lady recently called out of the half-darkness a great question: And where the desert for us moderns? It was a real thought. What I took from that was: Where do I seek what they sought?

And so that would then lead me to think – what was it they were seeking?

For some of you, this is old hat and well masticated, and if so, bear with me. I’m going to take a gamble and imagine that for some of us a little basic information may go a long way. I’m going to give just the tiniest sketch of a few elements of the ‘pull to the desert’, and then be rather crude and dare to imagine what that may look like in our own lives and time. There’s an echo of many years leading wilderness rites of passage (I’m not saying it’s the same), and four years I spent living in a tent as a young man. I sought – in a rather muddled way – a ‘kind’ of desert at a certain, urgent moment in my life. You may well have intuited something similar.

I think one big difference is this: In my years out there with the hares and the stars I located many big WOWS, but not a sustained experience of healing. I found I couldn’t achieve that. God did that. He re-routed the pathways of my interior, decommissioned a few demons, got under the hood in the third watch of the night. I couldn’t ‘self-individuate’ into that reality for all the tea in china. Not without senior assistance.

The Near Mountain & The Far Mountain