PHILOKALIA MINISTRIES

Wadi Natrun and the memory of a desire that had never disappeared “As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God.” — Psalm 42:1 When I went on pilgrimage to the monasteries of Wadi Natrun in 1997, I carried with me, inevitably, a certain romanticism about the desert. How could one not? These were the places whose names had inhabited my imagination through the sayings and lives of the Fathers. Scetis. The desert of Macarius. The land of Abba Arsenius,