top of page
_edited.jpg)
Search
What Does a Blind Beggar See?
A Personal Reflection on Silence and the Fear of Teaching There is a part of me that longs for silence with a kind of desperation, as if only silence can keep me from unraveling. Not silence as escape or convenience, but the silence that strips everything away, the silence that teaches me who I am without role or title or task. A silence where I no longer speak with authority about anything because I know so little. A silence where the only voice worth heeding is the voice of
Father Charbel Abernethy
Nov 143 min read
A Dialogue in the Desert: On Loneliness and the Presence of God
(Inspired by Psalms 25–28, Grail translation, and the life of St. Paul the Hermit) ⸻ Disciple: Father Paul, I have come to you as one exiled within his own heart. The silence presses like a weight. The days seem to blur into one another, and I find myself asking, as the psalmist does, “Turn to me and have mercy, for I am lonely and poor.” St. Paul: My son, the loneliness you feel is not an enemy to be fled but a teacher sent by God. I too fled the cities, thinking I would e
Father Charbel Abernethy
Nov 113 min read
Urban Asceticism: Finding the Desert Within - Chapter Two
Chapter Two: The Hidden Geography of the Heart There is a desert deeper than any wilderness the eye can see. The ancients knew this well. They spoke of the heart as a landscape: vast, perilous, beautiful, capable of both storm and stillness. It is this inner topography, not the external environment, that determines whether one lives in the world or beyond it. The monk who fled to the Egyptian sands was not escaping humanity; he was fleeing the passions that distort it. He car
Father Charbel Abernethy
Nov 103 min read
Urban Asceticism: Finding the Desert Within - Chapter One
Chapter One: The Ache for Silence There are moments when the heart simply cannot bear any more noise. Not only the noise that fills the air, engines, voices, screens, but the deeper noise, the interior storm of thoughts and anxieties that scatter the soul in every direction. It is then, in that unbearable restlessness, that the desire for silence awakens: a hunger that is not of this world. I did not seek the desert by crossing mountains or seas. It found me here, among the s
Father Charbel Abernethy
Nov 73 min read
In the Desert of the Heart, Let the Healing Fountain Start
In the desert of the heart, where words dry up and thought scatters like dust in the wind, silence becomes the only spring that does not fail. It is there, stripped of the noise of self, that the soul begins to taste the sweetness of stillness. The mind exhausts itself in its own designs, turning endlessly upon questions of what must be done, what must be spoken, how to be justified before men. Yet when all these sounds have faded into fatigue, a deeper voice begins to breath
Father Charbel Abernethy
Nov 32 min read
Tags
bottom of page