City a Desert Press: An Update on Two New Works

Dear Friends of Philokalia Ministries,

I wanted to share with you a brief update on two works that have taken shape over these past months, somewhat unexpectedly.

To Become All Flame is now with the typesetter and cover designer and is moving toward publication. Many of you will recognize its origins. Much of the book grew out of the retreats, reading groups, conversations, and years we have spent together with the Fathers—especially their understanding of prayer as the gradual transformation of the whole person in God.

The title comes from the ancient image of Abba Joseph, who raised his hands toward heaven and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire: “If you will, you can become all flame.”

The book explores what such transformation means—not as an extraordinary spiritual achievement, but as the slow work of grace within the ordinary poverty of human life. Prayer, asceticism, suffering, desire, repentance, silence, the remembrance of God, and love are not separate dimensions of the spiritual life. Together they become the place where the human person is gradually opened to God and made capable of receiving His life. The fire is His before it is ever ours.

A second work, Beyond Loss and Calling: The Dismantling of the Religious Self and the Life That Remains, has just reached completion in its final draft.

This book surprised me even more.

It began in a very different form, partly out of my psychoanalytic studies and partly from an attempt to understand the events and losses of these past several years. But over time, and through a great deal of prayer and writing, something changed. The questions themselves changed. What began as an effort to understand loss increasingly became an exploration of surrender.

Beyond Loss and Calling asks what happens when the life we believed we were meant to live can no longer be sustained—when vocation, usefulness, identity, belonging, and even familiar ways of understanding ourselves before God begin to fall away.

What remains?

The book enters that question slowly. It does not attempt to resolve loss by finding another identity or another calling to replace what has disappeared. Rather, it considers the possibility that there is a deeper life beneath these things: a life received rather than constructed, a life in which one gradually ceases trying to become someone before God and learns simply to be before Him.

In this sense, it is very much a book of the desert.

Looking at these two works together, I am struck by the fact that I had very little intention of writing either of them as books. They emerged with a surprising fluidity from the retreats and groups of Philokalia Ministries over the years, from long immersion in the Fathers, and most especially from the experiences of these recent years.

Perhaps that is why they feel deeply connected despite being quite different books.

To Become All Flame asks what it means to allow ourselves to be transformed by the fire of God.

Beyond Loss and Calling asks what remains when much of what we thought constituted that life has been taken from our hands.

Fire and relinquishment. Desire and poverty. Transformation and surrender.

Perhaps they are not very different things after all.

I also want to thank all of you for your patience with this extended break from our groups and for allowing me this time of greater silence. I have come to understand more deeply that both the groups and the writings require something other than simply having more to say. They require listening—perhaps far more listening than speaking or analysis. There are times when we must resist the desire to fill the silence too quickly, because something can be heard there that cannot be reached by thought alone. This has been such a time for me.

I am grateful that you have allowed that silence to remain silence.

And I am grateful, as always, for your interest in these writings, but even more for the years of prayer, reading, conversation, friendship, and seeking that have surrounded them. So much of what finds its way onto these pages first emerged in the life we have shared together around the Fathers. In that sense, these books do not feel entirely separate from the life of Philokalia Ministries. They have grown from the same listening.

Thank you for accompanying me, and one another, so patiently.

In Christ,

Fr. Charbel