Reflection Two of Fall Retreat - The Desert

Reflection Two - The Desert

“One Thing Is Necessary”

“Flee, be silent, pray always.”

— Word given to Abba Arsenius

There comes a point when desire begins to simplify the heart.

At first we may think that our longing for God will simply add something to our lives:

more prayer, more reading, more spiritual discipline, perhaps a greater seriousness about

the Gospel.

But genuine desire does something more demanding.

It begins to rearrange everything.

Things that once seemed necessary begin to lose their hold.

Noise becomes exhausting.

Distraction becomes painful.

The need to explain oneself diminishes.

The appetite for recognition weakens.

And increasingly the soul begins to long for one thing:

to remain near God.

This is where the desert begins.

Not first as geography.

As simplification.

As the stripping away of what divides the heart.As the discovery that much of what we call necessary is not necessary at all.

†

When Christ comes to the house of Martha and Mary, Martha is busy with many things.

Mary sits at His feet.

And Christ says:

“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is

necessary.”

One thing.

The whole desert is hidden in those words.

The Fathers did not despise the world because creation was evil.

They fled because the heart had become crowded.

They wanted to discover what remains when everything unnecessary is removed.

Arsenius, a man of extraordinary education and refinement, prays:

“Lord, lead me in the way of salvation.”

The answer comes:

“Arsenius, flee from men, and you will be saved.”

Later the word deepens:

“Flee, be silent, pray always.”

These words can sound severe.

But they are not contempt for humanity.

They are medicine for a divided heart.

Flee what fragments you.

Be silent enough to hear what lies beneath the noise.

Pray until the heart becomes gathered around God.

This is the desert.

†

The first monks did not begin by inventing a system.

There were seekers.

Men and women.

Ascetics.

Solitaries.

People withdrawing to the edges of villages and others moving farther into the

wilderness.

Only gradually did stable forms emerge.

The life came before the institution.

The charism before the structure.

The fire before the lamp.

This does not diminish the importance of structure. Rules became necessary.

Communities developed. Obedience protected people from delusion. Common life

became a crucible of charity.

But the beginning was much more elemental.

A person wanted God.

And that desire became strong enough to change how he lived.

Everything that followed was meant to protect that desire.

Rules.

Obedience.

Silence.

Fasting.

Solitude.

Community.

All of it ordered toward one end:

communion with God.

When that is forgotten, the means can quietly become the end.

The desert therefore continues to ask the Church—and each of us—a disturbing question:

Does the form still serve the fire?

†

This is particularly important when we speak about obedience.

The purpose of obedience in the desert was not to make a person passive.

It was to make him free.

Free from self-will.

Free from compulsive self-protection.

Free from the need to control outcomes.

Free from the tyranny of his own thoughts.

Free enough to hear God.

The disciple went to the elder because the elder knew the human heart.

He could see where desire was true and where ego had attached itself to desire.

He could say:

Stay.

Go.

Wait.

Be silent.

Do not trust that thought.

Persevere.

Return to your cell.

Forgive your brother.

The authority of the elder arose from discernment.

The deeper question was never merely:

What are you allowed to do?

It was:

What is God doing in you?

†

But the desert also teaches us not to romanticize desire.

Not every desire is holy simply because it feels spiritual.

We may desire solitude because we cannot tolerate others.

We may desire silence because we fear intimacy.

We may desire the desert because ordinary responsibilities humiliate us.

We may reject authority in the name of freedom while merely protecting self-will.

The desert exposes all of this.

You do not escape yourself in the desert.

You meet yourself.

The anger you blamed on others is still there.

The need for approval is still there.

The fear is still there.

The desire to be important is still there.

The desert does not immediately make us holy.

It makes us visible to ourselves.

And that visibility can be painful.

This is why the Fathers continually tell the monk:

Remain in your cell.

The novice imagines holiness is somewhere else.

Another monastery.

Another elder.

Another place.

Another set of circumstances.

But the elder says:

Stay.

Your cell will teach you everything.

Wherever you go, you bring your heart with you.

And unless the heart is purified, every new place eventually becomes another setting for

the same passions.

†

Yet there is another danger.

The fear of illusion can become so great that every unusual movement of grace is treated

with suspicion.

We can become safer than the Gospel.

Safer than Antony.

Safer than Arsenius.

Safer than Mary of Egypt.

There is a difference between discernment and domestication.

Discernment asks:

Is this from God?

Domestication asks:

Does this fit what we already know how to manage?

Those are not the same question.

The Spirit does not despise order.

But neither is He confined by our categories.

Sometimes the charism appears before the structure capable of receiving it.

Sometimes circumstances make the usual paths impossible.

And then we must remain humble enough to ask whether God may be revealing another

form of fidelity.

God has always been capable of making paths where none seem visible.

†

This is where solitude must be understood correctly.

Solitude is not misanthropy.

It is not rejection.

It is not refusal of responsibility.

At its deepest, solitude gathers the heart.

The solitary withdraws not because others do not matter, but because they matter enough

to be carried before God without possession.

Slowly the heart learns how to love without possessing.

How to pray without controlling.

How to carry suffering without making itself central.

How to remain hidden.

This is why the greatest solitaries often became astonishingly compassionate.

They withdrew from crowds and became fathers and mothers of multitudes.

Solitude, when authentic, does not shrink the heart.

It enlarges it.

†

And perhaps this is why the desert becomes increasingly intelligible as life passes.

Much of our earlier life is concerned with becoming.

Building.

Choosing.

Accomplishing.

Serving.

These things are good.

But time strips away illusions.

Positions change.

Health weakens.

People die.

Recognition fades.

The future shortens.

And the question becomes simpler:

What remains?

God remains.

A person who once asked,

“What am I called to accomplish?”

may begin asking,

“How am I called to belong to God?”

That is not a lesser vocation.

It may be the ripening of every vocation.

†

The desert teaches us that the call of God does not always add.

Often it subtracts.

Fewer words.

Fewer distractions.

Fewer ambitions.

Fewer identities to maintain.

Fewer explanations.

Not emptiness for its own sake.

Space.

Room for God.

And this desert is not only for monks.

Every Christian needs a desert.

For one person it may be solitude.

For another, an hour before dawn.

A quiet chapel.

A sickroom.

A nightly prayer.

A period of illness.

A chair beside an elderly parent.

A season when usefulness has diminished.

The desert takes many forms.

What matters is what happens there.

Do we fill the emptiness immediately?

Or do we remain?

Do we flee silence?

Or allow it to become inhabited?

Do we immediately try to recover our former importance?

Or allow ourselves to become hidden?

†

“One thing is necessary.”

Not one religious practice.

Not one state of life.

Not one external form.

One center.

One love around which everything else finds its proper place.

When God becomes the center, everything else is not destroyed.

It becomes rightly ordered.

We can love others more freely because we no longer ask them to be God.

We can serve without needing service to define us.

We can be alone without being abandoned.

We can work without worshiping accomplishment.

We can rest without feeling useless.

This is what the desert seeks.

Not emptiness.

Undividedness.

And so perhaps the question is not:

Should I go to the desert?

It is:

What within me must become desert so that God can become everything?

What noise must grow quiet?

What identity must loosen?

What fear determines too many decisions?

What need to be understood keeps me from hiddenness?

What good thing has quietly become more necessary than God?

These are not accusations.

They are invitations.

†

Arsenius prayed:

“Lord, lead me in the way of salvation.”

And the answer was:

Flee.

Later:

Be silent.

And then:

Pray always.

There is a movement here.

Flee what fragments the heart.

Become silent enough to encounter what remains.

Pray until the whole person becomes gathered into God.

Then something remarkable begins to happen.

The desert that seemed empty becomes inhabited.

Solitude becomes communion.

Silence becomes prayer.

Renunciation becomes freedom.

And the heart discovers that the loss of many things has made room for the One Thing

Necessary.

The desert was never the destination.

God was.

Desire awakens.

The heart simplifies.

The unnecessary begins to fall away.

And somewhere in the silence, the small flame from which we began grows steadier.

The fire has found room to breathe.