The Desert Was Still Alive

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, Abba Moses, Abba Poemen. The very dust seemed to bear the memory of men who had fled the noise of the world because they had been wounded by another Beauty.

It would have been easy to experience the pilgrimage as an encounter with the past.

But that is not what happened.

What struck me—and what has remained with me all these years—was precisely that the desert was not dead.

I was not walking through the ruins of a vanished Christianity. I was being confronted with a living reality.

There were still men there.

Still prayer.

Still vigils.

Still fasting.

Still cells.

Still the hidden struggle of the heart.

The centuries separating us from the great Fathers suddenly seemed strangely thin.

Of course the monasteries had changed. History had passed over them with all its violence and complexity. Yet beneath everything there remained the same astonishing movement of the human heart: men still being taken captive by the wonder of Divine Love.

That was what unsettled me.

These men had not entered the desert because they despised the world. They had discovered—or had begun to discover—Someone for whom they were willing to relinquish everything else.

The desert was the consequence of desire.

That realization changed the way I understood asceticism.

From the outside, asceticism can appear primarily as renunciation: fasting, vigils, silence, poverty, obedience, celibacy, hiddenness. We see what has been given up.

But the Fathers saw something else.

They saw what had been found.

A man does not remain in a cell for decades because deprivation itself is beautiful. He remains because somewhere in the depths of the heart he has tasted something that makes every lesser possession seem strangely weightless.

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field.

The man finds it.

And then, for joy, he sells everything.

The joy comes first.

Everything else follows.

Perhaps this was what Wadi Natrun planted most deeply within me. The desert Fathers ceased to be simply figures whom I admired. Their lives became a question addressed to my own heart.

What does a human being do when God becomes enough?

Not God and accomplishment.

Not God and reputation.

Not God and security.

Not God and usefulness.

Not even God and the identity by which one has learned to understand oneself.

God.

The desert gives a terrifying answer.

You become free enough to disappear.

This is why the hiddenness of the monks affected me so deeply. The world teaches us to become visible. To establish ourselves. To create something that bears our name. To make ourselves necessary.

The desert moves in the opposite direction.

It teaches a man to consent to being forgotten.

The cell becomes a place where the false self slowly starves because there is no audience left to sustain it. There, before God, the question is no longer whether one is important, successful, admired, understood, or even remembered.

There is only the naked encounter:

God is.

I am before Him.

He knows me.

That is enough.

I could not have understood in 1997 how enduring the impression of Wadi Natrun would become.

Perhaps we rarely understand such things when they happen.

We imagine that pilgrimage consists in going somewhere holy, seeing it, praying there, and returning home.

But sometimes a holy place follows us home.

Sometimes it waits.

A seed falls into the heart and lies beneath the soil for years, even decades, until circumstances break open the ground around it.

Only then do we recognize what we had actually seen.

I had seen men disappearing into God.

I had seen Christianity stripped of almost everything except its burning center.

I had seen that the life of the desert was not nostalgia for some heroic age of the Church. It remained possible because the reality that created the desert in the first place remained possible.

Christ had not changed.

The human heart had not changed.

Divine Love had not ceased calling men beyond themselves.

And therefore the desert could never finally disappear.

Its geography may change. Its outward forms may change. For some it will be an actual monastery. For another, a small room. For another, years spent caring quietly for someone who can no longer care for herself. For another, the relinquishment of ambitions once thought indispensable.

But the inner movement remains the same.

The desert begins wherever a human being finally stops bargaining with God.

Where the hands open.

Where the need to construct a life gives way to receiving one.

Where prayer becomes less something we do than the breath by which we remain before Him.

Looking back now, I understand why Wadi Natrun never left me.

I thought I had gone there to see where the Fathers had lived.

Instead, I encountered the mystery by which they had lived.

Desire.

A desire purified until it becomes simple.

A desire for God so profound that silence no longer feels empty, hiddenness no longer feels like loss, and renunciation no longer appears primarily as sacrifice.

Everything gathers into one thing.

Christ.

Perhaps this is the deepest truth the desert has always guarded.

The monks did not go there because they had ceased to love.

They went because they wanted to learn how to love without measure.

They entered the desert carrying the whole Adam within them, until the heart, emptied of its possessiveness, could become spacious enough for the world.

And perhaps that is why the memory of Wadi Natrun has endured in me for almost thirty years.

The desert was not asking me to admire it.

It was asking me a question.

And I am only now beginning to understand the question:

What would remain if God were allowed to become the one thing needful?

The answer of the desert has never changed.

Come and see.

Enter your cell.

Become silent.

Hold on to nothing.

And discover whether the One who called Abraham into the unknown, Antony into the desert, Arsenius into silence, and countless hidden men and women into lives known only to God is still enough.

He is.

The desert was still alive.

It is still alive.

And somewhere within the heart, it is still calling.