What I Was Trying to Build

City a Desert Press: The Fathers, the human heart, and the recovery of a whole Christian life

“The kingdom of God is within you.”

— Luke 17:21

Only after completing several books have I begun to understand more clearly what I was trying to create through them.

Part of the intention was certainly to give some foundation to the work of Philokalia Ministries—to make clearer the vision that has shaped the conversations, retreats, podcasts, and groups that have grown around it. I wanted to make accessible something of the beauty and severity of the Fathers, particularly the desert tradition, St. Isaac the Syrian, the Philokalia, and the witness of the modern elders.

But I think there was something deeper beneath this.

I was trying to recover a vision of the Christian life as a whole.

A Life, Not a Religious Compartment

The Fathers do not speak about the spiritual life as though it were one part of human existence.

They speak about the transformation of the human person.

Prayer, repentance, watchfulness, fasting, silence, compunction, mercy, suffering, desire—these are not separate religious practices gathered together beneath the heading of “spirituality.” They describe what happens when a human being begins to turn toward God with the whole heart.

This is perhaps what we have lost.

We can speak about Christianity as doctrine to be believed, morality to be practiced, obligations to be fulfilled, ministries to be undertaken, causes to be defended. All of these may have their proper place.

Yet the Fathers continually bring us back to something more fundamental.

The heart.

What is happening there?

What do we desire?

What possesses our attention?

What do we fear losing?

Where does the mind wander when no one is watching?

What happens within us when we are contradicted, forgotten, humiliated, praised, disappointed, or deprived of what we thought our lives would be?

The desert begins there.

The Monastic Heart

This is why I have never believed that the wisdom of the desert belongs only to monks.

Not everyone is called to a monastery. Not everyone is called to physical solitude. Not everyone will keep long vigils or live according to a monastic rule.

But there is something in the monastic heart that belongs to every Christian.

The desire for the one thing necessary.

The refusal to allow the heart to be endlessly scattered.

The remembrance of God.

The willingness to remain.

The guarding of what is precious.

The gradual relinquishment of everything that keeps us from loving God and the person before us.

The desert may be a geographical place. But it may also appear within a marriage, an illness, an unwanted limitation, a season of obscurity, the care of another person, the loss of one’s plans, or the quiet repetition of duties no one else sees.

We do not always have to find the desert.

Sometimes the desert finds us.

And if we remain there without fleeing inwardly, we may discover that God has been waiting for us within the life we were trying to escape.

The Gathering of Desire

Increasingly, I have come to believe that much of the spiritual life concerns desire.

Our desires become scattered.

We want God, but we want countless other things as well. We want recognition. Security. Control. Vindication. Consolation. Success. A particular future. A particular image of ourselves.

The heart becomes divided among them.

Asceticism, then, is not hatred of the world or of the body. It is the gathering of desire.

Prayer gathers us.

Silence gathers us.

Repentance gathers us.

Suffering sometimes gathers us against our will.

Slowly, painfully, the heart begins to discover what it actually wants.

God.

This is why the language of fire has become so important to me.

The goal of the Christian life is not simply to become a somewhat improved version of ourselves. It is not even primarily to become knowledgeable about spiritual things.

It is to become combustible before God.

To become all flame.

Everything false cannot survive that fire. Neither can the countless identities by which we try to secure ourselves.

What remains is simpler.

And freer.

A School of Seeing

Looking back, I think the books were also trying to teach a way of seeing.

The Fathers teach us to read our lives differently.

Loneliness may become solitude.

Limitation may become enclosure.

Waiting may become watchfulness.

Failure may expose an idol.

Suffering may strip away an illusion.

The interruption may be the obedience.

The person before us may be Christ asking to be received.

And what appears to be the diminishment of a life may actually be its gathering.

This does not mean romanticizing suffering. Pain remains pain. Loss remains loss. There are wounds that should never have been inflicted.

But Christianity makes the extraordinary claim that nothing given to God need finally be wasted.

Even the desert can flower.

The Church Exists to Make Saints

There is also an ecclesial conviction beneath all of this.

The Church exists to make saints.

Everything else must finally serve this.

Theology, liturgy, institutions, ministries, pastoral programs, preaching, catechesis—all of them are necessary only insofar as they serve the transformation of human beings in Christ.

The question therefore cannot simply be whether we belong to the Church outwardly.

The more terrible question is whether Christ is being formed within us.

Are we becoming merciful?

Are we becoming capable of prayer?

Are we less governed by fear?

Do we judge less?

Can we endure being unseen?

Can we receive another person without immediately making him part of our own needs?

Can we forgive?

Can we remain?

Can we love?

The Fathers never allow us to hide indefinitely behind religious language.

Eventually everything descends into the heart.

A Desert Theological Prose

There was another part of this work that I did not initially know how to name.

I wanted the writing itself to bear something of the desert.

Not merely to speak about silence, but to leave room for silence.

Not merely to explain stillness, but to resist the compulsion to fill every empty space.

Not merely to describe the Fathers, but to allow something of their sobriety, repetition, severity, tenderness, and strange spaciousness to shape the movement of the prose.

Over time a particular cadence emerged.

Sentences became shorter.

Certain words returned again and again.

Desire.

Remain.

Mercy.

Heart.

Silence.

Fire.

God.

The repetition was deliberate, but not rhetorical in the ordinary sense. The Fathers repeat because the heart forgets. They return to the same realities because we return to the same distractions. A word must sometimes be placed before us repeatedly until we cease merely understanding it and begin to hear it.

I have come to think of this as a kind of desert theological prose.

It is theological because it is concerned with God and with the transformation of the human person in Him.

But it is desert prose because it distrusts excess.

It tries not to decorate what should remain bare.

It does not wish to explain a mystery until nothing mysterious remains.

It allows a sentence occasionally to stand alone.

It permits silence to complete what words cannot.

This kind of writing is necessarily slower.

It asks to be read differently.

Not hurried through for information, but received almost as one might receive a saying of the Fathers: reading a few lines, stopping, returning, allowing a word to follow us into the day.

There are moments when the prose becomes almost liturgical in its repetition, and others when it becomes stark enough to resemble the cell itself.

A few words.

An empty room.

A heart before God.

This, too, belongs to what I was trying to create.

I did not want merely to write books about the spiritual life.

I wanted, insofar as words are capable of it, for the writing itself to participate in the movement it was describing—to gather rather than scatter, to quiet rather than excite, to lead toward attention rather than consumption.

The form had to serve the same end as the content.

Simplicity.

Attention.

Stillness.

And finally, prayer.

The Grammar Beneath the Books

Perhaps this is what I was trying to create through these first books without fully knowing it.

A grammar.

Desire.

Wonder.

Repentance.

Watchfulness.

Stillness.

Suffering.

Mercy.

Remembrance.

Prayer.

Fire.

These are not simply subjects about which Christians might read.

They are words in a language the heart must learn to speak.

And eventually a strange thing happens.

We stop merely reading the Fathers.

We begin to recognize the country they were describing.

It is here.

The battlefield is the heart.

The desert is wherever we cannot escape ourselves.

The cell is the life actually given to us.

The ascetic struggle is to remain there without turning away from God or from the person He has placed before us.

And prayer is the slow gathering of everything into Him.

Perhaps this is what Philokalia Ministries has been about from the beginning.

Not making people experts in the Fathers.

Not recreating the desert.

Not persuading everyone to become monastics.

But recovering the Christian life as the transformation of the whole human person into prayer.

The Fathers give us the grammar.

Life gives us the sentences.

And God, in His mercy, teaches the heart how to speak.