Where Is Peace?

Abba Arsenius and the disciple

“Learn where there is wisdom, where there is strength, where there is understanding; that you may know also where there is length of days and life, where there is light of the eyes and peace.”

— Baruch 3:14

A brother came to Abba Arsenius and said:

Disciple: Abba, I have come seeking wisdom.

Arsenius: Why?

Disciple: So that I may know what to do.

The old man was silent.

The brother waited. He had walked many days to hear a word from Arsenius, and during the journey he had rehearsed the questions he would ask. He had imagined returning with something clear.

Disciple: Have you nothing to tell me?

Arsenius: You asked for wisdom. Then you asked what to do. These are not always the same thing.

The brother felt irritation rise within him.

He had not crossed the desert to be answered with riddles.

Disciple: Then where is wisdom?

Arsenius: Where you have stopped demanding an answer.

The brother lowered his eyes.

He saw how many answers he had already demanded from God.

Why this road.

Why this loss.

Why this waiting.

Why others seemed to walk beneath a clearer sky.

He had called these questions prayer.

Now he was not certain.

After a while he said:

Disciple: And where is strength?

Arsenius: Where you no longer need to prevail.

The brother thought of the arguments he continued long after the other man had gone away. He thought of the judgments he had carried for years, sharpening them in solitude.

He had called this discernment.

Now he saw how tired it had made him.

Disciple: Where is understanding?

Arsenius: Where you can stand before what you do not understand and not flee.

The brother became troubled.

Disciple: I have not fled.

Arsenius said nothing.

Disciple: I remained in my monastery. I kept my rule. I did what was asked of me.

Still the old man said nothing.

Then the brother understood.

His body had remained.

His heart had fled a thousand times.

Into memories.

Into imagined futures.

Into the life he believed he should have been given.

Into conversations that had never happened and vindications that would never come.

He covered his face.

After a long while he asked:

Disciple: And where is life?

Arsenius looked toward the desert.

Arsenius: Where you are dying.

The brother felt something close within him.

Disciple: I do not want to die.

Arsenius: What do you fear losing?

The brother began to answer, but stopped.

He did not know.

His plans?

His name?

The man he had hoped to become?

The secret image of his life that he had carried since youth?

He saw suddenly that he had spent years asking God to preserve a man whom God might be trying to bury.

Disciple: I do not understand.

Arsenius: Then remain there.

They sat together for a long time.

At first the brother tried to understand the old man’s words.

Then he tried to remember them.

Then even this became tiring.

The wind moved against the wall of the cell.

Nothing happened.

For once, the brother did not search for meaning in it.

Something in him grew quiet.

Not peaceful.

Only tired of running.

At last he said:

Disciple: Abba, where is the light of the eyes?

Arsenius: When you cease looking everywhere else.

The brother looked toward the horizon.

All his life there had been somewhere else.

Another place.

Another season.

Another obedience.

Another brotherhood.

Another version of himself.

Somewhere beyond the horizon was the life in which he imagined he would finally become faithful.

He had spent so much time looking toward it that he had hardly seen the life God had actually given him.

Again there was silence.

The sun was descending.

The brother knew that soon he must leave.

For the first time he did not want to.

Not because he wished to remain with Arsenius.

Because he knew what waited for him beyond the desert.

The same brothers.

The same cell.

The same wounds.

The same unanswered questions.

The same life.

Nothing had changed.

And this frightened him.

Disciple: One thing more, Father.

Arsenius: Speak.

The brother could barely ask it.

Disciple: Where is peace?

The old man closed his eyes.

Arsenius: Where you are.

The brother felt anger rise again, but beneath the anger was grief.

Disciple: But there is no peace where I am.

Arsenius opened his eyes.

Arsenius: Then you are not yet there.

The words entered him more deeply than the others.

He thought of his cell.

He had slept there for twelve years and had rarely been there.

He thought of the brothers whose faces he knew but whom he had never truly received.

He thought of his prayers, so often offered to a God whom he was asking to meet him somewhere other than his actual life.

He thought of all the years spent waiting for his life to begin.

And suddenly he wept.

Not because he had found peace.

Because he saw how long he had refused the place where peace might find him.

Arsenius did not comfort him.

The brother wept until there was nothing left to say.

Night came.

The desert disappeared into darkness.

At last the brother rose.

Disciple: Abba, should I go back?

Arsenius looked at him.

Arsenius: Where would you go?

The brother stood motionless.

For the first time, the question had no answer.

And Arsenius said:

Stay.