The Wise Storytellers

There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of personal thoughts. —Amma Syncletica, Life of Blessed Syncletica

Father Richard considers the Desert Mystics foundational contributors to his lineage of faith: 

The period of early Christianity, one of the key building blocks in my lineage of faith, is largely unknown to many Western Christians. It is an overlooked area for much of the Roman Church and its child, Protestantism. With the self-sufficiency and arrogance that has often characterized the West, we have proceeded as if the first centuries of Christianity were unimportant, or not part of the essential Christ Mystery. The very things the early Christians emphasized—such as the prayer of quiet, the Trinity, divinization, universal restoration, and the importance of practice—are some of the most neglected parts of the Western Church.

After the legitimation and, some would say, the co-opting of Christianity by Constantine in 313, many Christians fled to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Cappadocia (Eastern Turkey). We call these men and women the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and most of their names would be unknown to Western Christians. The desert Christians emphasized lifestyle practice, an alternative to empires and their economies, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monastics and functioned much like families. This tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and the later Church Councils. Since the desert monks were often formally uneducated, they told stories, much as Jesus did, to teach about ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace, divine union, and inner freedom.

Early Christianity set the foundation for what we would now call contemplation. Both Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen recognized the importance of this early, desert form of Christianity. It is a unique window into how Jesus was first understood, before the church became an imperial, highly organized, competitive religion.

Eastern Orthodox theologian John Chryssavgis writes of the powerful stories shared by desert Christians in their spiritual teaching:

The Fathers and Mothers who lived in the desert of Egypt remind us of the importance of story-telling, which we have for the most part forgotten in our age. Listening to their stories and sayings, meditating on them in silence and subsequently telling them to others, helped our ancestors to live humanely, to be more human, to remain truly alive.… The stories from the Egyptian desert are more than just a part of the Christian past. They are a part of our human heritage: they communicate eternal values, spiritual truths. Theirs is a silence of the deep heart and of intense prayer, a silence that cuts through centuries and cultures. We should stop to hear that heartbeat. [1]

Contemplative Prayer Is Nothing New

Today’s meditation is adapted from a morning meditation sit at the CAC, during which Richard introduced a selection of quotations from the desert tradition. Richard shows how the teachings of the desert mystics align with the practice of centering prayer:

I’ve continued to be influenced by the desert mystics and the Eastern Church Fathers, even to the point where I say, “My gosh, this is a different Christianity.” It’s completely different from the issues we’re dealing with today. The main thing I’m struck by is how some of their teaching is almost Buddhist. It totally affirms what we’re taught in centering prayer. Here are several of their teachings to show that what we’re saying in contemplation and centering prayer was clearly understood for centuries in Eastern Christianity.

Until the mind is freed from the multitudes of thoughts, and has achieved the single simplicity of purity, it cannot experience spiritual knowledge.
—Isaac of Syria

We see that the desert traditions are very strong on self-knowledge. What they see as self-knowledge is not knowing our personality types, whether we’re a Six or a Two on the Enneagram; it’s seeing our patterns. This becomes clear:

Attention is the beginning of contemplation, or rather its necessary condition: for, through attention, God comes close and reveals Himself to the mind. Attention is serenity of the mind, or rather it’s standing firmly planted and not wandering, through the gift of God’s mercy.
—Nicephorus the Solitary

St. Simeon described attention this way:

Some of the fathers called this doing, silence of the heart; others called it attention; yet others—sobriety and opposition (to thoughts), while others called it examining thoughts and guarding the mind.

The monks Callistus and Ignatius taught:

Collect your mind from its customary circling and wandering outside, and quietly lead it into the heart by way of breathing.

Philotheus of Sinai lists how we get “caught” in our thoughts. He speaks of the initial impact coupling with the thought or emotion, merging with it, being held captive by it, and finally becoming what the desert mystics called a “passion.” The more I read them, the more it becomes clear that what they mean is “obsession.” Obsession is passion for the desert mystics. It is anything we cannot stop doing with our minds or emotions. At that moment, we’re in the grip of a “passion.” It makes total sense. We are no longer free. We have lost our freedom.

Passionlessness means not only not feeling passions but not accepting them from within.
—Callistus and Ignatius

Without this attentive discipline, our mind is in a “disorganized and dispersed state.” [1] That’s what we’re saying centuries later! So, when people say that contemplation or centering prayer is something new, just point them back to the desert traditions.

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