Justluckie

Salvator Rosa and his Hermits

The National Gallery of Scotland has recently acquired a couple of paintings by the 17th century Italian painter, Salvator Rosa. One is a wild landscape with St Anthony and a Hermit. It would be tempting to see the figures as little more than incidental decoration in a landscape, perhaps giving a sense of scale. But I think there's more to it...

'A word for me, father?'

Perched before a fissure in the earth's solidity,

they penetrate the deepest darkness with a word.

This gash-tomb is home for one who seeks only light.

'How can I give you a word when all I know is the weight of silence?

Should I have you live as I do?

Is there anything I can say that would lead you to believe that

in this hard place

one may find in the soul

a receptive softness

like earth?

And yet I will give you a word: "attend"!'

And so he went on

to find his own rocky place,

his own rupture in the unmoving hardness,

a place, indeed, to see how one measures up against the massiveness of it all,

a place to attend

to watch

to wait

to meet.

Where, in the desert, is the Cross?

I find myself drawn to the wisdom of the Desert Mothers and Fathers during Holy Week. This is surprising because they make very little mention of the cross or of Christ's resurrection. It is clear that these early hermits did observe the Easter feast as this is mentioned a few times in passing but Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection are rarely mentioned. As I suggested in a previous post, this may, in part, account for the universal appeal of this tough but simple spiritual wisdom as it appears to play down some of Christianity's central doctrinal and credal aspects. If this is true, it is quite surprising as it seems that the Paschal character of Christian faith was established early on and there is no doubt in the mind of contemporary Christians that the Paschal mysteries are central to our understanding of how God 'saves' us, whatever we mean by that. By contrast, the desert hermits seem to place far greater emphasis on the acquisition of virtue, simplicity of life, prayer, guarding the heart, penitence and humility. Is there a conflict here?

I think not. The Desert Fathers and Mothers did not need to talk much about the way of crucifixion and resurrection because that was the very life they lived day by day. The spiritual struggle of the cross is central. The transformation of our lives by grace is central. The overcoming of all that is deathly is central. The word we see more often than any other in the words of the elders is humility, and what more potent symbol of humility is there for the Christian than the cross of the one who humbled himself and became obedient unto death. And what better symbol is there of a life transformed into flaming light by the purification of desire than the dazzling brightness of the Risen One?

The key, I think, to understanding the wisdom of the desert is in seeing that cross and empty tomb are not doctrinal metaphors but the lived realities of those who seek to live in humble, transforming simplicity of heart.

 

The Desert for Today

If you believe the blurb on the back of his books, Thomas Merton considered more than one of his large output to be his favourite. The Wisdom of the Desert has a credible claim to that position.

As one following a call to a life of solitude, it is not surprising that Merton turned to the Desert Fathers for inspiration. His book is a very personal collection of sayings from these earliest Christian hermits and his excellent introduction explains why this is a reasonable thing to do. These sayings were not offered as systematic theology, but as practical spiritual wisdom offered to those who sought 'a word' from the elders. The sayings are brief and I suspect that their original use may well have been as memorable texts for meditation - specific pieces of guidance whose meaning is only unfolded as their truth is lived out in the daily life of the disciple. Here are just two examples:

...whatever you see your soul to desire according to God, do that thing, and you shall keep your heart safe.

Here is the monk's life-work, obedience, meditation, not judging others, not reviling, not complaining.

Merton hit on one very good reason why the wisdom of the desert makes so much sense for today - it starts with the experience of trying to live a godly life and not with doctrine. This is not to disparage doctrine, but it is to suggest that, as a starting point for Christian discipleship, it has severe limitations. One limitation is the suggestion that one is somehow saved by thinking certain things in certain ways. I've never figured out how that works. At its best, Christian doctrine is a way of giving a conceptual framework to the complex experiences of those who seek to live a godly life.

There are other attractions of the desert tradition. It is not naive about human nature and offers some very practical advice on dealing with our innate capacity for mucking things up. It is concerned with very practical aspects of prayer or meditation, which as Merton points out is described in the tradition as stillness. It does not offer a programme or even a 'house style' of spirituality but gets to the heart of lived experience, avoiding the kind of external trappings that so easily distract us. It consistently bears witness to a Christian faith that is understanding, compassionate, forgiving and humble, but also rigorous and demanding. I can think of no better place to turn for wisdom for today's Christian churches.

 

On Watchfulness

It's hard to look through a programme of training events in the NHS these days without finding a session on 'mindfulness'. This meditative practice is often promoted as a kind of approach to  symptom control and is usually thought of as a practice originating in Buddhism. In fact, many of the world's religions have spiritual practices similar to mindfulness meditation, including Christianity.

In essence, mindfulness, or 'watchfulness', to use a term more common in the Christian tradition, is the practice of developing our awareness of ourselves and what is around us in a way that lays aside our natural tendency to add commentary to our observations. In attentive silence, often aided by a focus on the breathing and the use of a prayer word or mantra, we allow ourselves simply to see past the noise and clutter and to rest in that silent, expansive space where we encounter God. For Christians and other theistic practitioners, the watchfulness is not an end in itself, but a way to see our union with God more clearly. The practice does not create that union - it is already there - but it does allow us to see past the distractions and false constructs.

One of the consequences of practising this kind of contemplative prayer is that we find ourselves less at the mercy of 'events' because they no longer define who we are. Our truest selves are found in the stillness, not in the storm. This means that fear is reduced, because the things that happen around us and to us are not able to take away what is truest about us. And this benefit is probably equally experienced by those who practice mindfulness meditation without a theistic context. So you might ask what the 'benefit' is to practice meditation as a theist! Well the answer to that is simple - we do not seek God to find benefit, but because we have sensed God's call and cannot help but respond. We do not, on the whole, respond to the invitation of a lover because we think it will help us get on in life. In any case, I would not draw a distinction between what is 'Godly' and what is 'for our good'. God is not something religious people add on to what other people experience, but a way of naming what others experience. Truth is one.

The spiritual lineage of the practice of watchfulness is an interesting one. Founded on the earliest Christian texts of the New Testament which repeatedly call us to 'be awake'', the monks of the Egyptian and Syrian deserts developed the concept and the practice. Most notably, Evagrius of Pontus urged his brother to 'keep watch over his thoughts. Let him observe their intensity, their periods of decline, and follow them as they rise and fall.' The goal of this watchfulness was called 'apatheia', or 'passionlessness' which is the state of freedom from the buffeting of events I described earlier.

From Evagrius to John Cassian and then to Benedict, watchfulness became firmly rooted in Western Christian practice and we can see it develop from there into more elaborate systems such as that of Ignatius of Loyola. So it is a great sadness that this spiritual wisdom has become submerged under a much more recent fixation on doctrine as an abstract system and on a fixed code of ethics as the focus of religious identity. The rediscovery of spiritual wisdom from other sources is an invitation to Christians to rediscover that same wisdom gushing forth from their own deep wells.

This Desert of Advent

I've been rereading the Sayings of the Desert Fathers recently as part of a little project to find a spiritual vocabulary adequate to the task of giving voice to the experiences of people I work with in our specialist cancer hospital. For a large group of our patients, those with cancers of the blood, the treatments often entail long periods of time in isolation with a severely compromised immune system. The intense solitude and hardship that can be part of this experience find some important echoes in the lives of the earliest Christian monks and nuns who chose a life of austere simplicity, confronting the demons that raise their ugly heads in such extreme conditions. And although the spiritual wisdom they passed on sometimes reflects this severe context with its harsh asceticism and spiritual struggle, there is also a deeply human and surprisingly gentle side to the Sayings. Theirs is a practical as well as mystical spirituality shaped by the humility that comes only from simplicity, self-awareness and alertness to the presence of God. I won't give too many examples because I'm saving all the best ones up for my little piece, but here's a wee flavour:

Abba Poemen was asked for whom this saying is suitable, 'Do not be anxious about tomorrow.' (Matt. 6.34) The old man said, 'It is said for the man who is tempted and has not much strength, so that he should not be worried, saying to himself, "How long must I suffer this temptation?" He should rather say every day to himself, "Today."' (Poemen 126)

But the real reason I wanted to mention the Desert Fathers and Mothers today is that it strikes me more and more that the desert is a major theme of Advent. For example, the prophetic texts we most associate with the season, including those linked to John the Baptist, are full of images of the wilderness. In these texts, perhaps especially those from 2nd and 3rd Isaiah, the desert is both a metaphor for destruction and barenness and a place of promise, the place from which salvation will come as it did for Moses. We tend to make the connection between the wilderness and the season of Lent, but it seems to me that Advent makes much more use of the desert as a way of exploring the need for hope in a hard place and the importance of stripping away any distractions that threaten our ability to see the light.

All of this means, of course, that there is a rather harder edge to Advent than we might normally allow. I have no desire to reduce the sense of expectant joy that pervades this season, but I feel that it's right that we rediscover some of the desert's hard-won riches as well, not least because it seems to me that a healthy dose of realism is essential at this time. 'Now it is time to awake out of sleep...' Advent is a desert time, a time for stripped-back, clear-eyed alertness.

As a guide to this rich season, I heartily recommend the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, and if you're looking for some more contemporary spiritual food, have a look at Kimberly Bohan's Love Blooms Bright, a lovely blog with a number of contributors under Kimberly's expert guidance.