Desert Spirituality

Silence is not the last word. When Arcinius had asked for the second time, “Lord, lead me to the way of salvation,” the voice that spoke to him not only said, “Be silent” but also “Pray always.” To pray always, that is the real purpose of the desert life. Solitude and silence can never be separated from the call to unceasing prayer.

When solitude would be primarily an escape from a busy job, and silence primarily an escape from a noisy milieu, they could easily become very self-centered disciplines. Solitude and silence are for prayer. The Desert Fathers did not consider solitude as being alone, but as being alone with God. And silence not as not speaking, but as listening to God. Solitude and silence are the context within which prayer is practiced.

The literal translation of the words which Arcinius heard ”Pray always” is “Come to rest.” The Greek word for rest is hesychia and hesychasm has become the term which refers to the spirituality of the desert. A hesychast is a man or a woman for whom solitude and silence are sought as the ways to unceasing prayer. And the prayer of the hesychast is a prayer of rest. This rest however has little to do with absence of conflict or pain. It is a rest in God in the midst of a very intense daily struggle.

Abba Antonio even says to a fellow monk that it belongs to the great work of a man to expect temptations to his last breath. Hesychia, the rest which flows from unceasing prayer, needs to be sought at all costs even when the flesh is itchy, the world alluring, and the demons very noisy. Mother Theodora, one of the Desert Mothers, makes this very clear. She says: “You should realize that as soon as you intend to live in peace, at once evil comes and weighs down your soul with a sense of boredom, with faint-heartedness and evil thoughts. It also attacks your body through sickness, debility, weakening of the knees, and all the members. It dissipates the strength of soul and body, so that one believes one is ill and no longer able to pray. But if we are vigilant all these temptations fall away.” Although weakness of the knees is not likely to be our main complaint, we as ministers have no lack of excuses, and often very sophisticated ones, to stay away from prayer. For us, however, prayer is as important and as crucial as it was for the Desert Fathers. Let me therefore explore with you the role of prayer in our daily lives as ministers.

I will first express my suspicion that we tend to see prayer primarily as an activity of the mind. Then I like to present to you the prayer of the hesychasts, as a prayer of the heart, and finally I want to show how this prayer of the heart asks for concrete discipline to make it the center of our daily ministry. Let me then first speak about the prayer of the mind.

Very few ministers will deny that prayer is important. They won’t even deny that prayer is the most important dimension of their lives. But the fact is that most ministers pray very little or not at all. They realize that they should not forget to pray, that they should take time to pray, and that prayer should be a priority in their lives. But all these ‘shoulds’ do not have the power to carry them over the enormous obstacle of their activism. There always is one more phone call, one more letter, one more visit, one more meeting, one more book, and one more party. Together these form a quite insurmountable pile of activities. The contrast between the great support for the idea of prayer and the lack of support for the practice of it is so blatantly visible that it becomes quite easy to believe in the ruses of the evil one, which Mother Theodora described in such vivid detail. One of these demonic ruses is to make us think of prayer as an activity which is primarily an activity of the mind involving, foremost, our intellectual capacities. This prejudice makes prayer into ‘speaking with God” or into ‘thinking about God’.

For many of us prayer means ‘speaking with God’ and since most often than not it seems a quite one-sided affair, it simply means ‘talking to God’. This idea is enough to create great frustrations. If I present a problem I expect a solution. If I formulate a question I expect an answer. If I ask for guidance, I expect a response. And when it seems increasingly that I am talking into the dark, it is not so strange that I soon suspect that my dialogue with God is in fact a monologue. And then I wonder ‘to whom am I really speaking, to God or to myself’?’ Sometimes that lack of an answer makes us wonder if we didn’t say the wrong type of prayers. But mostly we feel taken and cheated and quickly stop this whole silly thing.

It is quite understandable that we experience speaking with real people who need a word and who offer response, as much more real and meaningful than speaking with a God who seems to be an expert in hide-and-seek. But there is another viewpoint which leads to similar frustrations. That is the viewpoint that praying is ‘thinking about God’. Whether we call this prayer or meditation makes little difference. The leading conviction is that what is needed is to think thoughts about God and his mysteries. It asks for hard, mental work. And it is quite fatiguing especially when reflective thinking is not our strongest side. Since we have already so many other very concrete and immediate things on our own mind, thinking about God becomes a quite demanding extra, especially since thinking about God is not a spontaneous event, while thinking about pressing concerns comes quite easily. Thinking about God makes God into a subject which needs to be scrutinized or analyzed. Successful prayer thus is prayer that leads to no intellectual discoveries about God. Just as a psychologist studies a case and tries to acquire insight by trying to bring coherence in all the available data, so someone who prays well would come to understand God better by thinking deeply about that is known about him. And here as we’re speaking to God, the frustration tolerance is quiet low. And it does not take much to stop praying altogether. Reading a book, writing an article or sermon is a lot more satisfying than this mental wandering into the unspeakable. I’m not saying that it is not good to think about God, or to reflect on his mysteries intelligently, but I am only saying that when we consider praying primarily as ‘thinking about God’, that our prayer life easily becomes very frustrating.

Both concepts of prayer – talking with God and prayer as thinking about God – are the dubious product of a culture in which very high value is placed on mastering the world through our intellect. The dominating idea has been until quite recently that every thing can in principle be understood and what can’t be understood can be controlled. God too then is a problem that has a solution, and by a strenuous effort of the mind we will find it. Let us not underestimate the intellectualism of the mainstream American churches. When the public prayers of ministers inside as well as outside of church buildings are any criterion for their prayer life, God certainly is busy with attending seminars! How can we possibly expect anyone to find real nurture, comfort and consolation from a prayer life that taxes the mind beyond its limits, and adds one more exhausting activity to the many already scheduled ones?

During the last decade many have come to the discovery of the limits of the intellect. More and more people came to realize that what they needed was much more than interesting sermons and interesting prayers. They wondered how to really experience God. The charismatic movement is an obvious response to this new search for prayer. Also the popularity of Zen and the experimentation with encounter techniques in the churches are indicative for a new desire to experience God. Suddenly we find ourselves surrounded from all sides with people asking “teach us to pray.” And suddenly we become aware that we are invited to show the way in a terrain that we do not know ourselves very well. The term spiritual direction has unexpectedly emerged as a term indicating a desire for a new type of ministry. And we with our many books and respectable degrees, we have to say to ourselves, “I’m better off in a youth group, counseling the troubled, and leading in worship than in helping people to pray”. The crisis of our prayer life is that our mind may be filled with ideas of God while our heart remains far from him. Real prayer comes from the heart. It is about this prayer of the heart that the Desert Fathers teach us.

Let me therefore now speak about the prayer of the heart. The hesychastic prayer, the prayer that leads to the rest where the soul can dwell with God, is the prayer of the heart. For us who are so mind-minded it is of special importance to come to learn to pray with and from the heart. The Desert Fathers can show us the way. Although they do not offer any theory about prayer, their concrete stories and counsels offer the stones with which to lay the spiritual writers of the orthodoxy have built very impressive spirituality. The spiritual writers of Mount Sinai and Mount Athos and the staretzy of 19th century Russia, all are anchored in the tradition of the desert. The best formulation of the prayer of the heart defined in the words of the Russsian mystic Teofen Direklos. He says: “To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord who is ever-present, all-seeing within you.”

All through the centuries this view on prayer is central in hesychasm. Prayer embraces thoughts and feelings. Prayer is standing in the presence of God with mind in heart, that is, at that point of our being where there are no divisions or distinctions, but where we are totally one. There, God’s spirit dwells, and there the great encounter takes place. There, heart speaks to heart, because there we stand before the face of the Lord all-seeing within us. We have to realize that the word heart is used here in its full biblical meaning. In our milieu the word ‘heart’ has become a soft word; it refers to the seed of the sentimental life. Expressions such as ‘heart-broken’ and ‘heartfelt’ show that we often think of the heart as the warm place where the emotions are located, in contrast to the cool intellect where our thoughts find their home. But the word ‘heart’ as we find it in the Jewish, Christian tradition, and as it is used by the Fathers and Mothers of the desert, refers to the source of all physical, emotional, intellectual, volitional and moral energies. From the heart unknowable impulses as well as conscious feelings, moods and wishes arise. The heart too has its reasons, and is the center of perception and understanding. Finally the heart is the seed of the will; it makes plans and comes to decisions. Thus the heart is the central and unifying organ of our personal life. Our heart determines our personality and therefore is not only the place where God dwells, but also the place to which Satan directs his fiercest attacks. It is this heart that is the place of prayer. The prayer of the heart is a prayer that directs itself to God from the center of the person, and thus affects the whole of our humanness.

One of the Desert Fathers, Macarius the Great, says, “The chief task of the monk is to enter into the heart.” It now is clear that this does not mean that the monk should try to fill his prayer with feeling, but that he should strive to let his prayer remodel the whole of his person. The most profound insight of the Desert Fathers was that entering into the heart is entering into the kingdom of God. Or to say the same in other words, that the way to God is through the heart. Isaac the Syrian writes: “Try to enter the treasured chamber that is within you, and there you will discover the treasured chamber of heaven, for they are one and the same. If you succeed in entering the one you will see both. The ladder to this kingdom is hidden inside you, in your soul. If you wash your soul clean of sin you will see there the rungs of the ladder which you may climb.” And John Carpathios says: “It takes great effort and struggle in prayer to reach that state of mind which is free from all disturbances. It is a heaven within the heart. The place as the Apostle assures us, where Christ dwells within us.” The Desert Fathers point us in their sayings to a very wholistic view of prayer. They pull us away from our mind-minded practices in which God becomes one of the many problems we have to address, and show us that real prayer penetrates to the marrow of our soul-bones, does not leave anything untouched. The prayer of the heart is a prayer that does not allow us to limit our relationship with God to interesting words or pious emotions. It is a prayer that by its very nature transforms our whole being into Christ precisely because it opens the eyes of our soul to the truths of ourselves as well as to the truths of God. In our heart we come to see ourselves as sinners embraced by the mercy of God. The prayer of the heart thus challenges us to hide absolutely nothing from God and to surrender ourselves unconditionally to his mercy. In the heart we see ourselves as well as God in truth, and it is this vision that makes us cry out “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Thus the prayer of the heart is the prayer of truth. It unmasks many illusions about ourselves and about God and leads us into the true relationship of the sinner to the merciful God. This truth is what gives us the rest of the hesychast. To the degree that this truth anchors itself in our heart, to that degree we will be less distracted by worldly thoughts and more single-eyed directed towards the Lord of the heart and of the universe. Thus the words of Jesus, “Blessed the pure of heart they shall see God” will become real in our prayer. Temptations and struggle will remain to the end of our lives, but with a pure heart we will be restful even in the midst of a restless existence.

This raises a question: how then do we practice the prayer in a very restless ministry? This is a question of discipline.