I’ve not had time to do much reading of anything not related to school over the past year or so, yet somehow I still managed to squeeze in the time to read this little book by noted Catholic teacher and writer Henri Nouwen.
This book is written primarily to priests and lay ministers who serve in parishes, schools, universities, hospitals, and prisons, but I believe its message is applicable to all of us who desire to see the kingdom of God advance in the world in which we live, whatever that world may be. It addresses the challenge which we all face in retaining a vibrant and meaningful connection to Christ in the face of a world of ever-increasing darkness when so many are adapting, becoming discouraged and disillusioned, or living more for their own name than the name of Christ.
Nouwen looks to the writings of the Desert Fathers (and Mothers–some of these were women) of the fourth and fifth centuries. They lived in a time when active persecution was no longer a threat–Roman persecution of Christians had ceased some time earlier with the ascension of Constantine–but the threat of assimilation into the world was just as real as ever. The Desert Fathers (and Mothers) reacted to this by separating themselves from the world–literally–through flight to the deserts of Egypt. There they became influential leaders in the Church and served as witnesses against the destructive power of the world and to the saving power of Christ.
Nouwen looks at three elements of the spirituality of the Desert Fathers and how they might be applied to our context here in the modern world. These are solitude, silence, and continual prayer.
Solitude was attained by the Desert Fathers through flight to the desert. But in our present-day world with all the busyness which our lives require, where do we go to attain solitude? And what does solitude mean anyway? For most of us, it means a private place where we go to relax, refresh, and regain strength for the ongoing competition that is modern-day life. But this is not the solitude of the Desert Fathers. The solitude of the Desert Fathers is a place of conversion and transformation, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born. In solitude we get rid of all our distractions–no books, no music, no telephone calls, no friends, no meetings–and are left with nothing but ourselves, weak, sinful, broken creatures that we are. In solitude we lay down all the illusions that we dream up to preserve our false sense of worth and come face to face with ourselves as we really are. But this state of brutal honesty with ourselves is far too much for us to handle in our own strength; this forces us to surrender completely and totally to Christ who alone has the power to conquer evil.
Our present-day existence does not afford us the opportunity to withdraw as the Desert Fathers did. Instead we must create our own desert by carving out space where we can withdraw daily, shake off our compulsions, and dwell in the presence of Christ.
Silence was another important component of the spirituality of the Desert Fathers. Nouwen looks at three aspects of silence as it appears in their writings: that silence makes us pilgrims, that it guards the fire within, and that it teaches us how to speak. Silence keeps us on our pilgrimage toward the heavenly kingdom simply by virtue of the fact that speaking gets us involved in the affairs of the world–and it is very hard to get involved in the world without becoming corrupted by it. Silence guards the life of the Spirit within us; so often we feel that we must through our words convince others of God’s power, but what we express through our words is not the power of God but our own petty ideas and feelings. Silence teaches us to speak because God spoke the world into existence out of the eternal silence in which He dwelt prior to creation. Just as God’s creative word came out of His eternal silence, so our words can create communion and life only when they embody the silence from which they proceed.
In our modern-day world, words are so abundant that they have almost lost all power to communicate. Too often the words we speak are superfluous, shallow, and inauthentic. But when we keep to the discipline of silence, we keep our hearts focused on the heavenly world of the future and gain the power to speak creative and healing words to the present world.
Prayer is another critical discipline in the spirituality of the Desert Fathers. The prayer which they practiced was a prayer of the heart which consisted of resting in Christ. But we misunderstand prayer as an activity of the mind in which we are either talking to God or thinking about God. Talking to God can be a very frustrating experience because it frequently seems as if we are just talking to ourselves. Thinking about God requires hard mental work and the resulting fatigue can be very discouraging. The prayer of the heart is neither of these; instead it is a holistic prayer in which our entire person is directed toward God, in which we hide nothing from God and surrender ourselves entirely to His mercy. This kind of prayer is nurtured by short prayers which contain no superfluous words but instead cut straight to the point. It is unceasing; we allow our prayers to become so ingrained inside of us that we live our entire lives in an attitude of prayer. And it is all-inclusive in that it includes all of our concerns.
I believe that this is a book which we would all do well to read and learn from. So many of the concerns of our present world apply with much greater force within the world of evangelical Protestant-dom. We have so much that distracts us from our true condition of emptiness and dependance upon Christ. So much of our words are superfluous and inauthentic, and our prayers reduce God to something that can be contained in our minds. I believe that our spiritually would be much more vital and vibrant if we were to learn “The Way of the Heart”.
