lone tree in the desert — *A lone tree, thriving in the desert.*
Photo: Rabah Al Shammary via unsplash

Lent is a season for reflection on the self. I never really understood or appreciated it until I became old enough to doubt my self-knowledge and then began reading works of monastic spirituality.

As a religious, half-heartedly fundamentalist college student, I labored under the illusion that the most important thing in life was to discover the correct beliefs about God. I have abandoned this fruitless search for correct belief in part because I discovered it was an endless rabbit hole disguised as a wise search for truth. But I have kept part of it: the seeking.

“... the desire for God requires the discovery not of the truth about God, but of the truth about one’s self.”

And what I have found in the process is that the desire for God, the desire to live the good life, requires the discovery not of the truth about God, but of the truth about one’s self. I do not mean navel-gazing, but rather honest encounter with one’s desires and motivations. An encounter that helps one to discern whether they lead one toward God, toward one’s best self, or in some other direction.

Wait! Before you give up, let me lead you along an ancient path built largely by those people we call the “Desert Elders.” They were the first Christians to lay out the difficult practicalities of the religious life, and to see that honesty about the self is a central aspect on that journey.

Three hundred years after the death of Jesus on the outskirts of Jerusalem and 1,000 kilometers away, the habitable margins of the deserts of Egypt were filling up with strange people devoted to becoming more like him. The most revered of these are called the Desert Elders. Most were native Egyptian villagers and peasants who left their villages and farms to enter the desert and follow more seriously the way of Christ. They were mostly poor, not well educated, and of lower social class. Their language was Coptic, with its roots in the ancient agriculture of the Nile.

Though they spent much time alone, their life was in important ways social, built upon strong ties of apprenticeship with those who had gone before. Central to this apprenticeship is the practice of revealing one’s thoughts to one’s master. As one reveals one’s thoughts in loving and rigorous conversation with an elder, the thoughts become more clear, and also less powerful. As they lose their power, one can discern their meaning and not simply be their victim. Insight from this discernment can then be used to build a deeper interior connection of a more purified self to God.

Let us begin, then, in conversation. Here is story of a well-educated Desert Father being himself asked two questions after he had spent time in conversation with an uneducated Coptic-speaking Elder:

[Evagrius] asked him “Abba Arsenius, how is it that you, with such a good Latin and Greek education, ask a peasant about your thoughts?” He answered “I have indeed been taught Latin and Greek, but I do not even know the alphabet of this peasant.” …

One day [Evagrius] came to Arsenius. … He too had come to question the worth of his fine learning: “How is it that we, with all our education and our wide knowledge get nowhere, while these Egyptian peasants acquire so many virtues?” Arsenius answered, “We indeed get nothing from our secular education, but these Egyptian peasants acquire the virtues by hard work.”
- from William Harmless: Desert Christians: An introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism, Oxford Press, 2004. pp: 311 – 312.

In this series of conversations, we can find a key to early monastic spirituality. Arsenius was well educated, but when he perceived that someone had (as it was said) “a word” for him, he eagerly accepted it and spent long conversation with a person he recognized as his elder. Though he could have been proud of his great education and status, he instead went out into the desert to learn from the peasant-elders who had preceded him. In this conversation, Arsenius discovered that he “got nothing” of a spiritual nature from his education, and that he had not done the “hard work” to acquire even the basic virtues necessary to begin the religious quest. His education had been about one kind of abstract knowledge, but what he needed was practical know-how to develop the virtues. What did he do in response? He spent years with one of these peasants, disclosing his thoughts to him in conversation, so that he might get coaching in the hard work on his spiritual path: learning enough about himself and his desires so that he could truly be a follower of Jesus, and not just know things about him.

The person who asked Arsenius both of these questions was Evagrius Ponticus. Evagrius is called the “first great theoretician of the spiritual life” by William Harmless. Educated in Greek and Latin in Constantinople, and an important participant in early church councils, Evagrius left this high society first for Jerusalem, where he became the friend and then disciple of Melania the Elder, a woman who led a monastic community there. He then left for the desert communities of Egypt where he remained for over 15 years until his death. There, he did the hard, practical work on himself to acquire the virtues. The purity of heart that comes with these virtues then allowed him truly to meditate on God, to pray and meditate with a pure heart. He then translated this experience into a systematic exposition of the developmental path of acquiring the virtues necessary for true prayer.

A light in the desert.
Photo: Jeremy Bishop via Unsplash

He wrote these systematic explorations of Egyptian desert spirituality at the time of a great flowering of spiritual writing in the early church: Augustine, Chrysostom, Basil, and others were writing at about the same time. And yet, for over 1,500 years he disappeared from the lists of important writers of the early church, mostly because of his association with the loser in a theological battle over the nature of Christ. Because of newly discovered manuscripts, the influence of his work can now be mapped throughout much of church history.

He wrote in a complicated, mystical style, sometimes hiding more than he revealed. But, outside of the New Testament, and along with the Sayings of the Desert Elders, his work is the closest thing we can get to the vital early springs of Christian spiritual wisdom. Here is one more saying, from Evagrius’ Chapters on Prayer:

“If you are a theologian, you pray truly;
If you pray truly, you are a theologian.”

— Evagrius Ponticus

Here, in a cryptic reply that might be given in conversation, he teaches something important: true knowledge of God requires the true practice of prayer. Lovers of theory think they can storm heaven with logic, and lovers of doctrine think they can capture heaven in a formula. We cannot. We would then be worshiping idols. We can only capture heaven in our hearts, through the hard work of acquiring the virtues that Arsenius and Evagrius tell us they learned in conversation with peasants.

This true prayer might be contemplative, monastic prayer, or it might be prayerful work, or it might be singing the psalms, or searching the heart, or serving the poor. But the work of purifying the heart so one can discern one’s motivations will be central to them all, if they are what Evagrius calls “true prayer.” And the knowledge that comes with it is not abstract scholarly learning, it is practical skill and careful devotion to those things that truly matter.

This is the lesson we can learn from these peasants and scholars. Praying truly is theology, but a particular kind of practical, heart theology. And the key is the practice of discerning when one is praying truly, or serving truly, or speaking truly.

The season of Lent is an opportunity to ask, to discern, whether we are praying, serving, speaking, acting truly.

So, as you frame your approach to this Lenten season, as you adopt some practice, or decide to forgo some pleasure for your spiritual growth, incorporate this wisdom from the Desert Elders: the hard work needed is not about self-flagellation, not about being ashamed or guilty about one’s actions, not about exercises of self-denial, not about achievements of personal faith. It is instead about exercising discernment about one’s thoughts, emotions, and motivations, with the goal of praying, serving truly, speaking and acting truly in whatever form you use.

Many of the exercises people do during Lent can help one practice discernment. But for many of us, they get in the way, they distract us from discernment. Discernment is the heart of Lent. How we can do this will be the topic of the following posts during this Lenten season. I welcome you to this journey.