Desert Echoes #4: Cell-ular Regeneration

 A certain brother went to Abbot Moses in Scete and asked him for a good word.  And the elder said to him:  Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. (From The Wisdom of the Desert, by Thomas Merton, saying XIII)

The "cell" was the center of life for the Desert Fathers.  It was their home, chosen for remoteness and isolation.  Within it they found refuge from the desolation of the desert.  There they sought God in silence, drawing near to Him, finding peace.  Inside its walls they confronted their demons (whether metaphorical or actual).  They discovered who they truly were; at once accepting their human nature and denying it with vehemence.

The central importance of the cell was in being the place where the hermit or monk encountered God in solitude.  It was the inner sanctuary - the eremite's Holy of Holies.  Here there was only silence between the individual and the Beloved.  There remained no place to hide from the penetrating, purifying and purging love of God.  They longed for the Spirit of God to seep down into them like rainwater saturating a cracked and thirsty ground.  This could only happen in silence, in exposing the darkness and emptiness of oneself alone to the living water.

This is radically different from contemporary evangelical attitudes about the church where God is expected to show up most powerfully in public worship events - in sermons, music, videos, singing and all manner of noise and activity.  Neither is there anything inherently wrong with such forms of worship.  In fact, they can be beautiful experiences for those drawn to them.  However, the Desert Fathers knew that we can often hide from God in "noise".

Nature abhors a vacuum.  Humanity abhors silence.  In silence we are alone and naked before God.  In silence we are forced to confront who we are.  We are terrified of us.  We fill our lives with the noise of activity, work, media and myriad other distractions in order to flee ourselves.  We change our locations, our jobs, our relationships - all in an effort to escape, avoid, ignore and deny our inadequacies, failures and fears.  Transience becomes a means of self defense.

The Fathers recognized this.  They dared to stay, to sit, to face themselves in the terror of silence.  They knew that moving from one place to another accomplished nothing.  They understood that what we fear is God and there is no place to hide from him.  The only solution is to bare ourselves before him as we are:  where we are, who we are.  In doing so, they found that they were truly loved by God.  They were consumed by that love.

In her introduction to The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Benedicta Ward observes of the above saying, "The point was that unless a man could find  God here, in this one place, his cell, he would not find him by going somewhere else."  There is a word here for those of us who are Desert Children.  As we wander our own deserts, we find cells of our own.  It is tempting to believe that if we could simply go somewhere else, be someone else, everything would somehow be better.

It's not true.  The only way to peace is in knowing that God knows who you are and loves exactly who we are.  No denials here.  You must come face to face with the ugly, horrid, nasty bits of you before you can accept that he loves all of you.  In fact, there was never a time he did not love you - not even in that most depraved moment.  You know the one I'm talking about.

You must accept the scandal of God's love before you can accept its wonder.  God's love is offensive.  It offends because it shames us by its selfless passion.  It is not dignified.  It is not just.  It is the love of a man smitten with a whore (see the book of Hosea).  The irresponsible love of a shepherd who abandons his herd  to chase after one stupid lost sheep.  The undignified love of a father who runs with abandon to embrace and restore that good-for-nothing bastard he calls a son.

It's not pretty love.  But it's beautiful.  It's overwhelming.  And when you truly accept this love, face it and embrace it - it will change your life.  All else will pale in comparison.  Just remember that it you are more likely to find God where you are than where you aren't.