The Wisdom of the Desert

Following another read, where this book was recommended, I obtained it. I found it to be a pleasant, witty and disarming book to be read in "bite sized portions" to allow for proper digestion.

As adorable as it is, it's hard to report on it. Merton here captures nearly 150 snippets of life in the desert, stories from the early church hermits. It is entirely narrative, ranging from sentence-long to page-long vignettes about the lives of those who sought to know on the Lord. At first I though I would list the numbers of all the stories that I found significant or inspirational, but soon the list became so long that it was just a senseless string. My copy is now very dog-eared. Given that, like the narratives of the Bible, there is a clear intention of teaching you something without a clear summary of what was taught, perhaps the best summary is a highlight of the themes that stand out. Humility seems to be the key virtue of the desert. Removing one's self from the world and society is a way of preventing one's self from being distracted from vanity. All of the promises of earthly life draw one into considerations of personal gain rather than into an honest assessment of one's place before God. Even within the monastery, monks should avoid bragging about themselves or their sacrifices. Secondarily, but not independently, is a flight from money. The monk is to give away his last two pence so as to be free from worry, savings, and distraction. They live on little food, mostly bread. Lack of judgment of others is a key value. Repeatedly the stories that Merton has collected warn us that we have no basis on which to evaluate others. Beautifully, the stories lead us to evaluate ourselves without pointing fingers our way. Instead, the monk must excel in forgiveness. It's not without humorous moments, though subtle. When a monk declares (proudly) that he does not need to work because he is so dedicated to prayer and study of God, the other monks don't call him down at dinner time. As far as pragmatic application to my ministry, it is rare that I hear the call to humility and self-surrender. As I carry these stories around, they will shape the way I react to others. I love this book.

No, this is not a book for a `Survivor' wannabe, nor is it a guide for those who dream of crossing the great deserts of the world. But it is a guide of sorts, or more a companion for our pathways in life. This is a new reprinting of a collection of sayings from the desert fathers and mothers of the fourth century. You might ask, "Who are the desert fathers and mothers, and what written in the fourth century could be of any use to us today?" and they would both be good questions. The desert fathers were people who felt Christianity was losing its way, so they decided to return to a simpler life and went to the desert to seek solitude and god. However to some extent their plan failed; soon people realized these men and women had wisdom and guidance if one could ask them. So some of them developed great followings. This collection is unique among those I have seen. in that it does not sort the sayings by author, or by subject, but rather it is a random smattering that the reader can meander through in order, or randomly flip open and read whichever one they come across. Merton in his introduction states, "This collection of sayings from the Verba Seniorum is by no means intended as a piece of research scholarship--this book is designed entirely for the reader's interest and edification." I believe it lives up to that goal. At just under 200 pages, this book is short and sweet. Some of the more obscure sayings have been omitted and what is left is a collection of thoughts, meditations and reflections that can help us examine our lives. A few examples of the wisdom are: "XLVI Abbot Pastor said: `If you have a chest full of clothing, and leave it for a long time, the clothing will rot inside it. It is the same with the thoughts in our heart. If we do not carry them out by physical action, after a long while they will spoil and turn bad'." And "XLVII He said, again: `Malice will never drive out malice. But if someone does evil to you, you should do good to him, so that by your good work you may destroy his malice'." For more, pick up the book and check it out.

Thomas Merton was perhaps the best known monastic of the last century. That he was a Trappist perhaps puts him in the best contemporary context from which to understand the Desert Fathers - the kind of hermit/distance existence that they had does not really exist in the world today (true, there are a few who carry on the tradition in the deserts of Egypt and a few other places, but often even they advise against this becoming a trend in Christian practice again). The Trappists are among those for whom silence and solitude are intentional practices, much like the Desert Fathers. Merton, a talented writer on matters spiritual, states in the Author's note that his intention was not to produce a new 'edition' by academic standards, or to do any piece of new research. Rather, Merton set out to produce an accessible collection of wisdom sayings that had been contained in the collection 'Verba Seniorum', a Latin text of stories and proverbs handed down from the Desert Fathers and those who knew and wrote about them. In the fourth century, while Christianity was still struggling as a minority (sometimes a violently oppressed minority) in the Empire, there were those who saw that the greater threat to the new faith was not the imperial officials and their forces, but rather the attractions and lure of the cities. It was very easy to put forth the claim that the world was not a Christian one, and that one would have to renounce the world to live an authentically Christian life - the Desert Fathers tended to do this renunciation in rather dramatic fashion (and, to varying extent, this is what monastics continue to do to this day). This renunciation was true even with official tolerance and imperial imprimatur, for Christianity was still the decided minority. Merton states that it is a mistake to think that the Desert Fathers were isolationist individuals, however - 'the very fact that they uttered these "words" of advice to one another is proof that they were eminently social.' They sought an equality amongst themselves under God, and were welcoming toward those who sought them for instruction and wisdom. In this collection, the 'Verba Seniorum' are perhaps the most true to the actual words of the Desert Fathers that we can get. Most writing about them came from people who added literary flourishes and often hagiographic legendary material into the mix; these are much more simple. They are 'the plain, unpretentious reports that went from mouth to mouth in the Coptic tradition before being committed to writing in Syriac, Greek and Latin.' Over and over again, the Desert Fathers stress love above all. Their love reaches out for tolerance toward others, even as they sometimes seem to be intolerant toward themselves. Perhaps their generosity toward others came from a recognition of the faults of their own and the hope that God will deal more generously with them as they strive to deal generously with others. 'One of the brethren had sinned, and the

As another reviewer notes, Merton's selections are not as comprehensive as Helen Waddell's, and his introduction does not provide nearly as detailed an account of the historical and literary context of the desert fathers' sayings. This is not Merton's purpose. He is trying to give us a sense of the spiritual essence of the fathers, and he does it brilliantly. Although he is not as elegant a writer as Waddell, nor as learned, he has a much deeper intuitive understanding of the fathers' search for God and their love for each other. His selections emphasize the importance of this love and downplay the fanatical asceticism that many people associate with the fathers. Throughout his introduction, he emphasizes that love is far more important in the Christian life than either mysticism or asceticism. Thus, although a sympathetic reader may not learn terribly much about the history of the desert fathers from Merton, she will begin to understand "the wisdom of the desert".