Desert Spirituality...To Flee...

I am in the process of reading a book by Father Henri Nouwen called The Way of the Heart. It is a book describing and reflecting on the spirituality of the Desert Fathers as a critical aspect of our modern interior lives. Over the next few posts, I would like to offer some of my reflections on the concepts and principles of which Father Nouwen reminds us.

He relates that God spoke to a particular monk in the desert that desired to be holy. God said to flee, be silent, and pray always.

We must flee the world and its sinfulness into the desert of solitude. We must leave behind family, job, friends, tasks, and place ourselves with Christ and him alone. This doesn't mean jumping an airplane to the Sahara! (although with four kids - it sounds pretty nice!) It means making a desert within us where we can be alone with the Beloved. We often conceive of solitude as either loneliness or a time of privacy (you know 'me' time). That isn't solitude at all. Solitude is a dialogue with our God, who is a consuming fire, where "the old self dies and the new self is born". Solitude is the place where we come face to face with our darkness. We cannot go here alone. We must have Christ with us leading us through this process. We must persevere with great courage because it is here in the crucible of solitude that our sanctification is wrought.

To make our 'desert', we must develop our own spiritual disciplines against the culture that offers us none. We must flee to the desert we have constructed in our heart to be with Christ and him alone often. We need a time and a place. We can't be vague or general because we won't stick to it. Moreover, we must be determined to keep that time come what may.

The fruit is peace, patience, and a deep abiding encounter with Christ. The old man is put away. The new man, the healed man can then live and love as Christ does.