Abba Anthony also said, "Our life
and our death is with our neighbour. If we gain our brother, we have gained God,
but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned against Christ."
One day Abba Anthony received a letter
from the Emperor Constantius, asking him to come to Constantinople, and he was
wondering if he ought to go. So he said to Abba Paul, his disciple, "Ought
I to go?" He replied, "If you go, you will be called Anthony, but if
you stay here, you will be called Abba Anthony."
Desert Father Stories
Reflection – One
of the criticisms of the desert fathers that has been made over the centuries
is that theirs is a way of life essentially self-centered. They are focused
entirely on the salvation of their own souls and care nothing for their neighbours. Why don’t they spend their lives feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, if they want to be so close to God? Isn’t that what Jesus did? Isn’t
that what he told us to do?
It
is a superficially strong argument. And of course there are indeed thousands if
not millions of Christians over the millennia who have indeed become very holy,
very close to God precisely by lives of active charity and generous unstinting
service to their fellow man. That is beyond dispute.
But
this little pair of desert father sayings, again from the great Abba Anthony,
help answer the objection made to the way of life of the desert, which is of
course the pattern of all monastic life and in a certain sense of all
consecrated life. Even those consecrated people who are engaged in the active
apostolate have a little wee current of the desert fathers running somewhere
through their lives of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
That
is, the fathers of the desert communicate to us that the most helpful thing we
can do for another person, the most lavish act of service we can perform for
another human being, the most profound act of charity and Christian compassion,
is to win this person for Jesus Christ. This is not to dismiss or disparage in
any way whatsoever the corporal works of mercy. But those corporal works are,
in fact, ordered properly only when they are in fact ordered towards winning
souls for Christ.
And
souls are won for Christ, not by all sorts of doing and talking and human
activity, but in a very deep way of prayer and fasting and our own inner
purification and union with Jesus. ‘Acquire interior peace, and a multitude
will find salvation near you,’ a more modern ‘desert father’ of Russia said,
St. Seraphim of Sarov.
That
has been the lived experience of the Church for 2000 years—that the real and
deepest good for human beings has been accomplished by men and women who allow
God to take possession of their deepest being, that grace flows through such
men and women like a vast, swift-moving river, that hearts are changed and souls
are saved and the earth is renewed as in the spring-time by such men and women
and the Spirit of the Living God flowing through them.
This
is what is meant in the second story—if Anthony goes to Constantinople (where
he can really be useful to the emperor!) he will remain Anthony. Not a bad
thing, actually, and it’s not like he would have been committing some grave sin
to do so. But if he stays in the desert, stays in this mysterious and seemingly
useless life of prayer and fasting and total oblation to God, he will be ‘Abba’
Anthony. A spiritual father, a man whose life will beget life in others, who
will bring forth new souls made new in Christ.
And
we see this over and over again in the life of the Church. ‘Abba’ Anthony is
still bringing forth souls for Christ; his spiritual fecundity has spilled over
the bonds of time and history and into eternity, and there are still countless
thousands of men and women won for Christ by the teachings and way of life laid
down by him and those who came after him. And we can see the same thing
happening with Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Dominic whose feast day is
today, and so many others, Catherine de Hueck Doherty among them (in my
opinion).
And
yet, when it comes down to us, we have to struggle through it. Is my life worth
anything? Is what I’m doing going to make the slightest bit of difference in
the world? Is my faithfulness to Christ, my poor efforts to pray and fast and
do what the Lord wills for me—is it worth it? Can I become ‘Abba Denis’ (the
sound of which makes me snort in derision, just a little). Can you become Abba
or Amma (insert your name here)? And if you do, what good will it do?
This
is the great struggle, the great question all of us face, even if our lives are
filled with works of active charity that have some obvious immediate good effect.
And we have to struggle through it with God’s help—no shortcut, no way around
it but through it. But souls hang in the balance, our brothers and sisters who
are far from Christ can only be brought near to Him by the ministry of
Christian souls set on fire for God by God—all the depths and heights of this
desert life are for them, ultimately.
So
it is anything but self-centered to walk this path of radical holiness, radical
belonging to God. It is all about becoming a living flame of love in the world,
without which many will die of the cold. So let’s try, just a little, today, to
let God burn in us as he did in those great men and women of the desert. The
world is suffering from ‘global chilling’, you know, and needs that fire, that
warmth, more than ever.