For several years I have had some unforgettable acquaintances. Of course, I have not known them personally. We never hung out together. After all, they did live in Egypt some sixteen centuries ago.
They could also have been a little hard to understand. They seemed to have been a peculiarly solemn lot. Completely clueless when it came to small talk, off the chart introverts, they nevertheless had something we often lack. As I read through their interactions with one another again and again, I can sense a deeper stillness than we normally know. They had a very low, unprovokable center of gravity.
I have spent so much time reading through The Sayings of the Desert Fathers that I feel that I actually do know them in some mysterious way. In fact, as odd as it sounds, I know them so well that in their most personal moments I can feel their tears falling through their prayers.
One day I took a longer look at the book’s cover. I was struck by the two figures there. They stared out, with a wide-eyed, icon-like boldness, as though they had seen it all. They were afraid of nothing. It was a look that would cut through duplicity as a knife through butter.
These characters, in both their words and their portrait, were like surgeons of the inner life. In response to one another’s inquiries and with their use of silence that was as cool as steel, they whacked away, penetrating one another’s psyche and taking even the reader to a level that is rarely reached.
What would become of us if such intense figures were dropped into our church? Their concern to get their lives clear with God before attempting anything else could be a little dazzling for us. In our attempts to work out compromises in holding ourselves together, we would be startled to see how little they regarded such a cause. Their calling was to love God first knowing that all else would then work out.
And what would have become of them if they hung around with us? Would their strange mixture of strength and frailty have been sustained? Would the invisible scars that they had seen both within us and within themselves grow deeper still? With our propensity to claim happiness before we seek holiness we might have perplexed them. It might have led them into tears.
What would we learn from Abba Poemen if we turned to him?
A brother asked Abba Poemen what he should do about his sins. The old man said to him, “He who wishes to purify his faults purifies them with tears, and he who wishes to acquire virtues acquires them with tears, for weeping is the way the Scriptures and our Fathers gave us when they say, “Weep!” Truly, there is no other way than this. (p. 184)
Could the same advice be given to us about our church today? If one were to look at our church with the eyes of Abba Poemen what would he see? Some might say that they would see great reason for hope. New things abound. Others would be more cautious. And some, taking the General Assembly’s approval of the Peace, Unity, and Purity recommendations as a phenomenon in itself, would wonder why we had set about to cure spiritual ills through administrative measures. Abba Poemen, however, might surprise us.
Have you not yet realized, he might say, that so many decisions, so many public relations gestures, so many attempts to reduce your programs have revealed a spiritual wound? Where are your tears? And we might then reply we have no tears because we have no reason to need them. Some of us are buoyant and some of us are angry but there is no one here who weeps. We are all too sure for that.
And Abba Poemen would grow very still. He would know that something was not right. The silences of the desert fathers speak louder than their words. He might even wait for further time to pass, for the arrival of Father Isaac several centuries later. A specialist could be needed.
Toward the end of the seventh century the population of Nineveh had been very impressed. A new leader, Isaac, had been appointed bishop. But five months later, to everyone’s surprise and without any clear public explanation, Bishop Isaac resigned. He did not leave to pursue a more lucrative position. Instead he left to find a period of deep solitude. Then he moved on to live at a remote monastery near the Persian Gulf for the rest of his days. He gave himself to studying Scripture until he went blind. Even so, Isaac wrote about a special beam of light.
Those who are led by grace to illumination in their way of life constantly perceive an intelligible ray, as it were, which passes through the words of Scripture. (Published as On Ascetical Life by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, p. 29).
“An intelligible ray,” he says. Could it illumine our situation?
If Isaac were referring to the illumination of our hearts through the Holy Spirit’s witness to Scripture, he had anticipated Calvin’s own teaching by more than 800 years. And both of these reluctant leaders leave us in a quandary with such talk. Does not passage after passage warn us that the pursuit of pragmatic strategies never rises to the height of true faithfulness to God? And then once we have resorted to such moves, does not Scripture turn on us again and notify us that we cannot escape these situations that we create through additional expediency? The clever decision is never the same as patient trust, no matter which side we are on.
When the Spirit’s intelligible ray clarifies Abram’s clever attempt to pass his wife off as his sister it reveals his failure of trust. We wonder if that ray is also falling on our pragmatic solutions. And later, as an early disciple lifts up the standards of human wisdom and family care as his guide, Jesus tells him that even the dead must be abandoned. Let them bury themselves, an extremely pointed lesson, forcing us to the limits of our own wisdom. In neither case were there any tears.
Where does repentance, after such certainty, come into the picture? We should not forget that the gospels tell us that John the Baptist’s role was to announce that we must face it first. Repentance is not an option. Instead, we are busy lying about Sarai and burying our dead.
What have we been doing with ourselves? The age-old witness to the indispensable demand that we seek first our internal integrity before the Lord seems to have been marginalized and left among the eccentric figures of antiquity. And there it has often remained. We have to dig among these biographical ruins to find some word that might be useful to us again. How hard it is for us to know when we are actually seeking the deepest truth and when, on the other hand, we have begun to rationalize our own more tempting choices. We should not forget that our spiritual safety usually lies in desert places.
I find these words of Hebrews coming back to haunt me more.
Indeed the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (4:12)
Soul surgery again. Was it merely nice Sunday school talk or was the author telling us what had happened to him? If it were the latter he still tells more. Placing this passage within the context of a “day of rest,” he more or less tells us that this spiritual surgery takes time. He invites all who formerly disobeyed to this surgery called remorse, and, incidentally, that could include all of us
The text thus includes a radical spiritualizing of the Sabbath symbol. What it does, in a scintillatingly brilliant way, is therefore to make it all the more real. He reconstructs the Jewish Sabbath observance into the operating room in which the divine warrior surgeon slices us open and then rebuilds our high lives. Jesus Christ is there. And as the ultimate high priest, his presence declares that only God can deal with sin. Forgiveness, this picture announces, is the definitive act that brings reconstructive surgery.
I sense not only the desert fathers but now Isaac standing nearby. Perhaps their wisdom could help us to understand one thing more. Hebrews also takes us to a throne. Later Christian tradition went on to associate the throne with the Cross. After all, it is Christ who rules there from God’s right hand. But it is not a lounge chair. It remains a throne. It is before the throne of grace that even we hard shell Presbyterians may still recover the capacity to weep. We may no longer have to be in charge of our own future. The melt down comes at last.
When we recover our tears we may allow all of those past efforts to do the expedient thing, and we did try so hard, to be washed away. The quick administrative change has left us looking more at a symptom than a cure. We weep also because, conservatives and liberals alike, we sense that we let something happen inside ourselves. Compromise is important with merely practical things. When it involves our spirits, however, we sometimes let a very precious part of our souls be set aside.
It never happens all at once. Little by little, the stress fracture occurs over a period of time. Small micro-decisions, the second and third becoming easier than the first, soon lead us to pass our internal moral voice over to someone else. We concede, who knows, it is a complicated matter, they must be right. We all sense, however, do we not, that something has been lost.
And this is why we are all so angry. The good news, however, is that the day of rest, the throne room, and the Cross are still there. As a church, we can begin again. And as Abba Poemen would remind us, tears are now not only a divine gift but our only choice.
Richard A. Ray is a former pastor, professor, and managing director/editor of John Knox Press). He currently resides in western North Carolina and is general editor of the Kerygma Bible Studies. He has served as a director, and president, of the Board of Directors of The Presbyterian Outlook.
