Dear friends,

“We’re supposed to be in the world, but not of it.” 

With some quip like this, I’ve heard Christians dismiss monasticism and any wisdom that might stem from it. Why should we listen to people who cut themselves off from the society they were supposed to love and shape?

But at its best, monasticism isn’t about escape; it’s about devotion and purification — not for self-righteousness or self-enlightenment, but to learn to better love God and others. 

“What is to be learned in the desert,” writes Rowan Williams, ​“is clearly not some individual technique for communing with the divine but the business of becoming a means of reconciliation and healing for the neighbor.”

Few are called to a classic monastic lifestyle. But all are called to purity of heart.

I can hear the words of Abba Moses in the deep voice of my friend Chris Hall: ​“Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” 

Unpacking this saying for non-monks, Ron Rolheiser comments: 

“Our ​‘monk’s cell’ is our marriage, our home, our nexus of relationships, our work, our private set of burdens and tensions, our truth, our virtue, and our personal integrity. The day’s duties are ​‘your cell.’ The spiritual task is to remain inside of that, to let them teach you, to let them be a form of prayer, to not flirt with what’s outside of them, and to make fidelity to them your vocation.” Source

That hits me hard. So often I clamor to be somewhere other than where I am. There is such a thing as ​“holy discontent” — a spiritual hunger that longs for more of God. And that’s a beautiful thing. But sometimes the thing I am dressing up as holy hunger is really just restlessness. Sometimes, the thing that will purify me — that will move me toward that deeper life with God — isn’t something I’ll find by chasing whatever is out there, but by staying right where I am.

The ancient desert wisdom talks a lot about purity and sin and vice. To our modern ear — and especially if we grew up in a less than healthy church — this kind of language can feel not only antiquated but harmful: leading to shame, suppression, self-righteousness, or worse.

Here’s how I’ve come to think of sin: it’s anything that, given enough time, leads to inner decay. And God wants us — the creatures who bear his likeness — to be completely free and alive.

“The wisdom literature in Scripture teaches us about two ways to live,” writes Rebecca DeYoung, ​“the way of life, led by wisdom, and the way of death, led by folly.” 

Staying in our ​“cell” and spending time in the ​“desert” — rightly understood and wherever that may be — are opportunities to learn to walk by the Spirit in the way of life.