Fire everywhere

How an ordinary person awakens to a life as prayer.  Continued from yesterday . . .

My misery shut me down. Sleep was the only way I could find respite. In sleep, I could inch myself minute by minute toward the day I would leave. One afternoon as I slept a fitful sleep, the Light came to me, an angel awakened me—though it still seems hard to believe. Some, of course, will dismiss this as the fabrication of a troubled mind trying to find a way out of its trauma. It’s true that the psyche is remarkably agile and able to find ways to rescue itself. But it would be a pity to dismiss such a grace, or for me to forget it. Just as the desert was stripping me of all that had become as Pharaoh to me, so too this terrifying nothingness was my baptism into my own exodus—a death necessary for rebirth.

Roused from my sleep by the angel, I heard these words: “You didn’t need to come this far to learn what I must teach you. Though perhaps you did—to finally know the futility of searching the world for answers. The journey is within, and anyone can take it without even leaving home. The fullness of God is near as your breath, near as the beating of your heart. For the kingdom of God is within you.”

All was suddenly full of light. Fire everywhere.

End of series.  For more, download my free ebook Returning to the Center: Living Prayer in a Distracting World. Available here.

Descent into desperation

How an ordinary person awakens to life as prayer.  Continued from yesterday . . .

In the desert, I was stripped down to nothingness. No one knew me. My degrees, my accomplishments, my skills meant nothing to these monks. And no one who mattered to me really knew where I was. I had come to the edge of the known world, maybe even stepped off the edge, and for all intents and purposes I was dead. I could do nothing for those I loved back home and for all I knew they were getting along quite well without me. Here in the desert, I had nothing to offer that mattered. There was nothing I had to do, nothing I had to be. And there was nowhere I could go to win back my sense of significance.

I descended into a desperation I had not known was possible. A terror in my sense of nothingness. The kind of terror that’s only possible in the desert where you are stripped of all the props that hold you up, all that’s dogged your every step. My fears and insecurities, my ambitions and idiosyncrasies had hounded me for all these long years and the desert was now killing them, but I didn’t yet know this as an act of grace. I felt like I was dying.

More tomorrow . . .

Your cell will teach you everything

How an ordinary person awakens to life as prayer.  Continued from yesterday . . .

Father Irenaeus stepped from the shade of the monastery’s little door, squinting against the sun’s glare, and greeted my Muslim drivers and me with a suspicion that only added to my heightened anxiety. This monastery does not welcome strangers without an invitation. And given the current state of politics in Egypt, and the fragile state of the Christian church under a regime increasingly pressured by hard-line Islamic fundamentalists, two Muslims bearing an American caused no small stir. The monk, dressed head to foot in black, his black beard salted generously with white, looked at Mohammed and Mahmoud, then at me, and finally at my bags. He looked long at my bags—too long, I thought. I handed him my email invitation from Father Johannas and waited nervously. Time stood still, the silence broken only by the buzzing of the flies.

Made desperate by the prospect of returning back through the desert to Alexandria or Cairo with two offended Muslim drivers, I looked at the monk, then at my bags, and said, “Father, Jesus said, ‘Take nothing for your journey.’ I often disobey him—that’s why I’m here.”

Irenaeus laughed, a new light in his eye, and said in impeccable English, “Then welcome, brother!”

At St. Macarius I prayed with the monks before dawn and again at dusk. I ate bread for breakfast, and a bowl of lentils for lunch and another for dinner. And I drank tea, lots of tea. The monks eyed this strange American who’d come among them—I was obviously not Coptic, not even Orthodox. But they were generous and warm, and those who spoke some English were eager to try it out on me.

My cell was a little cubicle adorned with nothing more than a lumpy mattress, a fan, and a spray can of Raid. “Enter your cell,” a desert father said long ago, “and your cell will teach you everything.”

More tomorrow . . .

Renowned for wisdom

How an ordinary person awakens to life as prayer.  Continued from yesterday . . .

Several hours southwest of Alexandria, on the eastern edge of the Libyan Desert, a narrow road descends into a basin made fertile by millennia of hard labor. The Wadi Natroun, known from the sayings of the desert fathers and mothers as Scete, is home to a handful of primitive monasteries. My destination was the Monastery of St. Macarius, inhabited in one form or another for some sixteen hundred years. “Find them,” I’d heard the Light say so many months earlier.

Aside from St. Anthony the Great, there is no soul more renowned for wisdom than St. Macarius the Great, the one who first inhabited this part of the desert. Over the centuries, it was to Macarius and those who cultivated a holy life in this desert that archbishops and emperors, senators and scientists, the wealthy and the poor all made pilgrimage, seeking a word to sustain them, convert them, heal them, transform them. Some found what they were looking for, others did not.

If I were to find wisdom, I wagered that there wasn’t a place on earth more capable of helping me than this one.

More tomorrow . . .

The land was killing me

How an ordinary person awakens to life as prayer.  Continued from yesterday . . .

Mahmoud negotiated his Toyota minivan through Alexandria’s crowded streets and chaotic traffic, defying the laws and gravity and physics, deftly carrying Mohammed and me past one near collision after another. Safely outside the city, the desert stretched out endless before me. But I’d come out of the frying pan, only to enter the fire.

An Egyptian Christian had hired Mahmoud and Mohammed to drive me into the desert and to the site of the most ancient of Christian monasteries. I had nothing to fear from them; they were earnest and devout Muslims and if I were an infidel to them, you’d never have known it. Nevertheless, the thought crossed my mind more than once that, as an American whose government seemed to be on a crusade against Islam, I was a sitting duck in this land. I had brief visions of ending up on the evening news—blindfolded and made to spout anti-American slogans. Hours passed. I alternated between panic and prayer. The desert shimmered, heat rising from its ancient sands. I knew where I was paying them to take me, but I had no idea if the two were actually driving me there. My panic turned to raw fear. Egypt, as it had done for so many others desperate or crazy enough to follow God here, was already killing me.

More tomorrow . . .