An Introduction to the Desert Fathers. Jason Byassee

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An Introduction to the Desert Fathers - Jason Byassee


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to spend more time traveling and less worshipping, like any administrator. One hopes that will not dim the childlike blaze in his eyes. A “younger” monk—actually retirement-age (they get as high a proportion of second-career persons as mainline seminaries do these days) spent one career as an Alaskan king crab fisherman, the most dangerous profession in the world according to insurers. He says he won’t eat seafood now since he can tell the difference between fish frozen for months and fish right out of the Bering Sea—so good it intoxicates. He then retired with millions to a ranch in Arizona, on which the Hollywood movie Tombstone was filmed. He calls that film “the good mustaches against the bad mustaches.” Then he retired anew to Mepkin. He says he misses the movies.

      In this study guide on the Sayings, I write as one attracted to such a life, committed to imitating it insofar as a married person with children and academic and journalistic reputations to maintain can do so. I write for those interested enough in this oddly ancient, oddly relevant form of living to take up and read. My hope is finally for new and faithful forms of life to spring up in such unexpected places as mainline and evangelical Protestant lives, as befits a Lord who can make streams in the desert.

      Questions

      1. What’s your initial impression with those who take monastic vows? With monasteries? How have those been formed? (experience? popular depiction in art? reading?).

      2. Are there other settings, besides anything religious, in which you have experienced God in silence? Or in the keeping of difficult promises?

      5. Monastic life at Mepkin and in most other present-day monasteries reflects the sort of communal living that began with the work of such saints as Benedict and Cassian and flowered in the Middle Ages. The sort of desert monasticism reflected in the Sayings was rather different. It features mostly people living as hermits, near enough to one another to offer spiritual advice and challenge and to provide spiritual and material sustenance to one another. I reflect on my own experience not to suggest that fourth-century Egypt, medieval France, and present-day Mepkin Abbey are identical—far from it. They are linked, however, as they draw on many of the same forms of scriptural and patristic inspiration (the Sayings above all). I also move freely between these forms of life to suggest that living as the desert fathers recommend is, indeed, possible. People are presently doing something very much like it. I hope that churches such as my own United Methodist Church can reimagine new ways to integrate this advice into concrete forms of life. Harmless describes the monastic settlements at Scetis as a “colony of hermits” (175).

      I. Progress in Perfection


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