There were two elders living together in a cell, and they had never had so much as one quarrel with one another. One therefore said to the other: Come on, let us have at least one quarrel, like other men. The other said: I don’t know how to start a quarrel. The first said: I will take this brick and place it here between us. Then I will say: It is mine. After that you will say: It is mine. This is what leads to a dispute and a fight. So then they placed the brick between them, one said: It is mine, and the other replied to the first: I do believe that it is mine. The first one said again: It is not yours, it is mine. So the other answered: Well then, if it is yours, take it! Thus they did not manage after all to get into a quarrel.
The story of the two elders who couldn’t quarrel is one of the my favorite desert father tales. Here I’m quoting the version as translated by Thomas Merton in his book The Wisdom of the Desert, for no other reason than it was the first book of sayings from the desert elders that I ever read, so I’m still partial to Merton’s way of telling the tale. Our twentieth-century Trappist monk had a knack for capturing the sly, dry humor that gives so many of the desert sayings their punch; but as for me, I find this particular vignette to be laugh out loud funny. The hapless brothers just couldn’t seem to find it in themselves to work up a good old fashioned barney, as they call it in England.
I suppose if you have to be incompetent at something, not being able to have a fight is a pretty good skill not to have —unless, of course, you’re a soldier or a lawyer! But I think we can safely assume that monks are not meant to fight, and so this story is not only amusing, it’s delightful.
And yet, part of the edge of the humor here is the wry recognition that I certainly have (and I imagine most people would agree with me) that, if push came to shove, I’d put up my dukes — even just to keep an old brick in the desert. Most of us learn to fight at a pretty young age, often just to defend ourselves from the neighborhood bully — or an older sibling. Before we know it, we structure our entire lives around the belief that it’s a dog eat dog world out there, nice guys finish last, and so forth.
That all may be true enough, in a relative sense. But the desert elders, like the Nazarene to whom they have given their lives, are trying to live at a more-than-relative depth of life. They might lose the brick — but they consider that a small price to pay when it comes to preserving their relationship with the one who was crucified.
For all of us who are still prone to fight for the brick, I don’t this this story is meant to shame us; it’s meant to inspire us. It is possible to imagine a world where no one is going to fight over a piece of masonry — or anything else. We may not experience that world on this side of eternity. But if we can imagine, we just might be able to take baby steps in that direction. That, alone, would be revolutionary (a peaceful revolution, of course; but still a revolution).
Quotation Source: Thomas Merton, ed. The Wisdom of the Desert (New Directions Book 295) (p. 67). Kindle Edition.