Abba Lot visited Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, to the best of my ability I do a little fasting, praying, and meditating. I maintain hēsychia and purge my thoughts to the best of my ability. What else should I be doing?” Standing up, the elder stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire; and he said to him, “If you are willing, become entirely like fire.”
Abba Lot visited Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, to the best of my ability I do a little fasting, praying, and meditating. I maintain hēsychia and purge my thoughts to the best of my ability. What else should I be doing?” Standing up, the elder stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire; and he said to him, “If you are willing, become entirely like fire.”
Here is one of the most storied of the sayings attributed to the Desert Elders. Abba Lot comes to his mentor, Abba Joseph, seeking “a word” — perhaps like a Zen koan, an invitation into meditation and contemplation that defies logic but invites radical reliance on the movement of the Spirit who operates within us at a level too deep for words.
Like the rich young rule who confidently declares to Jesus that he faithfully observes God’s commandments (Matthew 19:16-30), Abba Lot begins by justifying his fidelity to the spiritual practices considered essential in the desert: prayer, meditation, fasting, and the contemplative practice of maintaining hēsychia (interior silence). And just as Jesus ups the ante the arrogant ruler, so does Abba Joseph challenge his directee: his fingers glowing like Jesus at the transfiguration, he declares “You can become entirely like fire — if you’re willing.”
Ay yi yi.
I am reminded of Matthew 26:41, when Jesus, praying in Gethsemani, is disappointed to find his companions asleep. He wryly remarks: “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” If I were Abba Lot, that’s probably what I would say, defensively, in response to Abba Joseph’s digital pyrotechnics.
Of course, it would be hard to argue with Joseph, given that he was demonstrating the very gift that he was challenging Lot to manifest!
Like the story of the rich young ruler, we can get distracted by the challenge. Society cannot function if everyone sold off all their belongings; likewise, we are not called to generate physical flame out of our fingers. But we are called to manifest the “light of the world” — to be (in Merton’s words) shining like the sun. I suspect most of us will need to give our entire lives to the task of becoming entirely like fire. But if we believe Merton, the gift is already given. Now it’s up to us to live into the beingness of it.
Quotation Source: John Wortley, ed. The Book of the Elders: Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Systematic Collection (Cistercian Studies Series 240) (p. 217-218). Kindle Edition.