A brother visited Abba Moses at Scete, asking him for a saying. The elder said to him, “Go and stay in a cell; your cell will teach you everything.” — The Book of the Elders: Sayings of the Desert Fathers
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) once remarked, “All of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” It fits almost too nicely with this legendary saying attributed to the desert father Abba Moses (among the desert elders, Abba was a term of endearment for the “fathers” and Amma for the “mothers,” both words coming from Aramaic as well as other Indo-European languages).
We live in a frenetic culture. Compare the most popular movies from the 2020s to the blockbusters of fifty or seventy-five years earlier. It seems that our entertainment has gotten progressively louder, faster, more explosive, more violent, more fast-paced. One of the biggest films of 1968 was the deeply contemplative 2001: A Space Odyssey; a half century later, the top grossing film was Avengers: Infinity War, an overwhelming blast of adrenaline-soaked action that barely gave moviegoers any time to catch their breath before lurching from one intense scene to the next.
Is this a metaphor for our society as a whole? I sometimes wonder that it is — and if so, it seems that we are embodying Pascal’s warning more than Abba Moses’s invitation.
What could we learn from “staying in our cell”? What is to be gained from breathing deeply, sitting still, and allowing silence to surround us and permeate our awareness? If we take the desert abba at his word, this can teach us everything. I assume that means it teaches us about life, about wisdom, about meaning and purpose, and even about God.
Perhaps most of all, sitting still in our cell can truly teach us about ourselves.
Many of us struggle with anxiety, with depression, with obsessive/compulsive behaviors, with addictions of various stripes and severities. Certainly immersing ourselves in silence and solitude, by itself, will not heal these afflictions. But if it can teach us, perhaps it provides us with the wisdom and the perspective to find a path toward healing and wholeness — and maybe even toward holiness. “Know yourself” declared a famous inscription at the Oracle at Delphi. This is not an end to itself: rather, it is a portal to mysteries even greater than ourselves. To know one’s self is to find the way to the threshold of knowing God. Mystery meets mystery: but it is in this contemplative encounter that both healing and wisdom might begin to flourish.
Quotation source: John Wortley, ed. The Book of the Elders: Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Systematic Collection (Cistercian Studies Series 240) (p. 19). Kindle Edition.