Goodbye, cruel world?

I’m reading about the Desert Father and Mothers, the abbas and ammas who went out during the 4^th century to escape the world and become one with the heart of God. I’ve been intrigued by these good folks for a while, attracted both by their love of solitude in the desert landscape, and also by their willingness—maybe even their eagerness-- to give up everything to be closer to God.

This book I’m reading now that talks about their departure from the world, their escape from a European world where Christianity had just recently become legal and, in fact, normal. Their fear was that Christianity’s acceptability would lull people into taking it for grants (bingo), as well as the well-founded concern that the noise and busyness of their lives would draw them away from God and His will. Theirs was an almost-Buddhist like idea, also quite Biblical, of course, that they needed to empty themselves and give up everything in order to gain the eternal Everything.

I struggle with this. As I write, I’m sitting in our modest little desert cabin, surrounded by the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo mountains on one side, the foothills of the Rockies on another, and being entertained by a little western blue birds (not the insistent, nagging bluejay, but the bright blue, round-headed little blue bird), I feel I’m in that thin place, near holiness. But what am I giving up in return for this beauty and quiet place of contemplation? Nothing! Oh wait--we don’t have Internet or even cellphone service out here, for Pete’s sake! But, really, what kind of privilege even brings me here in the first place, what luxurious wealth of time and money? What, for that matter, were those 4^th century desert hermits actually giving up when they retreated from the world? When you think about it, the lifestyles of even the most wealthy and powerful people of that time and place would be unimaginable to us today—a world (mostly) without books or antibiotics, greasy meals concocted from unspiced food, information that traveled no faster than a person could walk, nights that started with the setting of the sun.  And so. . .  the desert fathers and mothers felt they needed to escape even from THAT? So where does that leave us, who live in a world almost too abundant for human habitation?

To think about this roils my waters a bit. Let’s continue to think about it and return to it another day.

(I wrote this a week ago and that quiet day in New Mexico seems very far away already. But the question still remains: Does God call people like us to remove ourselves from our world like he called the Desert Mothers and Fathers? What do you think?)