Professor Rachel Wheeler describes how the desert offers a sacred invitation to people of all faiths and times:
The desert occupies a powerful place at the heart of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic spiritual traditions. Simultaneously, the desert is a place of resistance, refuge, and revelation. In the early centuries of Christianity, the desert was home for those seeking countercultural withdrawal. Many men and women, who came to be known as desert fathers and mothers, experienced the wilderness as a refuge from an empire increasingly inhospitable to them…. Its association with the powerful and wealthy was inconsistent with how many desert mothers and fathers believed they ought to live out their Christian calling.
The ways these desert Christians navigated the difficulties of their own time and place may seem irredeemably remote to most of us, but I find their stories strangely compelling, like stones yielding different veins of mineral and precious metals whichever way you turn them. Their stories and teachings are brief, sometimes cryptic, sometimes profound, as these gruff desert patriots rubbed shoulders with each other and uncovered uncomfortable knowledge of themselves and their habits of thought, fallibilities, and limitations.
Early desert Christians can serve as a model for how to wrestle with paradox:
The desert offered a particular kind of formation. It could be harsh, offering unwelcome discipline as a parent might. It required the desert dwellers to grow up and fend for themselves, to play well with others, and to share—all guidance we may have received from our own parents at one time! The desert would have offered a strange kind of consolation, as well, when loneliness or the particular boredom called acedia kicked in. Wild animals might have offered companionship, as they did for Abba Theon, who made his solitary home in the desert, sharing food and water with the wild animals who visited his dwelling. [1]
The prototypical desert father, Antony of Egypt (251–356), is said to have fallen in love with the place he lived, deep in the desert, where a few palm trees, water, and arable soil made an oasis. [2] This was the desert’s magic: that within what appeared scarce, there might emerge surprising abundance. What could be harsh might offer a warm welcome. The landscape’s paradox offered space for theological paradox: The incarnation! The virgin birth! The Trinity! The Apostle Paul’s simultaneous willing and not-willing to do good! Even: the subtle interplay of the body’s, mind’s, and spirit’s needs! The desert helped these Christians lean more deeply into undermining their assumptions and cravings for what is and what should be….
For me, these stories shimmer with the heat of desert light and sun.
References:
[1] The Lives of the Desert Fathers, trans. Norman Russell (Cistercian, 1981), 68.
[2] Athanasius, The Life of Antony, trans. Robert C. Gregg (Paulist Press, 1980), 68.
Rachel Wheeler, “Desert Magic,” ONEING: A Living Tradition 13, No. 2 (CAC Publishing, 2025), 9–10, 11, 14. Available in print and PDF.
Image credit and inspiration: Dan Grinwis, untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Namibia, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. By stepping freely into the desert, the seeker claims their own capacity to think and become whole in a vast place of transformation beyond the structures of any system.
Story from Our Community:
Father Richard wrote, “For the desert mothers and fathers, prayer was understood not as a transaction that somehow pleased God, but as a transformation of the consciousness of the one who was doing the praying.” This is the “word” I have been given this week, and it provides life-changing relief—to not have to decide what to pray or struggle to choose the “right” words, or even to feel sincere and honest while praying. Instead, I simply sit and receive. I don’t have to be anything but God’s child, gently and quietly anticipating transformation.
—Patty A.
