Rev. Cameron Trimble connects the monastic wisdom of Saint Benedict with the desert ammas and abbas who were his spiritual ancestors:
St. Benedict told his communities to stay: to root themselves in place, in relationship, in shared life. Stability, he taught, is how love survives collapse. You do not run every time the world shakes. You commit. You tend. You remain.
But long before Benedict organized communities that stayed, another stream of elders stepped away for a time—the Desert Mothers and Fathers—because they wanted to learn how to live in the world without becoming shaped by its distortions.
At first glance, these look like opposite instructions: Go versus stay. Leave versus root. Desert versus monastery.
But underneath, they answer the same spiritual problem: How do you remain faithful when the surrounding culture is losing its moral center?
The desert elders left noise to recover clarity. Benedictine communities built structure to protect clarity. Both traditions understood that without intentional spiritual formation and maturity, power, fear, and spectacle will train the soul faster than truth will.
The desert was never the final destination. It was a training ground for perception.
One elder taught that the first task of spiritual life is learning to see your own reactions clearly: how quickly anger justifies itself, how easily fear pretends to be wisdom, how often ego disguises itself as courage. Silence exposed all of that, not to shame people, but to free them.
Benedict took the next step. He asked: Once you learn to see clearly, how do you live faithfully in community over the long haul? His answer was not intensity but rhythm—prayer, work, shared meals, mutual care, accountability, humility, repair.
So the question for us is not whether to leave or stay. Most of us are not called to geographic withdrawal. We are called to interior non-cooperation with corruption while remaining deeply committed to one another.
You can stay without surrendering your soul. But it takes practice.
It takes boundaries around attention. It takes rhythms that interrupt outrage. It takes communities that tell the truth to one another gently and directly. It takes prayer, or silence, or honest reflection that clears emotional distortion before it hardens into identity.
Right now many people feel spiritually flooded, saturated with alarm, analysis, reaction, and dread. The nervous system never powers down. The moral imagination never gets quiet enough to hear wisdom instead of impulse.
The elders would recognize this immediately.
They would not tell you to disappear. They would tell you to build inner ground. They would tell you to create small deserts of clarity inside daily life—spaces where truth can speak without competition—so that when you act, you act from depth instead of reactivity.
Benedict would agree. Stay. But stay awake. Stay rooted. Stay practiced in humility and courage. Stay shaped by love more than by fear.
The goal is never escape.
The goal is freedom—the kind that lets you remain fully human when systems forget how.
Reference:
Cameron Trimble, “Staying Without Surrendering Your Soul,” Piloting Faith, Substack, Jan 30, 2026. Used with Permission.
Image credit and inspiration: Annie Quick, untitled (detail), 2025, photo, Albuquerque. Click here to enlarge image. Bare feet resting on the earth signifies a quiet monastic gesture. Reactivity loosens its grip and a contemplative response can arise.
Story from Our Community:
Following the end of a thirty-year marriage, I arrived in the desert of New Mexico, directionless and in despair. Something called me here to heal. It was as if I had been “exiled” from life to discover a new reality. I also faced major health challenges along the way. The expansiveness and the ever-present sun of the desert have opened me to a sense of buoyancy I never thought possible as I went through this major transformation of my life. I am grateful!
—Dave A.
