"What Christianity most has to offer the world now is not moral guidance or activism or yet another social program; it is a mystical connection to the Source of life. Cultivating that divine-human love affair seems to me the only hope left. Not as some kind of opiate-of-the-people escape from our problems, but as a nonlinear path that leads us deeper into them. Christianity has no exclusive claim on this relationship. It does have a two-thousand-year-old history full of reliable matchmakers: the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Isaac of Syria, Teresa of Avila, Howard Thurman, Simone Weil, Oscar Romero, Thomas Merton . . . the list is long. We can choose our guides. The inner journey into love is taken not for the self, but on behalf of all life.

"The purpose of the early desert hermits", Merton wrote, "was to withdraw into the healing silence of the wilderness . . . not in order to preach to others but to heal in themselves the wounds of the entire world"

From seventh-century Ninevah, in what is now Iraq, Saint Isaac of Syria wrote: "An elder was once asked, "What is a compassionate heart?" He replied: "It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons and for all that exists."

Christianity will truly come into its own in the Anthropocene, I believe, when it fully embraces that path to compassion, when it refuses to look away from the ecological Good Friday we are inflicting on the world. Only then will our actions, humbled and chastened, flow from compassion rather than from guilt. This requires a shift in vision, a redirecting of our gaze back to the One who loved the world into being and who sustains its every breath."

~ Fred Bahnson

"What Christianity most has to offer the world now is not moral guidance or activism or yet another social program; it is a mystical connection to the Source of life. Cultivating that divine-human love affair seems to me the only hope left. Not as some kind of opiate-of-the-people escape from our problems, but as a nonlinear path that leads us deeper into them. Christianity has no exclusive claim on this relationship. It does have a two-thousand-year-old history full of reliable matchmakers: the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Isaac of Syria, Teresa of Avila, Howard Thurman, Simone Weil, Oscar Romero, Thomas Merton . . . the list is long. We can choose our guides. The inner journey into love is taken not for the self, but on behalf of all life.

"The purpose of the early desert hermits", Merton wrote, "was to withdraw into the healing silence of the wilderness . . . not in order to preach to others but to heal in themselves the wounds of the entire world"

From seventh-century Ninevah, in what is now Iraq, Saint Isaac of Syria wrote: "An elder was once asked, "What is a compassionate heart?" He replied: "It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons and for all that exists."

Christianity will truly come into its own in the Anthropocene, I believe, when it fully embraces that path to compassion, when it refuses to look away from the ecological Good Friday we are inflicting on the world. Only then will our actions, humbled and chastened, flow from compassion rather than from guilt. This requires a shift in vision, a redirecting of our gaze back to the One who loved the world into being and who sustains its every breath."

~ Fred Bahnson

Over the next three days, I speak with different monks about their experience crossing that river. Brother Leander, a quiet ninety-two-year-old monk from Scotland with a cloudy right eye, takes to calling me 'dear brother' and 'laddie.' He sees prayer as central to the monastic life. 'If we were just a jolly bunch of farmers and ecologists, well …' His voice trails off, his right hand waving the thought away. He quotes Karl Rahner, a famous midcentury Catholic theologian. The Christian of the future, Rahner said fifty years ago, will either be a mystic or cease to exist.

Brother Leander looks hard at me with his good eye. 'And what is mysticism? The experience of God in the interior of one’s being. I always liked Hermann Hesse’s definition of a mystic: a poet without verses, a painter without a brush, a musician without notes.' I tell Brother Leander that I pray the Jesus Prayer, a kind of mantra used by the early desert monks. 'Yes, laddie, and you must pray the prayer not only with your lips or your mind but with your heart.'"

The sisters of Redwoods Abbey are Trappists, also known as Cistercians of the Strict Observance, a worldwide Catholic monastic order of men and women who follow the Rule of Saint Benedict and the Cistercian reforms of the eleventh century. Those reforms brought a return to simplicity, contemplative prayer, and silence. At a time when Christianity was taking a centuries-long detour into logic and rationalism, Cistercian monks were turning their attention inward, to the heart, where Jesus said we would find the kingdom of God.

The sisters chant the Psalms here in this chapel and in between chants they listen. Words are spoken or sung, but they are borrowed from silence and to silence they return. 'The monastic journey is learning how to listen,' Sister Kathy, the abbess, tells me one day during my visit. 'I don’t think we ever stop learning how to listen.' I experience it many times over the next five days — standing inside a circle of ancient redwoods across the Mattole River, sitting on a beach at nearby Needle Rock — but I find it first here among the sisters in their chapel of wood, steel, and concrete upheld by the roots of trees: a deep, welcoming silence."

As I write these reflections, I’m conscious now of my own resistance to puritas cordis, or at least the translation. That word 'purity' carries too many overtones of enforced chastity, sexual shame, 'purity culture.' The early monks practiced celibacy, but their primary aim was not the containment of eros. Perhaps a better translation of puritas cordis would be singleness of heart, attentiveness of heart, the ability to hone our gaze — and thus our compassion — into a finely wrought jewel, and give it to the Other."

It is from this place of both need and hunger that I’ve turned to the early desert contemplatives, to what John Cassian calls 'the sublime teaching of the anchorites.'

Anchorite: from the Greek anachōrētēs, 'one who has withdrawn.'

I’m attracted to Cassian’s writings and the work of other early monastics because they reveal parallels between the era of the desert fathers and our own; they, too, lived during a time when the known world was coming unhinged. In 313 CE, when the Roman emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, thereby marking the beginning of Christendom, men and women of conscience knew that the wedding of church and state was not a betrothal: it was a betrayal. The early anchorites withdrew from this arranged marriage because they knew that Christendom could no longer sustain their inner lives, that civilization had in fact gone mad. They left the cities and withdrew to the Egyptian desert, where the vastness of their spiritual hunger could be met by an equally vast landscape."

Cassian’s single-minded pursuit was to understand the practice of contemplatio, 'the gaze turned in the direction of the things of God.' He wanted to know how one initiated such a gaze, what experiences it produced, how one stayed there without distraction. The trick was to outfox the mind, 'a dilettante and speedy taster of spiritual ideas rather than their creator and possessor … pulled, like a drunk, in every direction.'

Anchoring the mind through contemplation was for those early Christian monks the practice, but the goal — the one thing needful around which the entire scaffolding of monastic life was built — was focused on a different organ of perception. When Cassian and his friend Germanus began their contemplative sojourn through Egypt, they stopped first at the cell of Abba Moses, a former highway robber turned monk to whom many of the early desert sayings are attributed. 'Every art and discipline is preceded by some objective,' Abba Moses told them. 'Our objective is puritas cordis: purity of heart.' Or as he later described it, 'a heart kept free of all disturbance.'

After talking late into the night, Cassian and Germanus stretch out on the floor of Abba Moses’s cell, resting their heads on bundles of papyrus, which, Cassian reports, also serve as low seats for the brethren when they gather in assembly. They sleep. At dawn, the three monks arise in the adobe cell and, as I imagine it, resume sitting on their bundles of papyrus. A light breeze enters the lone window. The desert air quivers. Abba Moses coughs, scratches a dry shin. At last he speaks.

'I see you are fired by a very great longing,' Abba Moses says."