Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations
Rooted in the Christian contemplative tradition, the Daily Meditations offer reflections from Richard Rohr, CAC faculty, and guest teachers to help you deepen your spiritual practice and embody compassion in the world.
Week Fifteen: Wisdom of the Desert
Cultivating Inner Freedom
Richard Rohr considers how we might, like the desert mystics, develop inner freedom through practice and solitude:
The desert fathers and mothers withdrew from cities to the desert to live freely, apart from the economic, cultural, and political structure of the Roman Empire. The abbas and ammas knew, as should we, that the empire would be an unreliable partner. They recognized that they had to find inner freedom from the system before they could return to it with true love, wisdom, and helpfulness. This is the continuing dynamic to this day, otherwise, “Culture eats Christianity for breakfast” to use a modern turn of phrase, and our deep transformative power is largely lost.
How do we find inner freedom? Notice that whenever we suffer pain, the mind is always quick to identify with the negative aspects of things and replay them over and over again, wounding us deeply. Almost all humans have a compulsion to fixate almost entirely on what’s wrong, which is why so many people become fearful, hate-filled, and wrapped around their negative commentaries. This pattern must be recognized early and definitively. Peace of mind is an oxymoron. When we’re in our mind, we’re hardly ever at peace; when we’re at peace, we’re never only in our mind. The early Christian abbas and ammas knew this and first insisted on finding the inner rest and quiet necessary to tame the obsessive mind.
In a story from Benedicta Ward’s The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: “A brother came to Scetis to visit Abba Moses and asked him for a word. The old man said to him, ‘Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.’” [1] But we don’t have to have a cell, and we don’t have to run away from the responsibilities of an active life, to experience solitude and silence. Amma Syncletica said, “There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of [their] own thoughts.” [2]
By solitude, the desert mystics didn’t mean mere privacy or protected space, although there is a need for that too. The desert mystics saw solitude, in Henri Nouwen’s words, as “the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new man and the new woman occurs.” [3] Solitude is a courageous encounter with our naked, most raw and real self, in the presence of pure love. Quite often this can happen right in the midst of human relationships and busy lives.
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