“In Scetis, a brother went to see Abba Moses and begged him for a word. The old man said: ‘Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything’.” Next Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, the ‘old man’ will say: “Go into your room, and shut the door.”
In the IV century, when Christianity was no longer persecuted, men left and women the ‘world’ and withdrew in the Egyptian ‘desert’. The so-called ‘desert fathers’ were seeking only one thing: to be Christians. Like me and you!
Why ‘going into my room and shut the door’? Why “going into my cell and sit there’? What has this to do with being a Christian?
When we go into our cell, our private room, and remain there for some time, with the door closed, something will happen. We desperately want to get out! We begin to feel very uncomfortable, agitated, anxious, distracted, even disturbed. Why? We are simply looking for our identity which we believe being ‘outside’ that door, ‘outside’ this room. We want to go out because we need an identity and we are somehow convinced that we will find it in money, in affection, in projects, in affirmation… you ‘ought’ to do that, we ‘must’ look like this, you ‘cannot’ be here… all of this is the ‘false self’, my identity dependent on the response of the outside. Who am I? I am one who is loved, appreciated, respected, honoured, accomplished. Yes? Maybe not!
When we enter our cell and stay there, we go deeper, we get closer and closer to our heart and therefore we get closer to: wilderness and paradise, lies and truth, demons and God himself. As long as we are busy with ‘doing’, running from one thing to another, we never really have to deal with what is inside of us, with ‘being’. A Christian is someone en route to his/her heart, no longer borrowing his/her identity from the world or the flesh. In the ‘desert’ of our cell, we discover that our true identity is securely planted in the love of God for us and that love frees us from our fearful compulsions and from the lie that says ‘You are what you manage to get from what is outside of you’.
Prepare your cell, you need to sit there for 40 long days!
Fr Ivano
