Practice of Prayer by Margaret Guenther

Author:Margaret Guenther
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cowley Publications
Published: 1998-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Cell

Abba Moses of Scete, who surely did his own housework in the fourth-century Egyptian desert, said, “Go to your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” While his life in the desert was extraordinary in its austerity, it was very ordinary in its tedium. Each day must have been like every other day, with prayer at its center and occasional grudging conversation with those spiritual seekers who kept turning up despite the inhospitable environment. There was an unrelenting cycle of physical labor as well, to procure just enough food and water for survival. As they prayed, the abbas supported themselves by plaiting ropes and mats for sale or exchange—surely a labor as repetitive as ironing or scrubbing. Like all good housewives, they were able to do two things at once. It was a life stripped down to the barest minimum.

Abba Moses and his brothers realized both the challenge and the potential holiness of this radically simplified environment and lifestyle. Go to your cell, he commanded, not because it is comfortable or interesting, but because there you must face your own solitude, indeed your own self. Abba Moses knew the dangers of tedium, of deadly sameness. He knew the perils of the sin of acedia, known to the desert dwellers as the noonday devil. The bare little cell was the place for the encounter with God, but it was also the place for the encounter with boredom, dullness, and the sin of sloth. Acedia sounds more elegant, but it is plain old sloth, the sluggish sin that pulls us down and deadens our souls.

The cell became the arena for the struggle, as the desert fathers fought the temptation to yield to the noonday devil, which was to abandon their passionate longing for God. I suspect that most of them were more than a little crazy. They were certainly bizarre and difficult people, yet there is a stark honesty in many of their sayings. If we refuse to be put off by their harshness and eccentricity, they are surprisingly contemporary in their insights. They knew that God was to be encountered in the ordinary, requiring no special trappings of comfort and beauty. They knew that God was to be found right there, in the bleakness of the little cell.

When I am overwhelmed with everydayness and burdened with the tedious tasks of ordinary living, I find it hard to pray. Then I tell myself, “If only you didn’t have so much to do, if only you had more time, if only you could get out of this predictable, boring routine and go to some really spiritual place, like a monastery or a desert—then it would be easy to pray.” Even as I think this, though, I know that my monastic friends would be quick to disabuse me of this idea, were I so naive as to share it with them.

In my heart I know that Abba Moses was right: go to your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. Go to your kitchen, and your kitchen will teach you everything.

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