A brother came to Scetis in the Egyptian desert to visit Abba Moses and asked him, “Father, give me a word.” The old man said to him, “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”
I spent the second summer of my second seminary experience serving as a chaplain at Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. Houston was too far from my home in Austin for me to commute, but there was no way that my wife and daughters could come with me for the whole summer. So, I found a small, one-bedroom apartment in a gentrified neighborhood on Hazard Street—just north of Rice University; a hop skip and jump away from the monumental Texas Medical Center where I’d be working. It was a charming little building built in the 1930s and recently renovated. It was comfortable, quiet and very, very empty.
I had plans, of course, to fill my time in Houston. There were phenomenal museums only minutes from my apartment, a great nightlife with live music, and no lack of amenities to occupy my attention. Twelve weeks alone would be long, but there was more than enough to do.
Instead, my routine every day looked much the same. I would arrive home from the hospital to a quiet apartment. I would change into more comfortable clothes, grateful to shed the suit and tie I was expected to wear—despite the Houston heat and humidity. Then I would lay down on the bed, accompanied by my iPad and whatever dinner I had purchased or prepared, and spend the remainder of the evening reading, watching movies and television or talking with my family. At some point, I would fall asleep and wake to a new day of the same. On weekends I would sometimes go for walks through the neighborhood, though not as many as I would like just because of the broiling heat. I would occasionally go out to eat, and a couple of times I caught a movie and crashed a local hobby shop. I never went to the museums or the parks. Mostly, I just huddled in my temporary home.
Maybe it was the emotional drain of spending days in rooms with strangers, often at one of the worst moments of their lives. Maybe it was the relentless self-examination and enforced vulnerability with my chaplaincy colleagues. Maybe it was the lack of a ready network of local friends. But I think, ironically enough, it was the emptiness of my quarters that made me strangely unable to leave.
It slowly dawned on me that I, then in my late forties, had never lived alone before. I had gone from my parent’s home after graduation to living with my grandmother as her caretaker for several years, then to marriage and making a home with my wife and (eventually) my daughters. In all those years, I had grown accustomed to being surrounded by the presence of others.
What I learned in that summer of solitude was how much of my ‘self’ was the product of the expectations and energy of those around me. I had been like a pinball, propelled more by collision than through any drive of my own. Left to my own devices, it was disconcerting how much of my momentum seemed to have dissipated.
The story of Israel and the story of Jesus are both formed and reformed in the desert. The forty days of Lent allude to that wilderness calling to “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” (Mk. 6:31). No wonder Christian monks sought out the desert to live in their cells. The ‘rest’ Jesus offers can be unsettling, though. The desert place is a mirror that reveals how lean and narrow our capacity for love can be, how confined we are by who we are to others rather than defined by who we simply are. Paradoxically, it is the desert where we may learn to love rightly by walking the way of the Cross with Jesus.
It’s not an original insight. It is, in fact, one of the truly important realizations of the ascetic life. I could have explained that spirituality long before I ever made my way to Hazard Street. Prior to that summer, though, it had remained largely a theoretical understanding. I had never lived alone in my cell long enough to face how little of my self was really me. I had also never realized how much room there was for Christ to dwell with me, and that is the grace of it all.
—The Rev. J. Michael Matkin
St. John’s, OKC