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Today, when Older Calendar people celebrate the Forefeast of the Lord’s Baptism, and NC-churches – the day of St. Anthony the Great, I’m thinking about the two desert-dwellers, John the Baptist and St. Anthony. What does the desert or ‘wilderness’ signify in their lives, and how can we relate to it?
We don’t know anything about what John did in his solitude in the wilderness, before his “voice crying out in the wilderness” started to attract crowds of city-dwellers to him. But we can presume it was something similar to what Anthony did: Anthony engaged in solitary fasting and prayer, by which he battled various temptations (like boredom, laziness, and ‘phantoms of women’) from demons. The uninhabited desert was teeming with demons, until Anthony’s persistent prayer (and abstinence from what they had on offer) cleared the place of their villainous dominion. This ‘work’ took Anthony at least fifteen years, after which he started to attract people who wanted to learn from him, and many who even wanted to live side-by-side with him, in the now-safe place he had (co-)created with the power of God. Thus, the ‘ human footprint” in the desert was a good thing, because it was a deified human footprint.
After our baptism, we all go out into our own ‘wilderness,’ which is our life, more or less teeming with demons. Even our Lord was “ led by the Spirit into the wilderness” after His baptism, “to be tempted by the devil” (Mt 4:1). We have important ‘work’ to do in our respective wildernesses, both inside and outside ourselves, so that the space we occupy in this world becomes a haven for others. We have a little seed of faith planted in us, that we are to let God grow into a beautiful, shady tree, “ so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches” (Mt 13:32), as the Lord tells us in the Parable of the Mustard Seed.
The point of solitude and ascetical discipline, which we may not think are accessible or perhaps even desirable for us, is to stop fighting or competing with fellow human beings, so we can clear our hearts to focus on the root(s) of what makes the ‘space’ inside and outside our hearts uninhabitable or unwelcoming, to God and others. We don’t have to move to the desert to find alone-time with God; there were and are those who live/d in big cities, like the fools-for-Christ, who have found creative ways to exit the rat race of competition with others, while living in their midst. Sometimes God does this for us, when we couldn’t do it for ourselves; He allows us to lose something or someone, through physical or other maladies (our own or theirs), or simply through our ageing process, which takes us out of the rat race at least to some degree. We might find ourselves alone with our ‘demons’ in new ways, at this point, not entirely unlike the challenges confronted by Anthony in his desert. These are dignifying challenges, because God is calling us to collaborate with Him in the big project of redeeming us and the world, in each of our little spaces. God, let us do our little bit today, to re-focus and re-deem (take back) our time, by the prayers of John the Baptist, St. Anthony, and all Your saints. Amen!
