DESERT SIMPLICITY

Abba Pambo asked Abba Anthony, “What ought I to do?" He answered, “Do not trust your own righteousness, and do not worry about the past, control your tongue and your stomach."

God’s request is simple: give Me everything, all you are, all you have, all you hope to be.

It takes us awhile to realize that. Some of us never do. None of us hand ourselves over without a fight.

Those who’ve followed Jesus into the desert go looking for a fight. They want the same things you and I do: family and friends, a sense of place and purpose, food and shelter, security for the future. Those are good, reasonable things to want and work for.

But those who God calls to the desert bury their wants to uncover the Kingdom hidden within. They go to the desert leaving not only the corruptions of “the world, the devil and the flesh,” but every good and normal desire we each have so they can hunt God down.

The various books that have come down to us of their lives and teachings all say the same thing: the fight from beginning and so to the end is with himself. Their desert discovery is the same thing you and I find out still living “in the world”: I love myself, my wants and desires, my pleasures and comforts far more than I love anything else, God included.

When we accept that truth, our spiritual struggle begins in earnest. Until I see that I don’t love God or my neighbor, all my spiritual efforts are, as St Paul says “boxing with the air.”

I can be friendly and good-natured, I can wish people well (“if wishes were fishes…”) and hope, like a beauty-contestant, for “universal peace.” I can follow Dale Carnegie’s doctrine that it’s good business to care about others. But none of this has anything to do with my salvation. Loving God first and my neighbor as myself puts me at war with myself every second of every day. It also means I’m going to lose most of my battles.

Knowing the cost of the soul’s contest, Abba Pambo sought out Abba Anthony in his desert cave. “What am I to do?” he cries.

Abba Anthony’s words apply to every soul, wrestling in the world or striving in the desert: “Don’t ever fool yourself into thinking you’re holy, that you’ve achieved spiritual respectability. From first to last, life is Grace.”

“Don’t worry about the past,” Abba continues. The devil twists our memory against us. Not that we forget, but what we remember. The old serpent reminds us of our failures and sins, playing them before us over and over. Even if we’ve heard the priest’s words of absolution, the gnawing regret, the sense of failure and the shame of self-disappointment linger. The demon whispers, “This is how you are, how you’re always gonna be. Pack it in, pal. C’mon. There’s a party you’re missing.”

The tempter uses an opposite strategy to produce the same result. Calling to mind the pleasures of sin past: the satisfaction we felt when the jerk at the office got fired or when the head cheerleader got pregnant and had to disappear for five months. He tricks us into fresh sins over stale temptations.

“Forget the past,” Abba Anthony says. Don’t cling to it. Give it to God.

“Control your tongue and your stomach,” he concludes.

The tongue praises or condemns, builds others up or tears them down. The stomach is either master or servant. Abba says give it to God.

God gets it all.

When it finally dawned on the Lord Jesus' disciples this is what He expected, they sputtered “What shall WE have, therefore?” If we give God everything, what’s left for us?

Old Abba Anthony knew only when we give God everything do we discover how to use anything. Till then, like grubby misers, we hoard what seems to be ours.

It was all God’s to begin with, including the dust you and I are made of.

When we grasp that, we can sing with St Paul: “All things are yours, the world or life or death or things present or things to come, all things are yours—and you are Christ's—and Christ is God's.”