THE FIRE OF THE DESERT

Amma Syncletica said “When a soul turns to God, there is joy unspeakable; but before this joy is pain and sorrow and darkness. Those who kindle a fire first endure the choking smoke, and with the smoke, tears, before they feel the warmth of the fire. Even so it is with God. It is written: “Our God is a consuming Fire.” When the divine fire is first kindled within our souls, we are choked with the sorrows and pains coming from our love of the world. Only when these loves are burned from us do we find the joy which no words can express.”

Amma Syncletica was said to be one of the most beautiful women in ancient Alexandria, from a family of wealth and position, but just over seventeen hundred years ago she walked away from all that to give herself unreservedly to Christ in the anvil of the Egyptian desert. She lived there more than sixty years, transformed by grace from a beautiful young worldling into one of the ammas, one of the “Mothers of the Desert,” whose spiritual teachings and insights, like those of the Desert Fathers, continue to guide Christians today.

The New Testament Letter to the Hebrews says, “Our God is a consuming Fire.” The statement hearkens back to the Old Testament, which repeatedly says the same. Many Christians, when they think about God as an all-consuming flame, conjure the image of God burning up the wicked in a Lake of Fire. Sometimes they seem to have a hand-rubbing glee when they do so, picturing sinners being tossed by the shovelful into hell’s fire at the Last Judgment.

But Amma Syncletica gives us fair warning: it’s not the sinners on the Last Day she cautions, but the souls who desire God in this life who need to be very afraid.

The God most people—many Christians among them—“believe in,” is more like an indulgent grandfather, turning a blind eye to our “flub-ups” (let’s not call them “sins,” please), than a Fire Which burns everything It touches. As a result, God is more a cartoon character than the One before Whom the many-winged Seraphim veil their faces.

In making God our granddaddy and Jesus our best bud, we’re re-making Him into our own image, rather than being ourselves re-fashioned by the consuming Fire of Grace.

At the outset of Lent, the Amma’s words are a needful corrective to the cheap grace so many of us eagerly grasp. In earlier times, Lent was a time to “afflict our souls,” to squarely address the failure and weakness of our spiritual lives. In ages past meats and cheeses and dairy products disappeared from the larders and storehouses of everyday homes, because these were the forty days of the Fast. Today we congratulate ourselves that we successfully survived forty days without sugar in our tea or butter on our brussel sprouts. Our souls have become little; they’ve shriveled with a continuous self-indulgence of body, soul and spirit.

This isn’t a cause for despair or fret, but a time for renewed resolution. This is the gift Lent can give. It starts, not with banishing everything tasty from our cupboards, but with a desire for a true taste of God’s Grace. It’s a willingness—even a desire—to be burned by the Fire.

Before we can live in the joy of God’s Presence, the Amma says, we have to endure the burning up of everything we so love that we put in place of God.

That sounds like a safe prayer until it gets answered. If I ask the Lord to take from me all that separates me from Him, all the stuff I love that I shouldn’t, I’m going to lose a lot more than the extra toothbrushes in the cup by the sink or the worn-out shoes in my closet. The desert is a place, and Lent is a time, to find out who and what we love more than God, and wrestle with what we’re going to do about it.

If God answers our Lenten prayer, if the Fire of the Desert comes to our lives, it will hurt. Fire burns and being burned is painful. But if we take Amma’s words to heart, the Fire of Lent can be one "giant step" to “the joy which no words can express.”