Charles McBryde’s Reviews > Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks―and What It Can Teach Us > Status Update

In some cases, the ruins of past lives became the home of present lives. At other times, their arrival required the active removal of those who lived there. Newcomers made these places “their own,“ often times by imagining a desert that was empty, uninhabited, and by reshaping the desert landscape.

In my case, it was love at first sight. This desert, all deserts, any desert. No matter where my head and feet may go, my heart and my entrails stay behind, here on the clean, true, comfortable rock, under the black sun of God‘s forsaken country. When I take on my next incarnation, my bones will remain bleaching nicely in a stone gulch under the rim of some far away plateau, way out there in the back of beyond. -EA

In spite of arguments, to the contrary, the Bible, and the monastic texts, are replete with what we might call animism—the sense that the natural world is alive, that it is potent with divine presence, that mountains can burst into song, that they weep and wail with sorrow and shudder with terror.

The Greek term used here for “crashing” is one we have seen before: KTUPON—a clashing, thunderous, and dissonant sound.

Humans have always been a part of desert environments, and part of the history of deserts is also the history of humans.

The grounds of the monastery seemed lush for the high desert, but this, too, is a feature of monasticism from its beginnings: monks, cultivated gardens, making the desert bloom, an idea that is at least as old as parts of the Bible, where, in the book of Isaiah, it says: “the wilderness, and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom.“

“A monastery is not a refuge, not a solution to problems of adjustment. Monasticism is a head-on collision with reality, and the more silent, the more solitude, the more head-on it is.“ —Father Allred Wall

“In the same way, that no plant whatsoever grows upon a well-trodden highway, not even if you sow seed, because the surface is trodden down, so it is with us. Withdraw from all business into hesychia and you will see things growing that you did not know were in you, for you were walking on them.“ — Saying of a Desert Elder

Essential to the idea of hesychia is a dualism: the inner and outer qualities of stillness and quiet. It required monks to reflect on how to develop inner quietude in the midst of a noisy and distracting world. This question was at the heart of the monastic endeavor.

Might we think of silence not as absence, but as the fullness of quiet, blooming attention, moments, where time slows? I’m drawn to the ideas of native American writer N. Scott Momaday: “Silence… is the dimension in which ordinary and extraordinary events take their proper places.“ Our desire for silence, even sometimes our discomfort with it, seems to be intimately, tied to our sense of time and attention.