On Starting Small: A Reflection on Longinus 1

We’re starting this series on the wisdom of the Desert Fathers with sayings about dangers in personal piety. The other day we looked at a disordered attitude towards the body, and yesterday we turned to perfectionism. Today, the danger in question is one that will be all too familiar for a lot of us: the temptation to take on too much too soon.

One of the great things about youth, whether literal youth or the youthful zeal of the newly converted, is that it comes with so much energy and excitement. There’s a sense of wanting to do everything, to ‘climb every mountain’, as it were. But the problem, of course, is that these energetic newbies are woefully unprepared and unready to take on everything they’d like to do. You can’t, after all, expect to run a marathon if you get winded walking to corner store. And the life of faith is just the same. As much as burnout is a huge problem among the faithful, for the inexperienced, ‘flame-out’ is a far greater risk.

And this leads us to today’s story from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Here, Abba Lucius receives a visit from one of his disciples, monk named Longinus, who has big dreams for what he wants to do with his life:

One day Abba Longinus questioned Abba Lucius about three thoughts, first saying: ‘I want to go into exile.’ The elder said to him, If you cannot control your tongue, you will not be an exile anywhere. Therefore control your tongue here, and you will be an exile.’ Next [Longinus] said to him: ‘I want to fast.’ The elder replied, ‘Isaiah said, “If you bend your neck like a rope or a bulrush that is not the fast I will accept; but rather, control your evil thoughts” ‘ [a paraphrase of Isaiah 58]. The third time, he said to him: ‘I want to flee from men.’ The elder replied: If you have not first of all lived rightly with men, you will not be able to live rightly in solitude.’

So, Abba Longinus comes to Abba Lucius with three of the great tropes of monasticism in mind: voluntary exile, in which one lives out one’s vocation in a foreign land, far from everything and everyone one has known; extreme fasting, in which one becomes wholly dedicated to controlling one’s appetites (as much as this was a long-established monastic ideal, it also never had the best reputation, being seen to lead to rigidity, self-righteousness, and harshness towards others); and radical solitude, in which one left the monastery to live completely alone as a hermit. But Abba Lucius is not on board with any of these lofty plans. It’s not that these goals are bad, but that Longinus isn’t ready for them. He’s unlikely to succeed at them, and if by some chance he were to succeed, his success would likely puff up his ego, thereby defeating the purpose of it all. And so Lucius rightly directs his disciple to start small:

• Before you travel to a foreign land where you can’t communicate with anyone, first learn how to control your tongue around those who speak your language.
• Before you tackle extremes of fasting, first learn how to live and act normally while undertaking the normal fasts, and learn control your thoughts while you’re at it.
• Before you try to live in complete solitude, first learn how to live well in community.

In order to undertake the big things, we first have to master the little things. There’s a reason we don’t start math classes with differential calculus. There’s a whole body of knowledge, application, and comfort therewith that needs to come first. Again, we shouldn’t expect the life of faith to work any differently from ‘normal’ life.

I’m reminded of an exercise that’s often used in business leadership meetings, called ‘Taming the Wild Idea.’ The idea is that you get into pairs and come up with a wild idea — something big and bold and impractical — and then think through ways of ‘taming it’, of making it more reasonable and achievable. I think the life of faith is a lot like that. It’s easy, especially when we’re young or inexperienced, to have big visions for how we want to live and what we’d like to accomplish. But we need to learn to tame those wild ideas and start small, with the basics.

So today’s wisdom may be a little boring, but it’s among the most important we can ever learn: If we want to do anything, we need to start small.