Lent is coming to a close, and so it’s time to bring these reflections on the Sayings of the Desert Fathers to a close as well. It’s been an amazing journey, as we’ve learned from, and sometimes questioned, their wisdom in how they understood and undertook their radical vocation of sacred practices, community, and interiority. But what’s the point of it all? What drew these men and women into the desert all those centuries ago? What compelled them to take on that life of radical discipline? What does it have to do with the Gospel? What does it have to do with us? I’ve tried to address these questions throughout the series, but if these are still live questions for you, today I’d like to wrap up the series by looking at one last, illustrative, Saying. (As it happens, it’s also my favourite, and one I’ve referenced multiple times before here on the blog.)

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him: ‘Abba, as much as I’m able, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and as much as I’m able, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ Then the elder stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him: ‘If you want, you can become all flame.’ (Abba Joseph of Panephysis 7)

It’s a dramatic scene. Abba Lot offers a great example of humility, in coming to another monk, relating his practice without overstating it, and asking him what more he can do. Abba Joseph answers with a non-answer that is nonetheless meaningful: His hands light up with the divine light and he tells him that if it is his desire, he will become ‘all flame’.

Fire has long been a symbol for the Holy Spirit — think of the pillar of fire that led the Hebrews through the wilderness, or the flames of Pentecost Sunday, or Jesus’s words, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12.49). As I once wrote in a sermon on that passage:

What if WE are the fire that our Lord longs to be kindled?

• • • What if we were given to see every tree aflame with the presence and goodness of God, and every human face we meet as truly bearing the image and likeness of our creator?
    • What if we allowed ourselves and every one of our relationships to be set ablaze by the power of the Holy Spirit, like the famous abbot of the Desert Fathers who told a follower to “become all flame”?
    • What if we allowed ourselves to be refined and purified, allowing the dross within us to burn away, so that we live no longer for ourselves, but as peacemakers — as agents of that peace that is built on wholeness, right relationships and justice?

What if?s

It’s a ‘what if’ that haunts me in the best way. It’s the tug in the heart that knows there’s more to life than just being a cog in the machine of a nation’s economy, a link in a chain of family legacy, or a role assigned to us by society. In other words, it’s the impulse we all have to live out our God-given calling, which as we saw the other year is a beautifully complex idea, involving becoming human, becoming Christlike, growing up into our true selves, and contributing to the church and society. This is what compelled so many hundreds into the radical life of Desert Monasticism, and it’s what is behind so much of the dissatisfaction so many of us feel today, what drives the huge pull towards spirituality today, whether in terms of organized religion or not. We know there is more for us. Not because we’re ‘special’, but because we were created by God and therefore our lives have meaning.

The good news (as opposed to the Good News, though they are deeply connected), is that we don’t need to run off to the desert and take on lives of extreme austerity. Abba Lot has already done that and still isn’t aflame with the divine light, and if you’ll recall another of my favourite stories from the Desert Fathers, St. Anthony received a vision of a man who was his spiritual equal, and it was an ordinary urban physician going about the daily stuff of faithfulness. The desert life was one extreme manifestation of answering the call to become truly alive and truly free, but far from the only, or best, one.

Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as Abba Joseph makes it out to be here. It’s not just a matter of wanting to be filled with the divine light and it ‘magically’ happens. What I think he’s getting at in his response to Abba Lot is that, at the end of the day, it’s not about what specifically we are doing. It’s not about ticking off boxes in a spiritual to-do list. It’s about turning over the will entirely to God, becoming singleminded about becoming ‘all flame’. (If that sounds like a recipe for religious delusion and fanaticism, that’s why discernment is so important, and we are to judge a tree by its fruit — if it’s not increasing love, compassion, mercy, and generosity in the world, it is not of Christ. If it is not building healed and whole, reciprocal relationships in the world, it is not of Christ.)

We find ourselves today on the precipice of Holy Week. Tomorrow we remember Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, and from there we follow Jesus’ footsteps as events unfold that lead him to the cross. But of course, that journey doesn’t end there. It continues with Easter, his weeks of post-Resurrection appearances and teaching, with his Ascension, and then Pentecost, which starts the story of fire of which we are an integral part.

May God be with us on this journey, and may we all have the courage, determination, and will to become all flame. Amen.