"Sacred Roots: Monasticism: Holiness and the Communal Rhythm of Life" by David Anderson

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Welcome, everyone, here to Strength to Strength. Um, we're—it's great to be together again this morning and look at a talk by Brother David Anderson on our continued series on the sacred roots of monasticism, holiness, and the communal rhythm of life.

So this is—yeah, I've really enjoyed, uh, David, your, your, um, what all you've had to—what all you've put into this so far, and it really has been—has been fascinating and, um, yeah, inspiring and challenging for me. So I hope it's been that way for all the rest of you listeners, and looking forward to what you have—have for this morning.

Um, yeah, we've been on before, so I don't think you need a lot of introduction. So I'll just—I'll just kick us off with a prayer here, and then I'll turn it to you, David. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your goodness. Thank you for, uh, your—your blessing and your love and your guidance in our world. And I just pray that your will would be done and your kingdom would come here in—in the world that we live in today. As we look at this subject of monasticism in the—in history, I pray that you would, um, inspire us and be with David as he—as he speaks.

As we think about, um, the roots of Christianity and what has formed us and what has brought us to this place, I pray that you would, you know, give us—give us ways of thinking about how we deal with our—deal with questions and decisions today, and that it can be helpful for us. Um, once again, may you be—may you be glorified, and may your kingdom be—be expanded in this world. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen.

Okay. Like usual, we will have a, um, time for question—question and answer, question and response, as the case may be there near the end. So go ahead, David. Great. Thank you. Um, and good morning to—to everybody. So I wanted to open up today's, um, talk with just a question to think about real quick. And it's, have you ever sat still for five minutes and found your—your mind going in, you know, a hundred different directions and thinking about everything except God? Especially when you sit down to pray. I find myself sitting down, and as soon as I sit down to pray, this, you know, set aside time for attending to God, and all of a sudden I realize, you know, there's 15 things I need to be doing around the house.

There's this I need to be doing in parenting, and what about this? And my attention's going all over the place. So there's a Christian theologian named Blaise Pascal, and he said that all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

I'll read that again. All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Even for five minutes, we often find ourselves, you know, scattered, fragmented. All these thoughts come to the surface, these emotions, and we seek out distraction. We seek out something just to escape from our solitude.

Now, imagine that, but for 40 years, sitting in solitude, decade after decade as the years tick on. And that's what countless men and women throughout church history have done as part of their spiritual walk. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to be talking about the phenomenon known as monasticism.

Now, when you hear the word monk, you might picture someone running away from the world and trying to hide away somewhere in a cave. And this can be a part of it. Sometimes that does happen. But the best of monasticism isn't actually about escape. It's about resistance.

Oftentimes, this was resistance to compromise in the church, but it's also resistance to hurry, distraction, shallow love, and other—the other things in our own souls. And it's about reordering our hearts, reordering their hearts, so that God is actually at the center.

So today, just the quick plan, I want to lay out a little of the context and some of the main figures of historical monasticism. But a lot of the talk, similar to two weeks ago, will be more, why are these men and women important? What can they show us about the Christian life? And there's a lot of critique around the idea of monasticism, and some of it is well-deserved. Some of it isn't. But since there's enough of a critique floating around there, I actually want to spend most of the time today focused on what they were doing, why they were doing what they were doing, and what can we learn from them. And then we'll also spend some time at the end on the implications for us today.

And we can also talk about some of those critiques in the Q&A session as well. So keep that in mind. But that's going to be the plan, is lay out the context, talk about why they're important, what their vision is, and what are the implications today.

Excuse me. So a lot of us have heard, if we've heard about monasticism, a lot of us have heard of it as kind of the response to Constantine. And we've talked about that some, especially with Stephen Russell, where Constantine comes the marriage of church and state. But monasticism actually comes a little bit beforehand, around one century before this kind of Constantinian shift. And so some of the context about that is, you know, there's persecutions happening all around the Roman Empire sporadically, but there's also this political instability. So for a while, the Roman Empire lived under something called the Pax Romana, which means the peace of Rome, where for—and now my dates are going to run away from me—but for around one or two centuries, things were actually very stable, or at least relatively stable.

This was during the time of Christ and the apostles. So around, you know, let's just say the early, you know, 20s, 30s, 40s BC to around the 100s, AD, it was this time of peace and stability. And during the second century, and again, second to third century, this started to fall apart, and society started to shift. And there were civil wars, there were wars, there were invasions. There was just a lot of political instability, and the world that people had gotten used to was starting to change. It's like the ground is starting to shift under your feet. If you're an American, you can almost think of that, of the past, you know, four decades have been a certain way of living.

And over the past decade, things just start to feel a bit different, and kind of the rules of the game are changing. And so even before Constantine was on the stage, people were living in an unstable world. And so some Christians started to actually go out into the desert to live out their spiritual lives. For some, it was a place of escape, but for some, it was actually a place of conquest. They were going to root out, you know, the demons in the wilderness, and they were going to root out the vices in their own soul.

Then Constantine comes to the stage, and this story might be more familiar. But after Christianity became legal under Constantine, and especially after it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, everything changed. Suddenly, being a Christian was no longer risky or costly. And in many places, it was actually normal. It was expected, and it was even advantageous. If you weren't a Christian, you would fall behind in, you know, your political career or what have you. And so the church grew in numbers, but it also became entangled with power, politics, and cultural comfort. And especially during that time, many believers began to ask, what does it really mean to follow Jesus in a serious and undivided way?

And if martyrdom was no longer a real possibility, how could someone still offer their whole life to God? And this longing, um, really influenced the rise of the monastic movement. Men and women began leaving behind their cities, their wealth, and ordinary life. And it's not because they hated the world, but it's because they hungered for an undistracted devotion.

They went into the deserts to fight a deeper battle and to live a kind of martyrdom in a world where it was very unlikely that you would be killed for your beliefs. They wanted to offer their whole life.

So just a brief bit on the history. There were two types of monasticism. And again, you don't have to learn these words. One is Aramedic, and the other is Synobitic. So for all of you, you know, word fun fact people. But all this means is the Aramedic solitude, Aramedic monasticism was one of solitude. This is what you might think of, the people running away into the cave and living by themselves for years and years and sometimes decades on end. And the founder of this, and indeed he's often called the founder of Christian monasticism as a whole, was a man named Antony, an Egyptian man. He's now known as Antony the Great. And he was a wealthy young man living in Egypt, and his parents died when he was around 18 or 20, and he was left with a very large inheritance.

And one day he entered a church, and he heard the gospel reading from Matthew. And he heard the words, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

And it struck him. And he actually took those words to heart, and he took them literally and wanted to obey Christ. And so he actually sold off his inheritance, what his family had built up for him. He sent his sister to be taken in to care in a community of Christian women. He sold off all of his possessions, and he actually left into the desert on the fringes of society to follow after Christ more and more in prayer and worship. And he started to live a very ascetic life. And so he lived in the desert. He only ate bread and salt and drank water. So you can start to think of almost this John the Baptist type of life, living in the wilderness, eating a, you know, restrained diet.

And he started keeping fasts. He started keeping vigils in the night. And there's a lot of vivid accounts of him coming into conflict with the vices in his soul, where he's realizing, "Wait a second, these are the places that I still need to submit to Christ." There's also vivid accounts of him in conflict with demons and temptations. It's a very riveting reading. There's a work called The Life of Antony by Athanasius. I would recommend it. Um, but people kept coming to listen to him. And as, you know, a monk who wanted solitude, he kept actually retreating further and further, and people kept following him further and further. And finally, he's in the heart of the wilderness, and there's this community of people around him that are asking him for advice.

And eventually, he emerges and serves as a spiritual leader for these people who had gathered around him. And so he kind of becomes this forebearer of the monastic movement. So why is he important? Why is this important? We'll talk some later. But at the very minimum, it's this idea, if you spend, you know, 10, 15, 20 years by yourself in a cave trying to pray, you actually become very insightful as to the problems of your own soul. And so these monastic writers were really interesting in that they weren't just, I'll put it this way, they preserved writings for us, and in their writings, they've started to, like, list out the various temptations and how they relate to one another.

And this one obviously leads to this one, and this one leads to this one. And in their years of solitude, they start to make a map of the soul and, like, what it looks like. And so they're almost like some of the forerunners of psychologists. They're trying to understand the human psyche. I was actually having a conversation with someone. He was from a, um, he was from a various Orthodox tradition and very influenced by monasticism. During a time, I was studying psychology, like studying the history of psychology, like these psychotherapists and Freud and Jung and that whole world and talking about those. And every time I mentioned something, he's like, "Oh, wow, we have this too, like from the 300s and the 400s and the 500s."

Like these early writers were onto something and trying to, like, plumb the human soul and figure out what's going on there. So that being said, being alone had its dangers, especially that of pride and escapism. And so there's actually another type of monasticism. This was communal monasticism. And so this is what you think of when you think of, like, a monastery.

The founder of this was a man named Pacomius. He was actually, um, pressed into service as a soldier when he was a young man in the Roman Empire. And he was so swept up against his will. And with several other young men, he was put on a ship that floated down the Nile to get to his deployment.

And there he encountered the local Christians. They had customarily brought food and comfort every single day to these conscripted young men who were taken away from their families and were being sent off to far lands. And these Christians were taking care of them, giving them food, giving them comfort. And, um, Pacomius remembered that. And so he actually was able to serve out his time without ever having to fight. But the whole time, he remembered the care that the Christians gave him. And so when he returned to Egypt, he also became a Christian.

And he actually started the first communal, um, monastery where he would gather people around himself. And it was people who either, yeah, people who couldn't quite live out the rigor of Antony's way of life, the extreme fasting and the extreme solitude. And so it was life together. And later of these communal monastics would actually become critical of solitude. They would say that we need others in our life, that being alone is, you know, a recipe for misdirection, a recipe for pride, let alone how can we actually fulfill the commandments of charity and outreach if there is a church of one, so to say. And so men and women started living together in communal life. And, um, some of these came up with something called a rule of life.

This was especially someone named Benedict of Nusria. Again, you don't have to know these names. I just throw them out there in case you're curious. But you might hear something called the rule of Benedict. And so this was a rule of life that people would commit themselves to. And so all of the men of this monastery would follow this daily rhythm together. And it was one of prayer and work, or in Latin, it rhymes, ora et labora. So prayer and work was the life of these monks. And so there were prescribed times of work, prayer, rest, study, meals, and you would all go through these together as a community. So life was structured by what's called the liturgy of the hours.

And so there were eight times of prayer every, every day. So around every three hours, people would gather for prayer. And it's similar to the hours of prayer in acts. You remember the Paul and Peter, you know, gather at the temple on the, what is it, the sixth hour of prayer or something, or even the Shema prescribed at certain times of the day. And this idea of using these patterns of time and these rhythms to constantly keep God the front of our attention.

And so these rhythms, they thought, would form the soul and train the heart. So that's kind of the history of them. So why should we actually care about any of this? These people that are going off into the desert, these people living in monasteries. What's important about these men and women that lived in caves and cloisters away from civilization?

In one, they highlight a different aspect of our spiritual lives that can often be missing in today's spirituality. So there's this certain type of spiritual life and this certain type of spirituality that's kind of a one-and-done spirituality that Christ did something past tense in my life such that past tense, I can look at this one thing and say, everything is fixed, everything is good, and, you know, life is good and we're all happy. And this actually reflects in many of the hymns we sing because they're from the time periods of the revivals in like the 1700s and the 1800s where people are focused on this conversion experience where everything is changed. So if you've ever sang, there's a fountain filled with blood or blessed assurance, Jesus is mine, what a foretaste of glory divine or amazing grace that saved a wretch like me or oh for a thousand tongues to sing.

And again, I love all these hymns. I sing them all the time. And there is a beautiful aspect to that part of the Christian life. Ephesians 2 says, we were dead in sin and we were made alive in Christ. We were translated from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light is what Colossians says. And so there is a beautiful aspect of that focus on spirituality of this past event where things are accomplished. But there's also another type of spirituality that we see in the scriptures. This is one of growth. This is one of ascent. This is one of pedagogy or education where you're being instructed and your soul is being formed and you're being shaped degree by degree into glory and even struggling and discipline where Paul says, I discipline myself daily.

I'm training. We actually have this reflected in some of our hymns too, of nearer my God to thee, nearer to thee, or I need thee every hour. And so in this type of spirituality, Christ isn't just the Savior, but he's also the teacher. He teaches us how to live rightly. And he heals, he's also the healer. And so he's healing us all through our lives as we continue to submit ourselves to him. He's leading us higher and higher.

And so the monks would view the spiritual life as one of growth and ascent. They would have different stages of the spiritual life. They would have the practical stage and, sorry, sorry, they would have the practical stage, the spiritual stage, and then the stage of theology. And what that means is in the practical stage, this was just basic obedience to the commandments. This was spiritual disciplines. And the goal of this was mastering the body and the emotions that, okay, just focus on following what Jesus said, focused on not falling into these basic temptations and emotions. This is the practical stage. And as you move from there, you go to the spiritual stage. And this is beyond just like overcoming lust or gluttony or, you know, serving your neighbor.

This is also creating a right vision of yourself and others. This is more subtle and deeper in the soul. This is struggling with wrong views of the world and subtler temptations like pride. So you can see the difference between, you know, I'm going to conquer gluttony and lust versus I'm going to start viewing others the way God views them. I'm going to start viewing myself the way God views me and root out pride. And then finally, the theological stage. All this meant was pure contemplation of God. And this might seem odd. This might seem really foreign and strange to our ears, but we see at least some of this, you know, hinted in the scriptures and not saying this is the, you know, one right way to live this out.

But Paul talks to the Corinthians and he says, brother and sisters, I could not address you as spiritual people, but as people who are still worldly, mere infants in Christ. And so he's saying there's different types of growth in the Christian life. Or he also says, solid food is for those who are mature, who through training have the skill to recognize the difference between right and wrong. And so these monks would view the spiritual life in terms of this idea of growth. We also see this in the idea of purification that Jesus himself says, you can't even see God without a pure heart. And blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

And how do we gain a pure heart? According to the scriptures, 1 Peter 1:22 says, now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth, so this practical stage, so that you have sincere love for each other, the spiritual stage of learning, you know, how to discern how God views the brother, love one another deeply from the heart. And then Jesus himself, whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me.

And I too will love them and show myself to them. So by following the commandments of Christ, we actually purify ourselves and we actually see more of God. And it changes, you know, who we are. So that's one reason they're important. They kind of highlight this focus on the growth of the spiritual life, that things are past tense, but they're also present tense. We have been saved, but we are also being saved.

This also leads to a certain understanding of what it means to be human and what the problems are. And so for the monk, actually for all of us, what would we say the problem of humanity is? And many of us would say sin, and all of us would, I presumably say sin. Um, and the same for the monk, but it comes down to how do you define sin? What is actually wrong with us? And in following, um, what, how are we saved? And so for the monks, they viewed the human being as a self that is buffeted and blown about by various desires and passions. And passions is actually a really key word for not just the monks, but early Christians as a whole.

And so when you think of the word passion, what do you think of? Maybe romance, you know, passion, maybe lust, maybe like some passionate, zealous revolutionary. So in early Christian thought, a passion isn't just a strong emotion. The word passion means something that happens to you.

This is why we call it the passion of Christ. It's not because he was feeling a strong emotion, but because he underwent something. He let himself be acted upon. And so a passion is something that, you know, externally affects you, something that you undergo, something that happens to you.

Um, so examples of this would be hunger. You know, hunger happens to me. Anger. I all of a sudden, you know, anger comes over me and I become angry. That would be a passion. Pain, sadness. And some of these are natural. They're the way that we are made in creation, that we need to eat, that we need to drink, that we, um, become angry at injustice.

So what's the problem here? And the problem is when these passions become distorted. And anger turns to wrath and hatred. Sadness turns to despair. Attractions turn to lust. And then the bigger problem is not only that, but we think that these passions are in charge.

And we let them be in charge. So when anger comes over me, all of a sudden, I, you know, tacitly say to myself, like, uh-oh, here comes anger. And then anger happens and I just let anger run loose. Or lust, like, uh-oh, here comes lust. Nothing I can do about it. Or even at a very small level, an example would be like, I can't function in the morning without my coffee.

And that is a statement. That's a giving away of who's in charge and all of a sudden saying, those feelings that I feel if I don't have my coffee, you know, maybe the fuzzy head or the headache, those passions, those are the things that are really in charge. So saying, I can't function without my coffee is a way of saying, ultimately, that passion is in charge. That's who calls the shots. And I will obey whenever they call, so to say.

So the monastics saw this and they diagnosed it as the main spiritual problem that we're buffeted by these passions and that we give them control. And the problem with that, one step further, and then we'll talk about, you know, the solution, is that these passions distort our reality. So I could list a lot of these, you know, anger, lust, you know, um, gluttony, despair, sloth, envy, pride.

But the monastics separated these passions into two different bundles, so to say. And again, this might sound a bit abstract, but this is the result of these people, you know, spending years and sometimes decades and generations reflecting on sin, reflecting on temptation, reflecting on the human soul. And this is kind of what they came up with. And so they separated all of these passions into two bundles of instincts, that of aggression and that of desire.

And so all of those passions of aggression, you can sum it up as trying to push things and people away. It's represented in a need for control, frustration, self-protection, and it's driven by the fear that somehow this whole world outside of me is going to, you know, invade my personal space, so to say, or violate it or absorb us. It's going to make demands on me that I do not want to cede to.

You can think of parenting as an example. When I become angry, this is with my children, this is one of those passions that's lumped under this bundle called aggression. And deep down, that anger with my children is often simply because they're making a claim on my time that deep down, even though I might not want to admit it, I simply don't want to respond to that claim. And so I push it away with this passion. They are crying and they've gotten into a fight. And my knee-jerk reaction is to become angry with them rather than to go in and enter into their world and help them. And it's because the monastics would say, I haven't overcome those passions.

And so it's like me saying, go away, reality. I'm going to keep myself safe and separate from everything outside of me. And if, you know, all of this, if reality invades me, if it starts making demands on my life, whether it's church community, whether it's my job, whether it's my children, when it starts making demands on my life, I'm going to react with, you know, force or frustration or violence verbally or even in extreme cases physically.

And all of this is because I'm viewing myself as the center. The other bundle of passions are those of desire. And this is the exact opposite. If aggression is to push reality away from me, desire is to bring it into me and to consume things and to consume even people in front of us, to make things and people a part of our own agenda. And so this is manifest in things like lust or gluttony or consumption or addiction.

And so it's, yeah, it's saying it's looking out to the world and viewing it in terms of your own agenda, your own narrative. And it's a refusal to think of things in their own terms. So lust is actually a perfect example of how these passions distort reality. If you're struggling with lust, say you've seen this modest person, this woman who you're attracted to, when you're viewing that through the terms of lust, you aren't actually seeing things the way they are. You aren't actually seeing a person, an image bearer for whom Christ died. Rather, you're seeing something. This person has been transformed into something that's subsumed into your own desire, your own reality, where you are your own personal God at the center of things.

And so, excuse me, for the monastics, they're laying out this picture of humanity where it's not that there's just sins floating around, you know, quote, out there that we have to avoid. There's not passions floating around somewhere out there, but rather that these passions and these sins have roots really, really deep within us. And so the Christian life is one of uprooting these passions, uprooting these vices. And this is progressive. And so baptism in that sense is just the start.

And they're going to say that certain ways of approaching the world lead to another. I'm not going to be able to have time, but they have these fascinating discussions on temptation and on sin. And so they're making these links that it's not just like all of these sins are just unrelated. Again, like they're floating out there, but they're saying, hey, maybe if I'm actually gluttonous with food, this means that I'll become gluttonous with people and I'll start consuming people for my own interests. And so maybe to stop that, I should start fasting from food and showing restraint in my interactions with food and physical necessities. And then I can start showing restraint with people. And as I view food in its rightful lens of what it's supposed to be, then I can also view people in their rightful lens.

And so they're making these connections. Like maybe if I can't fulfill my desires, that's when I become angry or sad. And so maybe when I'm angry with my children, with my church, with my community, that's actually a response of fear. It's because I'm not in control and I fear losing the situation. And so they're analyzing all of these temptations. And I think that's something that they have to offer us, that these temptations aren't just abstract sins floating around, but they're all connected and they're all rooted in the soul. And that's part of the Christian life is to uproot these. So if these distorted passions are the disease, then what's the cure? So if this is the diagnosis that they've given, what's the path to healing?

And this is what the monks might most well be known for. They didn't just withdraw. They didn't just run away from the world. They trained. They disciplined themselves. They engaged in what's called askesis, which is the word we get from, it's the word that gives us asceticism. And in the ancient Greek, this simply meant exercise. It's almost, it's like as if, it's actually the context is athletes. So athletes would exercise themselves. They would discipline themselves because they were running after a goal. And if this language sounds similar to the epistle, it's because Paul draws on this exact language, run in such a way as to get the prize. This is why I discipline and train myself daily.

And so the monks would take this to heart and engage in a life of training, a life of askesis. So they're asking the question, what does it mean to crucify the flesh along with its desires? What does it mean to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions?

How can we, as Peter says, abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against the soul? And so this is the struggle. This is the exercise. And so this moves to our third point and why they're important. They actually give us a theology behind the spiritual disciplines.

This has been really important in my life. So the spiritual disciplines are those things that the very common ones, you know, prayer and the reading of scripture. It's these things that we do. And I was going to give you a reason, but I actually want to open that up. Why do we do these things? There's also other spiritual disciplines. There's solitude. There's silence. There's fasting. There's vigils. So staying up in the night, like the psalmist does, keeping the watches of the night, prayer, reading scriptures. Why do we do all of these things?

It's been so encoded in many of our lives that that's just the thing we do. Why do we fast? Why do we read the scripture? Why do we pray? Why do we train, as Paul says? A lot of us just do it because we know it's good. And amen. That is a great start.

A lot of us do it. Maybe we pray and read the Bible because we might encounter God there. And amen. We do encounter God there. Maybe we will come away emotionally refreshed. Maybe we do this so we can learn something new. And all of those are great reasons. But what about the times that we don't come away feeling emotionally refreshed? What about the times that we don't come away feeling new? And what about the times that we don't really encounter God?

There's these times where you pray, you read the scriptures, you fast, and you know, nothing seems to come out of it. Does that mean that that spiritual discipline that day failed? The answer is no. But if it's no, then why are we actually doing it? Because it's not necessarily because of those reasons.

So what is, yeah, what is the theology behind these spiritual disciplines?

And so the monks would say that these disciplines reorient our desire and they shape us. And so the fasting isn't for God. God says, I don't need, you know, the blood of bulls. I don't need this. I don't need all this stuff. The worship and the fasting, they're not for God. They're for us.

And it's not just so that we can feel emotionally refreshed because the times that we don't are when it actually becomes training, when it actually becomes discipline. Because if every single time I go to prayer and I just feel amazing, there's no training in that. That's just like, this is, yeah, there's no need to discipline because every single time it feels great.

So the spiritual disciplines remind us that Christ is in charge and we don't have to answer all of these passions, whether it's anger, sadness, lust, all of this stuff. And so in light of this, think about it this way. Fasting isn't a mental exercise to discipline your body because your body's not the problem.

What's the problem? It's your mind. It's your will. It's your soul. That's the problem. Your body was made good by God. So fasting isn't a mental exercise to discipline the body. It's actually the opposite. It's a physical exercise to discipline your mind.

It's reminding you that you and Christ in you is in charge, that these passions of, you know, hunger, like, man, I didn't have my lunch today. I'm so used to having my lunch today. I feel like I can't function without it. Well, fasting breaks you from that bond and says, no, actually, you know, man does not live on bread alone. The thing I truly need is God's word. The thing I truly need is God himself.

Maybe I'm fasting from coffee. And all of a sudden it's, man, I can't function in the morning without my coffee. And it's a reminder and it's a training to tell your mind, your soul, actually you can function without it.

And so this fasting trains us so that when we feel these greater passions, when you start to feel doubt in the Christian life, when you feel pain, when you feel anger or lust, because you've trained, you know that that's not the final word. You're not dominated by it. So by these spiritual disciplines, you've learned to consider yourself dead to sin and to put away the passion so that it's Christ who lives in you. It's not these passions that are blowing you to and fro and hither and yon.

And so that's the purpose of the spiritual disciplines. They reorient our desires. They reorient who we are. And they remind us that Christ is ultimately the one in charge, that there's a choice when these passions come. Otherwise, we're just subject to whatever emotion, whatever season of emotion we're experiencing. If I'm in a season of drought, then this becomes my season of despair. If I'm in a season of just like frustration with my church community, with my brothers, with my family, then I guess that's just a season of anger. And these spiritual disciplines are training us so that no, you can't actually remain constant throughout all of these things. It's not, the goal isn't that you don't feel anything, but the goal is that Christ is enthroned and that Christ is in control rather than your passions.

And so that's the purpose behind asceticism. So whenever you hear the word asceticism, we have all these pictures of what comes to mind. It actually just means training. That being said, there is a huge danger to a life of asceticism, a life of training. The one, it can become legalistic. You know, if you don't do these fasts, you're not a Christian. We're going to, you know, whatever. Or even worse, if I do these fasts, that means that I'm super spiritual and God is accepting my worship. That's even worse. That if I, you know, fast three times a week and I read my Bible and I pray eight times a day, man, now I know that I'm set.

That means that I'm on the straight and narrow and that, no, that's that's dangerous. Because the one thing that all of the monks are going to write about is that these means of training are a means of grace, but they're also potentially a root of pride.

That as I train myself, I, you know, become super spiritual and I start to define the world the way I see it. And so the guard for this is actually love. So back to First Peter 1:22, he says, "Purity through obedience to the commandments unto a love of the brethren." And so that practice of obeying the commandments, we can extrapolate even the practice of training and discipline. It's not just to become more holy and more pure. Sacrifice isn't for us. And that's a key. When we think about taking our cross daily, we have to think, why did Christ take his cross? Why was he crucified? And it wasn't so that he could become more holy.

It wasn't an offering so that he could grow closer to God. He did it for others. And that's kind of the guard against pride in the spiritual life. That love abolishes pride. Love abolishes these wrong motivations. And so if you can orient yourself around doing these spiritual disciplines of living a life of training, but what's the end result? It's not so that I become more holy and I'm doing this so that I can save my life. The end result is so that I can love others well.

Then that is the spiritual life. And so these disciplines aren't to become more holy and pure, but they're actually to love God and love others better. And only in doing that do you actually become more holy and pure. So all that to say, we don't fast, we don't pray, we don't engage in these disciplines just to check spiritual boxes. We do it to retrain our desires and to learn that Christ and not our passions is Lord.

And another way to phrase it, to be renewed by the transforming of our mind. And it's actually when we don't feel anything that the training is most transformative. God could come and meet us every single time in our prayers. God could come and meet us every single time in our readings and blow us away with knowledge and blow us away with insights and make us feel whatever he'd want us to feel every single time we engage in the disciplines, but he doesn't.

And it's because when we don't feel anything, then the training is most transformative. There's actually a quote from the life of Antony after he's spent, I forgot how long it was, this countless nights engaged in, you know, battle with demons and temptations and is running like completely low until he finally gets to the place where he's just crying out like, "Christ, please save me." And at the end, he asks God, like, "God, why why didn't you step in? What's going on?" And the response was simple. And God said, "I wanted to see you struggle."

And that sounds potentially weird, potentially off-putting, but it hit me one time. I was at the park with my children. I was so Matthias would have been either two or three at that point. I forgot what. And he's trying to climb this ladder. He's a little scared of heights. So he's trying to climb this ladder and he starts crying and he's like, "Dad, dad, dad, dad." And he's crying and he's wanting me to like pick him up and put him up the ladder. And I wasn't.

And I was right there and I was watching him. And then it occurred to me, the words from the life of Antony hit me and it's like, "Wait, I want to see my son struggle because that's what's going to form him and that's what's going to make him into a stronger and better person." And so as he's learning to climb up the ladder and he doesn't, you know, feel the presence of, he doesn't feel the help of his father, that's actually when he's growing.

So the goal of these spiritual disciplines isn't for us to be more holy or to be more pure, but it's to train us to love God fully and to train us to love others and to be able to look at the world around us without greed and desire and lust and trying to consume the world for my own interest and also without panic. So this fear that the world's going to, you know, take over me. So it's to see people as persons and not problems or tools and to love, excuse me, to let love have room to flower when we stop pushing away reality.

So we're not training to feel better and the monks weren't training to feel better, but to become different. Okay. So section three, what are the implications for today? And I think when thinking about the monastics, and again, there's a lot of problems with how monasticism developed, what it eventually became, some of the abuses of what it could be, but I think they do help give us a model, both of the individual life and the communal life. And so in the individual life, again, think of that anecdote of watching a struggle. Maybe as a father, you could, you watch your kids struggle and you, you know, you're there when they absolutely need them, but you also know when to pull back and watch them learn from their own mistakes.

But even more so in your own spiritual life, when things are seeming dry, when things are seeming, you know, difficult and you're like, "Where is God?" We have faith that he's he is with us. And why don't we feel that? And perhaps it's because he's wanting to, he's wanting us to learn how to struggle well.

Also, most of us are, actually, I was going to say most of us, I'm presuming all of us are not monks and will likely never become monks. And so we're not going to be, you know, fasting 300 days of the year. We're not going to be, you know, doing the 8, 10, 15 times of prayer a day, staying up all night in the vigils. But that same mentality we can apply in our own lives. And so something like parenting, parenting when the flesh doesn't want to, again, when the kids are making demands on your life that you don't want to give. I would rather just sit in my office and read my book. It's my only time of, you know, rest in the day.

And the fact that the kids are crying, it's making me frustrated and upset. But that's where the transformation comes in. Parenting when the flesh doesn't want to, that is our training. That is our eschisis. That's when we can learn to put others first and ourself and ourself last. And so that's when we can learn how to take up our cross. So these moments, you know, whether it's church life, whether it's marriage, whether it's in our work, whether it's parenting, these moments aren't just duties that we, you know, have to do. They're actually the moments of transformation. The things that you most don't want to do, but you know are right, don't treat them as duties.

Treat them as opportunities. These are the times where you can become like Christ, who doesn't do his own will, but the will of the Father who sent him. Another way that they can help serve as a model in our spiritual life is to start asking God and becoming introspective. And again, don't get lost in the world of introspection. We can talk about all that, but it is helpful to know what's happening in our souls, that you can start to see patterns that, wait, I'm becoming angry at this thing all the time. And if I look deep down into it, it's actually because I'm scared that something is not going to work out the way I want to, or that something's making claims on my life that I don't want to answer.