THE DESERT AND WE

So what is the desert? But what else is it than a scenic place of life’s absence?

But this view supposes the desert as a sense opposed to life. But is it like that?

Before an answer is given to this question we must remember that

a. John the Baptist preached the message of the Gospel in the desert.

b. This work by John is ratified in the desert of Jordan with Jesus’ baptism.

c. Jesus faces the temptation in the desert.

So the place of the desert among all these unique turning points is admittedly prominent and dynamic.

d. We have to add to all these, this one, too. It must not escape our attention that the ascetic desert becomes the stadium (another Coliseum) where so many people are struggling. The ascetics of the desert give to it a completely unprecedented internal dimension.

After all these ascertainments, this question is raised.

If indeed the desert, as a spiritual presence and as a spiritual “function” of the Christian experience has a compulsory meaning for every Christian, then how can the mundane Christian experience this multidynamic “function” of the desert in the bustling and stormy social life? (J. Cornarakis)

We know that the desert, as a place where life is absent, is always a sense opposite to the sense of social life.

So when someone suggests to someone else to live the desert life in all his everyday problems, he gives the impression that he suggests something impossible.

Maybe a careful look to the issue is needed: When we talk about the desert, we must not attach magic properties to it. Then its role is definitely negative. There is something else, too. A pursuit to live the spiritual experience of the desert presupposes desolation from the human passions.

Desolation does not mean repression.

An effort by the human being to live the desert experience with repressed elements is doomed to failure from the beginning. How can someone live free in the desert, when he goes on burdened with his passions and trapped in his complex reactions?

So what will happen? Shall we leave the world? Shall we look for deserts?

We usually hear the complaint that our society ended up in isolation and ruins.

The contemporary technological human being lives isolated in a climate of purely negative meaning.

Trends of escape, irresponsibility, indifference, intense selfish activation, isolation are shown.

We see

a. that the values become less holy

b. a religious fading

c. a total lack of communication among people.

So the desert of the city ends up a place where communication is absent. In these limits we noticed these:

a. A change of nature’s picture. The human being does no longer face the world “glorifying”, but “utilitarianly”.

b. A disappearance of holy space. The human being no longer wishes to “live near God”.

c. A separation between the liturgical and mundane

time. The feast-days are limited. Sunday was stripped from its devotional characteristics.

d. The human body became less holy. So it becomes an object of exploitation.

e. The society becomes less holy. Everything is done without a conscious reference to the Christian faith or Church.

The results of the religious fading combined with the urbanization and the secularization are:

a. The “failure” or the “loss” of God’s sense or of the religious feeling. Because of the change of the world-idol, the world is no longer considered as having God in its center.

b. The non-understanding of the traditional symbolisms but also their change to purely decorative objects.

c. The doubt of the traditional beliefs.

d. The centering on the earth or the mundane affairs.

That is enclosed earthly perspectives.

e. Pragmatism, which presupposes an abolition of

every transcendent element.

At the same time a presence of a mask at the expense of the face is noted.

From the tribune of the Metropolitan Church of Athens, a respectable talker stressed:

“… It is immemorial the phenomenon of the deepest and most stressful request of the human beings’ soul to be redeemed from his everyday hypocrisy. He asks to abolish all the various masks he wears every day with a new one, the most unlikely. He asks to clear whatever repressed exists in his subconscious and to be liberated, but freedom not exist” (Metropolite Meliton of Chalkidon).

So hypocrisy has reduced to a science (!)

But the contradictions in the behaviour of the human being are often so tempting that easily betray, reveal and stress the chain of inner conflicts, which prevail in their spiritual world. The contradictions and the contrasts are so many that are characterized as rooms by experts. A room for

friends, another for the enemies, one for the family and the other for the people outside, one for those socially equal to them and another one for those inferior to them (K. Horney). So the human being is split and alienated from his own self. So a general numbness of the moral criterion is noticed.

These rooms jointly constitute the buildings of his life. A “block of flats” of contradictions and inner splits. A real labyrinth of broken isolated spiritual areas.

So how will this “block of flats” human being find inner comfort and relief?

We have today something else, too. Life is usually reduced to be particularly imaginary for the human being of the society. It is as if he lives in a tower of ghosts. These visual prisms are created by certain attitudes every interlocutor takes to the other. So “firstly there is Peter as he wants to present himself to Paul and Paul as he wants to present himself to Peter. Then there is Peter, as he really appears to Paul and … similarly there is the opposite case … There is Peter as he appears to himself and Paul as he appears to himself” (Jo. Cornarakis).

This situation is imaginary but also … phantasmagoric. So there are six ghosts. If also every interlocutor is a husband, a brother, a doctor, a boss, a climber etc. At the same time, the according number of ghosts is created.

There is, of course, the tendency of the “two-soul” man. That is the human being, who wants to live in two situations at the same time. But this condition what else can it be than a split personality?

But maybe someone wonders. “But, finally, is there a correct facing?

It is a fact that these are presented as results of the fraud of all the negative and destructive feelings. But there is the correct facing, too. Genuineness, which is achieved with

a. the correct search of self-knowledge with the correct digging and deep survey in his inwardness.

b. the removal of the negative function of repression,

which is the cause of all the disorders in the

behavior of a person.

c. the right disposition for sacrifice and fight. As a

classic example there is the case of the prophet of the Old Testament, who because he wanted to be accepted by the callous Ahaav, made sure he made his head bleed, so that he attracted the attention of the king and told him what he should have done (III Kings 21:35-42). Of course the example is extreme, but characteristic.

d. The cultivation of the (true) discretion with the

correct understanding and sympathy for the others.

After all these, this inexorable question arises: Does the desert or the society (the way we reduced it) suffer from an absence of life?

It is known that so many ascetics and fathers lived in the desert, were active and became saints. A lot of

monasteries, but the cells, too were turned into hotbeds of faith, love and true Christian life.

So shall we give up? Shall we go to the desert?

But nobody asked such a thing. Specifically, Christ himself in his prelatic Prayer said: “I pray not that thou should to take them of the world, but that thou should keep them from the evil” (John 17:15).

So those, who have the aptitude, will leave for the desert. The others will stay here. But we must understand some basic things. A desert means the search of

a. personal inwardness

b. opportunities for the removal of the negative

elements

c. ways of solving and not repressing the problems

d. God himself and His facing (face to face).

Nikitas Stithatos characteristically writes: “If you want to see the goods which God prepared for those who love Him, be in the desert of refusal of your own will and avoid the world. Which are these? The wish of the eyes, and the flesh, the arrogance of thoughts and the deceit of what you see”.

So we talk about necrosis. A life-giving necrosis. A

necrosis, which will be the refusal of the soul’s will and the transposition of the chaotic thoughts.

So the mundane desert arises two-way powered and is bipolar. It is necrosis and life at the same time. A leave and

an exercise. A negation and an affirmation. Without some existential forms of devoutness.

So there is a gap between what a human being is and what he has to become or be. So “woe unto him, who is alone”, because the human who is alone, being cannot stand by himself in front of his self’s chaos. He will fail.

The (last) fall of the Gospel’s publican should make us think a lot. Because what else is this fall than a search of his inner “being”, the as deep as possible self-knowledge? The “fall” before God.

+Fr.G

Дата добавления: 2015-10-23