The Deep Attention of the Christian Desert Fathers

This post continues the exploration of the qualities of kinship with Country explored in Seeing, feeling, and hearing the world; and of Tyson Yunkaporta’s suggestion in Sand Talk, ‘The assistance people need is not learning about Aboriginal Knowledge but in remembering their own.’¹ Can we trace qualities of pirlirr, liyan, and wirrin in Western culture ? In this post I reflect on reading The Blue Sapphire of the Mind, a book by Douglas Christie explore the practices of the Christian Desert Fathers. The lessons we may learn from the ancient Christian contemplatives are surely echoed in the project of Learning How Land Speaks

Several years ago I read Douglas Christie’s book, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a contemplative ecology,² which reflects on the experience and practice of the ascetics, hermits and monks known as the Desert Fathers (although there were women among them too) in the third and fourth centuries after Christ, showing how their contemplative disciplines took them between inner and outer landscapes in search of a consciousness of the whole of creation. While often expressed in terms of “living in the presence of God”, which can sound strange to modern and non-theist ears, Christie shows how they were also expressing a sense of the limitless beauty and vitality of the natural world and of the deepened, even transcendent, awareness of the self that accompanies this. He shows how this “contemplative ecology” finds echoes in modern environmental writers and has relevance for our work and lives today. 

Contemplative ecology, he writes, “can best be understood as an expression of the diverse and wide-ranging desire emerging within contemporary culture to identify our deepest feelings for the natural world as part of a spiritual longing.” The current movement for the “greening of religion” is not just about the current ecological crisis; rather, the faith traditions are deepened when conceived of as more intimately related to the living world. And in parallel “a full and adequate understanding of ecology requires the integration of spiritual insight and practice,” so that scientific understanding is placed in its full context, to include “human emotions, reason, imagination, and yes, soul.”

Christie’s argument is that the quality of awareness that enables us to engage with the beauty, significance and fragility of the natural world is essentially mysterious.  It requires an inner attention to that which the contemplatives experienced as their “demons” but that we moderns understand as our ego attachments, our sense of self-importance, our fragmented selves.  And it requires an outer attention, a willingness to notice everything as part of a sacred whole. All this requires disciplined practice and is profoundly challenging. There was, it seems, a powerful sense of wholeness in the ancient contemplative traditions. This wholeness included the ancient contemplatives’ feeling for the living world, a simple awareness of the beauty of the desert, an appreciation of deep silence, and wonder at their emerging intimate reciprocity with other beings. It grew out of the monks’ intense commitment to pay attention, out of which arose a sense of compassion and responsibility for their world, broken as it was by the dominance of the Roman Empire. Those of us involved in Learning How Land Speaks would use different language, but the emphasis on practice, intention, and imagination feels congruent. As Freya Mathews writes, it is possible to interpret such religious experiences under from a panpsychic perspective: ‘a living cosmos is capable of responding to our call, and if it does so, it will frame its response in the terms of reference of the invocation itself.’

This suggests that in contemporary culture we would benefit from a contemplative practice that would allow us to comprehend our increasingly degraded and compromised world as sacred; to live in a deeper and more encompassing moral or ethical relationship with the living world; to live “so that we do not continue to visit our most destructive impulses upon the natural world.” This, Christie argues, demands “self-conscious spiritual practices rooted in a desire to kindle a greater feeling and responsibility for other living organisms and the world as a whole.” We do not need to use the language of God for this; we can seek a spiritual meaning while remaining agnostic as to its origins. But this is demanding and challenging, potentially costly and self-implicating: there are no safe positions when it comes to reimagining our place in the world and enlivening our care for it.

The first chapter is essentially a self-contained essay that sets out this understanding of what these ancient traditions may offer for a contemplative ecology. The following chapters explore the practices in detail, continuing the comparison of ancient teachings with modern environmental writings. The Desert Fathers emphasised the importance of “contact”, of paying attention to everything, both inner and outer, so that through sustained attention we can retrieve a vision of the world as a whole. This involves inner attention to “ego’s isolating and alienating power” but also to the presence of the world around us. Christie tells us that the full meaning of the words “To dwell in the place of God” is to live with a particular intense awareness of living as part of the whole, within an intricate web of relationships.  We may imagine that the Desert Fathers were entirely engaged in communion with a transcendent God, but we learn that St Antony, one of the key figures in the movement, fell in love with the place in the desert where he built his cell, planting a garden and giving himself fully to the life of the place. This “fluid, reciprocal relationship between place and spirit, interior and exterior landscape, became a distinctive part of the world of the early Christian monks.”

Contact with the world draws our attention to that which is broken. The early monks lived in a society fractured by the dominance of the Roman Empire. For them, Penthos, the gift of tears, was an essential part of healing both self and world, enabling a deep and honest reckoning and awakening the soul to its spiritual fragility. Christie recalls Aldo Leopold’s statement, when contemplating the gradual disappearance of the once-abundant prairie wildflower, the cutleaf Silphium, that “We only grieve for what we know” and asks us to consider the psychic numbing that allows the unravelling of our world. We might also remember Leopold’s lament, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds”. The ability to mourn for the loss of other species and ecosystems is an expression of our kinship and participation in the whole.

We need resolute action in the face of the ecological crisis, but it is difficult to imagine that any action will bear real fruit without a true mourning for what is lost. In order to situate ourselves carefully and thoughtfully in our world we must find a way to be “at home always a stranger”. The ancient monks can teach how to live with the tension between a deepening sense of familiarity and belonging in place and the knowledge that no place can claim us completely. We need also the kind of non-attachment that a stranger might have, which offers openness, freedom, reciprocity.

Central to the contemplative practice of the early monks was Prosoche, the art of attention: the contemplative way of life meant learning how to look, stay awake, not missing through carelessness or inattention. The ascetics cultivated attention not just through seeing, but through touching, tasting, and smelling, in a way that included but transcended what is visible, “seeing deeply into the whole of reality.” This looking deeper into the world has important lessons for modern ecological practice, as way of seeing the whole even as one pays attention to the qualities of this of that particular facet of the whole that arises in our attention.

The contemplative monks learned, just as the modern ecologist must learn, how to live in a world where boundless beauty and cruelty meet us at every turn and the “immensity of loss that washes over the world continuously.” What does it mean to face pain and suffering, and what does it mean for us in the present age to face the truth of the unravelling of our world?

I came to the end of my reading of the book with my prejudices completely disconfirmed: early Christian mystics were not on a hopeless quest of mortifying the flesh in search of God; rather, they approached their world with a subtlety and discipline from which much can be learned. In particular, I was often taken beyond the either/or dualism that so often characterizes debate about the place of religion and spirituality in our lives. I am more than ever convinced that we will not learn to live in harmony with the ecology of our planet while holding onto a worldview that owes much to the European Enlightenment. New forms of politics, economics, industry and social relationships are all essential. But they will need to rest on a deeper sense of belonging in the world, a capacity to link the immediate and the local to the whole, an ability to see the sacred in our damaged and degraded planet. This is not an easy option, but requires intense discipline and self-examination. Maybe Christie’s “notes toward a contemplative ecology” will help us find a way forward.

Skellig Michael.Photo, Peter Reason

Note. The original practice of the Desert Fathers strongly influenced the ascentic community of Celtic monks living in beehive huts on the lonely rock of Skellig Michael off the southwest coast of Ireland (pictured). Geoffrey Moorhouse has written an engagement novel about their lives,³ which strongly based on historical research. Douglas Christie’s book clearly written but is long and academic, with close reviews of theological debate; some readers may find Moorhouse’ book both entertaining and more accessible. Mentioning Moorhouse’ book also gives me an opportunity to post a picture of Skellig Michael, which I visited on pilgrimage in my yacht Coral.⁴

1. Yunkaporta, Tyson. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2019.

2. Christie, Douglas E. The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

3. Moorhouse, Geoffrey. Sun Dancing. London: Phoenix, 1997.

4. Reason, Peter. Spindrift: A Wilderness Pilgrimage at Sea. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers (originally published in Bristol by Vala Publishing Cooperative), 2014; Also In Search of Grace: An Ecological Pilgrimage. Winchester, UK: Earth Books, 2017. More here.