10 The Hermit is ready to break the Silence
A hermit is someone who is alive and awake and sensitive to other people, and he is not encumbered by attachment of any sort. He has lots of time and can be responsive to people’s needs. If you are always busy you will operate out of a rut, because that is the way you can get by. But if you have some silence, inwardly and outwardly, you will have time to give attention to others, which is a sign of your love. There’s a story from the desert fathers that I like: a brother came to one of the fathers, and later when he was leaving he said: Forgive me father for breaking in on your rule – on his ascetic practice it means – but the father said: My rule is to receive you with hospitality and to let you go in peace. That’s beautiful, that’s just what a rule should be. It’s always been like that in the Christian tradition. True, you get eccentrics who indulge in obscure or wild ascetic practices, and they are well known; but someone who receives a brother with hospitality and lets him go in peace, that’s not news is it? But if you return to the sources that’s the tradition that comes across.
And people would always be welcomed by the fathers in the desert, peasants would come, and also bishops, they often made arduous journeys to seek out these people who had found some silence in their lives, some sense of the wholeness. The reason the fathers went into the desert was to face the devil, to find out the totality and the reality of this ambiguous existence, you see the devil is there in the selfish instincts, in the search for security at any price, and so on. When these things rule your every action, then your life is being run by the forces of division, rather than by a commitment to truth and love, which are the forces of unity and wholeness.
A hermit then, is one who is called aside not to exclude others but to be of service to others in a particular way. Everybody has this capacity for love, it’s present in some people, and potential in all. The hermit’s call is, I feel, that having seen how important that is, then he wants to create the space in which that birthing process can take place – you can’t come to a hermit and he gives birth for you: you have to do the birthing yourself, but I feel the hermit can help make it possible by creating the conditions in which it can become a reality. The hermit is always ready to break the silence to listen to the word incarnate.
People get entangled in their ideas and they think: the Lord is here, the Lord is there, he’s in the liturgies, he’s in the books, and so on, but you must find God present in all places or else it loses any meaning. Especially you must see that God often comes to you embodied. It’s another time that you must be sensitive in community, you get used to the people around you, you think you know all about them and even what they think and so on, and you’re no longer listening. There’s an art to listening, and nobody is teaching it: at school you’re taught, not to listen, but to develop memory capacity, to be able to reel out other people’s words and ideas, and you are terrifically rewarded for that. But obviously that is simply teaching conformity, and then of course you are not able to listen with any degree of attention. It would be much more useful if children were taught how to listen, how to be aware and sensitive, then they would be able to find things out for themselves, and that would be a skill for life.
There’s an art to listening, and it requires a great inner silence, it’s a silence that arises when you are totally engaged with another, and are present to the totality of that person. There is real humility in that, when you are able to listen without your own opinions and reactions. The hermit is listening because what he’s listening to is the word incarnate, to God in a body. Everybody is unique and the hermit is interested in how God is uniquely manifesting Himself in this person.