12 The Hermit meets Everyone with an Open Heart
The point about this is that you shouldn’t force anything onto anyone, neither the silence, nor the talking. You must meet people with an open heart, which means being sensitive to people and their needs, and the fact that their needs change day by day. A hermit is patient and allows people to develop at their own rate, he doesn’t force it.
An open heart sees the totality of the other person and doesn’t reject any of it, and that loving attitude can help another find healing and wholeness. All people have both a dark side and a light side to their nature, and sometimes the dark side can be very dark indeed. But if you can be with that, if you don’t reinforce the divisions, then healing can take place. Therefore the hermit is full of compassion – the word compassion is from the Latin, and it means to suffer with another – if you can allow that suffering a place in your life, then you can transform it. Generally people can’t allow suffering a place, their own or that of other peoples, they want to get away from the sorrow.
But if you can allow somebody to suffer and say don’t be frightened of this, then it may be that they will no longer be divided against themselves. So a hermit is one who can live with another’s suffering because he sees that is where true healing can take place. Both meditation and the hermit life can be seen as part of the healing ministry – it’s of great importance that we heal people physically of course, but the healing that we all really need is the spiritual healing that takes place when you have some sort of relationship to God, when you have opened your heart and can be led by the Spirit.
An open heart means not condemning others because you’ve stopped condemning yourself. If you’ve been touched by God’s love in your life, if you know God’s forgiveness, how that has made you whole, you don’t condemn others either, and then they have room to grow. The key is love. You must know God’s love of you, you must love yourself, and from that you will be able to love others also, and that love can bring about a transformation in another’s life. You must realise that God is able to bring about this healing in all people, nobody is outside the pale, even if it takes a long time for them to respond.
A hermit doesn’t run hospitals, schools, or aid and relief projects, all the normal church activities, and the reason is not that they are unimportant, but in the end they are insufficient, because healing somebody’s body is not sufficient for salvation, nobody was ever saved because they were well-educated. Salvation in the long run is what is important. You see, education, hospitals and so on can be a sign of love, but the problem is we stop at the sign, it’s really very lazy, we think when we’ve taught our children or bandaged someone’s wound that that is enough – but it’s not.
A hermit witnesses to something beyond material comfort, security, education, and so on. A hermit gives witness to God, who may be present in these things, but He is also beyond all these things. There’s this saying in the Gospel that ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4:4). It doesn’t say that man shall not live by bread at all, but he shall not live by bread alone: people have to be fed, be healthy, and educated, and all these things, but it’s not what you live by.
There is a nice term in the Celtic church that I like, which is ‘amchara’, it means a spiritual friend. The Celtic church was founded on the eremetic life, coming out of the Syrian desert, travelling to southern France and Marseilles, where John Cassion founded his monasteries, and then coming into Ireland and Scotland, where the early missionaries lived as hermits, and out of the depths of that silent life they evangalised the whole of northern Europe. I came across this term in a life of St. Columba.
You see a hermit is not a guru who has something you don’t, and if you’re lucky he will share that with you too, a hermit is not separated from others in this way. An amchara or hermit is one who shares with equals, as Jesus said: ‘No longer do I call you servants... you are my friends’ (John 15:14-15). We’re equals because we have been raised to the status of children of God, we have the same limitations but in the end the full flourishing of man’s spiritual nature is simply to realise his God given capacity to go beyond himself so that the life of God can be present to the world.