14 The Hermit is not an Extremist
You have a special responsibility for that part of creation which is nearest to you, which is your body and mind. You can be a channel whereby God is present to the world, and therefore you have to take care to see that you are healthy and sensitive. Those who don’t know God are the ones who indulge themselves in gross and unnecessary stimulation of one sort or another. This is not secondary, it’s an expression of the attitude you have with all creation. People only abuse themselves when they are in a false relationship with the world, one that is based on pleasure and pain. The means for the spiritual life are harmony and balance, and this has always been the case in the main Christian tradition. At the outset of Christian reflection on the spiritual life, in the first of John Cassion’s Conferences with the fathers, he asked: what is the aim of the hermit life? and Abba Moses replied, Purity of heart. And then he asked what are the means to achieve it, and the father answered: Discretion, neither too much nor too little.
Now the common idea is that the hermit life is an extremist life, but the heart of this way of life is simplicity and harmony that gives room for God’s plan to find fulfilment in life. To my mind those who are led by the forces of division are the ones who have renounced the world, the hermit is the one who has found it. You don’t need a lot for God to be born into the world, you don’t need great business interests or a whole library of books, in fact these things can be a great hindrance as the Pharisees and the scribes show. All you need is an open heart, one that is listening, and that is responsive to this call. If you are present to God and your life finds fulfilment in that then you don’t have great material needs: sufficient food, clean clothes, a shelter over your head is enough (Luke 2:7).
A professional is someone who has developed a marketable skill which he sells and thereby makes his living, But the hermit is one who has found some silence in his own life, and hopefully he’s helping others to find silence also, but that’s not a marketable thing, you can’t measure it or package it, so the hermit is strictly an amateur, he’s not doing what he’s doing for payment of any kind, neither for money, not for cultural capital either, which we may define as power, position, respect, and so on, you can also trade in these things, but a hermit must discard economics and calculation of this sort.
An amateur works for love, he loves to see the flowers blossom and to see people blossom too. He loves the trees and the birds, and this love shows in the care he takes of the things around him. He loves the night sky even though it’s of no possible use. I feel if you really knew how to look at the night sky and if you realised just how vast it is, you would be enlightened. The universe is unbelievably big, the nearest star is light years away, and you are the tiniest atom – and yet God loves you and cares for you. I think if you can just learn to walk quietly in the world, you will find that you are in the midst of revelation.
I think the hermit is someone who is always at home because he lives in God’s presence, and therefore he is no longer alienated. From all the time since the fall we have been alienated and divided against ourselves, because we have been alienated from God, and Jesus came to show us and to lead us back to the Father, he is the pioneer (Hebrews 2:10) who shows us the way back into right relationship with God, but that must become a reality in one’s life.
God is present in all the joys and all the sorrows, the happinesses and the pains, He is there when you are in relationship with Him. The world is the primal sacrament, and it comes before ever there were temples and mosques and churches. The whole of humanity has this sacrament, and it’s only in the development of culture that people get divided from one another. We divide over culture, but we should remember our natural togetherness as the human race, as part of the totality of creation: one people under one Father, joined together in God and in creation.
If you are at home in creation in a loving relationship with the world and with other people, then you will also be at home in eternity. But if you’re divided against yourself now if your life is an endless round of conflict internally and externally, you will carry that with you into eternity also. So the question is: is the kingdom of heaven a place that we can enter now? Because if it is then we will also enter it when we pass from this world of time and space into eternity. It is the meaning and purpose of creation, as I see it, that God should become present in our lives now, then when we pass into the fulness of God’s presence when we die, we may find that we are at one.