Simeon sits on his pillar

Simeon Stylites is one of the stranger figures in the history of Christian sanctity, and his strangeness is worth confronting honestly before drawing any lessons from it.

He begins as a monk, is expelled from his monastery for excessive asceticism — even his fellow monks find him too extreme — and moves to a hermit's life near Antioch. So many pilgrims come to see him that he cannot pray. He builds a platform to get above the crowds. He raises it higher. Higher. Eventually it is sixty feet tall, six feet across at the top, and he lives on it.

For thirty-seven years.

He prays, preaches twice daily to the crowds below, dictates letters to kings and emperors, and reportedly performs miraculous healings that draw pilgrims from across the empire. The site becomes one of the most-visited pilgrimage destinations in the Christian world.

The crowds still come even though he is sixty feet above them and they cannot hear him properly.

Simeon is not a model for general imitation. He represents an extreme edge of the ascetic tradition — the edge where the hunger for God produces practices that look, from outside, like madness. The church has always held these figures with a mixture of reverence and bewilderment.

What his life demonstrates is the complete subordination of comfort to purpose. He was not performing. He was not seeking attention — he was seeking to escape it. The pillar was his cell, his desert, his sealed fort.

He simply chose a very unusual shape for it.

Simeon on his pillar is the most extreme form of a question every Christian faces: what am I willing to inconvenience myself for? What comfort am I willing to sacrifice in the pursuit of God?

Most of us will not climb a pillar. But the gap between Simeon's radical inconvenience and our radical comfort is worth noticing.

The tradition does not hold Simeon up as the normal model. It holds him up as a permanent reminder that there are people who take the pursuit of God more seriously than their comfort — and that such people have always existed, and have always been regarded as strange by their contemporaries, and have always attracted more pilgrims than anyone expected.

What would you be willing to inconvenience yourself for?