Anthony enters his cave
Anthony's first years alone in the desert
Anthony has given away the family farm, arranged care for his sister, and apprenticed himself to the older ascetics at the edge of his village. He has been practicing — learning fasting and prayer and vigil, absorbing what each teacher has to offer, like a bee gathering honey from many flowers.
But the village is still too close to everything he has left. At thirty-five he makes a decision that will define the rest of his life: he crosses the Nile and moves into an abandoned military fort at a place called Pispir. He seals the door. His friends throw bread over the wall twice a year.
He stays for twenty years.
What happens in those twenty years is mostly hidden. The fort is sealed. No one sees. What Anthony will later describe, and what Athanasius will record in the biography that launches a thousand monks, is an interior battle of extraordinary intensity — visions, spiritual warfare, periods of desolation so profound that he cries out wondering where God has gone, followed by periods of such luminous clarity that he needs nothing else.
He emerges from the fort at fifty-five. The people who come to see him, expecting a broken eccentric or a gaunt fanatic, find something entirely different: a man of extraordinary serenity, warmth, and balance. A man who had gone into the wilderness to find something and had clearly found it.
And then the requests begin. Come and teach us. Speak to us. Give us a word.
He gives them words for the next fifty years.
“Whoever you may be, always have God before your eyes. Whatever you do, do it according to the testimony of the holy scriptures. In whatever place you live, do not easily leave it.”
— Anthony of Egypt, c. 3rd–4th century
“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”
Anthony went into the wilderness because he believed that something essential could only be found there — that the noise and distraction and social performance of ordinary life had to be stripped away before the deepest things could be heard.
This is not a call to physical solitude for everyone. But it is a call to some form of interior wilderness — some practice of deliberate silence and stripping away that allows God access to the parts of you that the noise ordinarily covers.
Jesus himself went into the wilderness before his ministry began. Anthony went before his teaching ministry began. The pattern suggests that what we give to others comes from what we have been given in solitude.
What is your equivalent of the sealed fort? What practice strips the noise away far enough for you to hear what is actually there?