Abba, speak a word
The Desert Fathers and the tradition of spiritual direction
The desert fills with monks.
After Anthony, after the peace of Constantine makes martyrdom unlikely in the Roman empire, a generation of Christians goes looking for a different kind of dying. They go to the Egyptian desert — to Scetis, to the Nitrian hills, to the caves and cells along the Nile — and they go to learn from the ones who are already there.
The pattern is consistent across hundreds of accounts. A young monk approaches an elder and says: Abba, speak a word to me. Give me a word to live by.
The elder almost never gives a lecture. He gives a sentence. Sometimes a single image. A monk comes to Abba Moses in Scetis and asks for a word. Moses says: Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.
A monk asks Abba Poemen why the demons fight him so hard. Poemen says: Do the demons fight you? They do not fight us as long as we are doing our own will, for our own wills become the demons, and it is these that trouble us.
A monk confesses a sin to Abba Sisoes and is amazed when Sisoes says he has to do penance. God has already forgiven you, the monk says — why do you speak of penance? Because, says Sisoes, even if God has forgiven you, you need to do penance so that you can forgive yourself.
Thousands of these sayings were collected and passed down — the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. They are still read today. They are still startlingly direct. They are still, frequently, exactly what a person needs to hear.
“Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”
— Abba Moses of Scetis, Apophthegmata Patrum, 4th century
“Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth.”
The desert fathers gave almost no lectures and wrote almost no systematic theology. They gave sentences. One word, one image, one concrete instruction — and then they trusted the person to go and live it.
This is the oldest model of spiritual direction in the Christian tradition, and it looks almost nothing like most modern discipleship programs.
It assumed that most people already know more than they practice. That the problem is rarely information. That what a person usually needs is not another teaching but a single word precise enough to cut through the noise and go to work.
If someone who knew you well gave you one word to live by this year — one word — what do you think it would be?