Not Like Us

I recently finished a beautiful little book of desert wisdom. In the book was a saying from Abba Anthony–one of the great teachers of the early Church. The saying reads: "The time is coming when people will be insane, and when they see someone who is not insane, they will attack that person saying: You are insane because you are not like us."

Abba Anthony said this in the fourth century. You'd be forgiven for thinking he wrote it last Tuesday.

If you aren’t familiar with the desert fathers and mothers, I offer you a brief primer. In the third and fourth centuries, something unusual happened at the edges of the Roman Empire. Men and women–many of them disillusioned by a Christianity that had become comfortable, institutionalized, and entangled with imperial power–walked out into the Egyptian, Syrian, and Palestinian deserts to seek God in simplicity and silence. These weren't folks who were fleeing the world so much as they were refusing to be consumed by it.

These ammas (mothers) and abbas (fathers) became teachers. Seekers traveled to sit with them, to ask questions, to receive "a word"–a short, piercing piece of wisdom meant to be carried and pondered. These sayings were eventually collected into what is known as the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (or Apophthegmata Patrum–say that three times fast), and they remain among the most startlingly fresh spiritual texts in all of Christian history.

Among the most revered of these teachers was Anthony the Great, who left his inheritance at age twenty and lived most of his life in the desert. He is considered by many to be the father of Christian monasticism. And yet he was no recluse–he was deeply engaged with the world's problems, and he knew something about what it costs to hold a different kind of center.

This particular saying from Abba Anthony might feel a bit like clever social commentary to us today. But it is far more than that–offering us both a pastoral warning and a spiritual gift.

Anthony seemed to understand that there is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from living in a community–or a culture–where the dominant reality has quietly become the only acceptable reality. Where compassion gets called naïve. Where truth-telling gets called divisive. Where slowing down gets called laziness. Where simply not participating in the frenzy gets you labeled as the problem. In the shadow of such communal living, Abba Anthony names what so many of us feel but struggle to articulate: Sometimes what gets called insanity is just the refusal to go along.

You know, I spend a great deal of time thinking about and reflecting on our congregation–a community scattered across five counties, often feeling like a minority voice in this area. I think about the people who come through our doors carrying the weight of being different in ways our culture punishes. I think about those who have been told by churches, or family, or the ambient pressure of their communities, that something is fundamentally wrong with them. And I can’t help but think that maybe the reason so many of us feel so different at this time in this place is because we ARE different. And maybe that’s not a problem to be fixed so much as it is a description to be claimed.

In so many ways, we are the ones refusing to just go along with what is happening around us. Which, as many of us know all too well, comes at a cost–both communally and individually. And yet, not paying that cost has never really been an option for any of us. Because we know what Abba Anthony knew–that in a climate like ours, in an area like ours, when people call us the problem, it is not necessarily evidence that we are wrong. It is evidence that we are paying attention.

Sometimes I need that reminder–and maybe you do too. That we are not crazy. We are awake…woke even. And that is not quite the 4-letter word people are making it out to be. In fact, it puts us in good company. Alongside people like Jesus, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harvey Milk, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the suffragists, the abolitionists, and a fourth-century Egyptian monk named Anthony who walked into the desert and saw the whole thing coming. We are a part of a tradition that has always lived in the tension between what is and what ought to be. And learning to live in that tension without being crushed by it, is some of our most important work. 

So this week, maybe we can let the desert elders remind us again that the crowd has never been a reliable guide for knowing which way we need to go. We already know the way…we just need to walk it.

On the journey with you,
Pr. Melissa

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