The Hermit

Last night, Christine and I were watching Globe Trekkers on PBS (I recommend it) and the traveler, a girl named Megan, was in Egypt. She went to a monastery in eastern Egypt – St. Antony’s – said to be the oldest monastery in the world. Established when St. Antony came to the area around 200 AD. The monks there told her that in the hills above the monastery there was a hermit who is trying to live as St. Antony did. I don’t even know who St. Antony was, but this got my attention.

Megan hiked up the hill and found the old man. He lived in a cave – had a wooden door on the cave and a little place to sleep in a little tunnel of a room with candles. He wouldn’t allow Megan into his cave because she was a woman. (I suppose if word got out that there had been a woman in his cave, the other hermits might talk.) But he sat on the rocks outside with her and talked. He talked as though they were meeting at church. I expected him to be a pop-eyed, quivering thing, afraid of contact with other people and spewing curses or ancient hexes. Or to be so excited to see another human that he jabbered on about his cave or his new clay pot. But he seemed normal, informed, well-adjusted. I wondered if he was a more complete human, more connected to what it really means to be human, than the people I see at work every day.

He must not always stay in the cave because he talked about society. He said it saddens him to go into town where the people use Jesus’ name in vain. He said, “But when I say that name here, in my cave, it’s beautiful…Jesus. Jesus. I call to him here. I have called to him many times.”

The hermit said he decided to live there after his mother died and he realized that suffering was the path to maturity…or did he say enlightenment? I don’t remember, but it was something good that he was seeking up there on the lunar-looking hillside with nothing but sand and rocks around.

This morning, I was reading 1 Samual 1&2 where Hannah takes her son to Shiloh and gives him over to GOD and leaves him with Eli. What commitment to God! To leave your child with a stranger. And what voluntary suffering! Is it worth it to have a son if you should only have him until he’s weaned?

And what a life Samuel must have had. What did he think of himself? That he was special to GOD or that he was abandoned by his mother? Or both?

There’s something about the life of Samuel and the hermit that is enormously appealing to me. But any time I get close to something like that – to the writings of the desert fathers or St. Fancis or Thomas Merton – I realize that the treasures of that life can never be reached on a try-it-out basis. You can’t take a retreat to a hermitage and call yourself a hermit. In fact, I doubt that you can spend a year in seclusion and reap the benefits of that seclusion if you know that, at the end of the year, your seclusion will end. It seems to me to be an all-or-nothing affair. When the hermit gave up all hope (and desire?) of rejoining the world, then the whispering of Jesus name in his cave became sweeter to him than the world he gave up – but not before. I don’t know this, but it’s my hunch. And I suspect, too, that I’ll never know because I’ll never be able – because of fear or weakness or selfishness or destiny – to renounce the world as clearly and thoroughly as the hermit has.