In the early centuries of Christianity, Christians seeking solitude and a focused relationship with God would sometimes head into the desert in small groups or as individual hermits – particularly into North Africa and Palestine. Enough ascetics did this at the time that non-hermits in villages and cities knew of this phenomenon. People would sometimes head into the desert to seek spiritual counsel from the desert dwellers. Some desert dwellers graciously provided this spiritual counsel. In other instances, visits from people seeking counsel (counsel of even just one word!) would drive the desert-living ascetics deeper into more isolated regions of the desert to more fully find the isolation they sought.

As people sought desert wisdom from the ascetic monastics, word spread throughout the region of the wisdom communicated by the self-isolating followers of God who were living in the desert. Quotes and phrases were shared and quoted by visitors to the desert monastics that developed into something of a a collective body of wisdom.

I discovered in reading In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers by John Chryssanvgis that any number of books have been written over the subsequent centuries about the lives, faith, and wisdom of these ascetic desert dwellers from early Christianity. In this particular book, Goodreads aptly describes the books’ content as “Words of spiritual counsel from the heart of early Christian monasticism.” For readers interested in reading more about desert mothers and fathers, In the Heart of the Desert provides a useful bibliography directing readers to additional books on this subject.

As an aside, one of my previous blog posts pondered the perceived relationship between types of geography – such as deserts – and how we perceive spiritual pursuits. That blog post can be read here.

Kim Burkhardt blogs about faith at The Hermitage Within. Thank you for reading this faith blog and for sharing it with your friends. While you are here, please feel welcome to provide support to sustain this blog ($$).