Holy Is This Time - #9

The cities of the late ancient world were not easy places to live. They were compact. People lived on top of each other. Nerves and tempers got frayed easily. In addition, social status was important in the Roman Empire. Unlike modern society where one can acquire wealth and change one's social position, people in the late ancient world were born into and remained in one social position. Most of all, social exchange depended on patronage. People looked for patrons to advance their cause or to fulfill their needs. This atmosphere troubled some Christians. The frenzy of the city was too much for them. So they decided to withdraw, to leave the city and to take up residence on the edge of the city and then in the more solitary, wild places of the mountains or the caves. This gave birth to a new movement in the church, the ascetical and monastic traditions: holy men and holy women who cut themselves off from the commercial and political ties of the city to seek God with pure hearts and motives. These people were like the prophets. They were countercultural, occasionally eccentric, seemingly wild women and men, God intoxicated.

Geography played an important role. The ascetics left the cities and entered the caves of Syria and Palestine to encounter God. Withdrawal allowed them to be unencumbered, free from the patronage network of urban life. The earliest monks lived alone with God. They were not committed to the domestic vocation of marriage. They withdrew to the edge of the city, then into the desert of Egypt. There they wrestled with their instincts and tamed their desire for wealth, control, competition and fame. They met their demons face to face, the lower frontiers of their personality, and anything that was untamed and incomplete in themselves. This kind of Jacob-wrestling could leave the Christian in an exhausted state of intense introspection. The individual could emerge from this way of life a really wholesome, integrated person or a really strange, eccentric screwball. Thus gathering to pray at morning and evening was a reality check. This second ritual format allowed the ascetics and the monks an opportunity to test their personal equilibrium. Gathering for the Sunday Eucharist on the Lord's Day and at morning and evening kept many from going off the deep end

Morning and evening ritual prayer in the monastic tradition became a way of seeking God, of praying always. This tradition was austere, simple, and streamlined. The community that gathered began with psalm 1 and went to psalm 150 in the course of the week. The goal was to allow the sentiments of the psalms to imprint themselves on the wax tablets of their hearts. The persons, events, and geography of the psalms got replayed in the lives of ascetics and monks. The goal of praying the psalms was contemplation. The psalms led to an interior, wordless prayer, a gazing into the heart of God. Silence and word, simple movements (such as sitting, prostrating,, standing, and quiet) became a ritual fugue in ascetic and monastic morning and evening prayer.