Wisdom from a Desert Mother

Today is International Women’s Day, so it is fitting to feature some wisdom from one of the desert mothers. Most of the first hermits and monastics started out in cities, within homes and unused buildings on large estates or at the edge of towns. Often these secluded spaces were owned and occupied by women. The hermit and monastic life was very appealing to some women. It offered one of the few means to escape the Roman expectation of a life confined to the home, being a wife and mother. Among Christian ascetics, a woman could live on her own, with no expectation she would take care of anyone else. When women moved into the deserts, they often dressed like men or eunuchs to escape the notice of robbers. 

One of those women was Amma Syncletica. ( Amma means mother) She was born to rich Christians parents who died. She sold everything to the poor, and then went into seclusion in the family tomb with her blind sister. She stayed there until other women heard about her, and she became their spiritual leader, long before their were convents. Like other hermits and monks, she felt this life was a prelude to the next, heavenly life. But she expressed this idea in metaphors that came from female experience:

“Whatever we do or gain in this world, let us consider it insignificant in comparison to the eternal wealth that is to come. We are on this earth as if in a second maternal womb. In the inner recess we did not have a life such as we have here, for we did not have there solid nourishment such as we enjoy  now, nor were we able to be active as we are here, and we existed without the light of the sun and of any glimmer of light. Just as, then, when we were in that inner chamber, we did without many of the things of this world, so also in the present world we are impoverished in comparison with the kingdom of heaven. We have sampled the nourishment here; let us reach for the divine! We’ve enjoyed the light in this world; let us long for the sun of righteousness! Let us regard to heavenly Jerusalem as our homeland… Let us live prudently in this world that we may obtain an eternal life.”

Our culture is so focused on this life and what is before us that we don’t take much interest in what might happen after we die, or in the existence of a heavenly dimension now. Meditators and mystics get a taste of it, that deep calm and sense that all is well. Syncletica lived at a time when political life was in serious upheaval. She imagined this life as only part of our human story.  We are in a womb, awaiting birth into the heavenly light where we will truly be what we were meant to be when God created us. How does that idea make you feel? Is there more to life than what meets the eye? If there is, how does that affect how we live in the here and now? 

-Rev. Stephen Milton, Lawrence Park Community Church, Toronto

Source: Laura Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women,( New York, 2001), p.20. 

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