On the evening of October 23rd, 2024, the Huffington Ecumenical Institute (HEI) at Hellenic College Holy Cross, in cooperation with the Pappas Patristic Institute, had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Douglas Christie—a renowned theologian, ecological writer and thinker, and expert on the contemplative tradition of the Desert Fathers—to deliver a presentation entitled, “Night in the Desert: An Ancient Monastic Ecology of Darkness.” Rev. Fr. John Chryssavgis, the Executive Director of HEI, welcomed Dr. Christie as a personal friend and fellow “sojourner” on the path of spiritual discovery and growth. For his part, Dr. Christie spoke warmly of the spiritual companionship offered to him by countless Orthodox Christians over the years and noted especially the (trans)formative influence Orthodox monasticism has had on his own life and work.
To a gathering of HCHC students and faculty, also joined by several distinguished scholars, clerics, and students from nearby institutions, Dr. Christie presented a rich interweaving of monastic reflections, meditations, and anecdotes centering around nighttime experience in the desert. Our focus was directed to the increasingly overlooked (and potentially vanishing) dynamism of the night in contemporary spiritual practice. Today, despite the pacification of night by ubiquitous artificial light, whatever remnants of silence and darkness we do happen to experience are almost singularly associated with inactivity, and therefore considered “lost” time by us according to the prevailing measures of modern life. To the desert monastics who daily confronted night in the wilderness as an inevitable reality—sometimes alone but more often surrounded by their brothers and other “creatures of the night,” both human and inhuman—however, nighttime was abounding with opportunities for unique experiences of work, prayer, care, reflection, spiritual struggle, and self-discovery.
Across a series of illustrative examples, often equally edifying as they were amusing, Dr. Christie highlighted the broad scope of the monastic experience of nighttime in the desert. We heard of Abba Longinus, who was driven by prideful thoughts to sleep exposed in the desert, only to be confronted with the bare (and barren) reality of his puffed-up ego. And Abba Theonas, who communed with the beasts at night as if he was in the Garden. And Abba Macarius, whose clever system of way markers for traveling by night was undone by an even cleverer demon, that he might learn to trust in God and not himself. Abba Moses—a paragon of reform and repentance—prayed nightly for six years without relief from past temptations but only found the beginnings of solace in God through his nightly trips to the well to surreptitiously refill his brothers’ water stores. In these stories, the night is not simply a time of danger, temptation, and demonic activity—though these were certainly realities desert monks perpetually faced—but also a time of heightened awareness that drew the monks, by a variety of means, closer to each other, to the world around them, and ultimately, to the God they so fervently desired to see and behold.
In all its dangers and ascetical demands, nighttime in the desert exacted vigilance from the entire monastic community. Standing vigil in communal prayer, monks expressed strength in numbers against the night and called upon the Light to return and shine down upon them. Yet amidst these heroic feats of defiance against the darkness and foolish hope in the coming Light, we see also the very small and very quiet human acts of compassion and care that define a life of Christian self-offering. Dr. Christie drew our attention to Abba Poemen who, when asked by a group of old men if it was a duty for a monk to wake his sleeping brother during a vigil, responded simply by saying, “If I see my brother sleeping, I put his head on my knees and let him rest.” This is the “hidden work” of the night—things done under the cover of darkness, with only God as our witness, which express the purest forms of Christian love. Monastic vigilance is first and foremost a concerted effort to keep the mind on God. But as we see, in so doing, God often directs our attention instead to serving the more immediate needs of those around us; not at the expense of Him, of course, but of our self-concern.
What exactly do we lose when nighttime begins to vanish from our lives? Surely, the consuming darkness of despair does not fail to resurface time and time again. Nor do the deserts of meaning we often find ourselves traversing grow less wearisome amidst the flood of constant light propelling the ever-wakeful modern life. Depending on how it is approached, nighttime can be an inconvenient obstacle to overcome or a wondrous paradox to embrace in the grace of God. As Dr. Christie’s presentation drew to a close, we heard beautiful personal testimonies from those gathered of their own paradoxical experiences of the night: nursing a hungry infant under the immense weight of motherhood; roaming the desert alone on horseback but feeling the presence of God; fleeing the cacophony of city noise under the simple shelter of a park shrub. These otherwise mundane experiences are transfigured in the night. In one sense, our human frailty comes into fuller relief at night, and we find ourselves necessarily drawn closer to one another. And yet, the solitude of night may also provide our only escape from the blur of activity that consumes our waking hours; through it, we find ourselves drawn back in and recover our sense of inner peace and wholeness. The experience of nighttime remains essential to contemporary Orthodox spirituality. As it was then, so also it is now vital that we continue to welcome the night into our lives in all its dreadfulness and spontaneity. By night, we experience a stripping away of the accretions of presumption that imperceptibly accumulate in our hearts and minds during the day. Without such purgative and subversive experience, our spiritual life begins to ossify and can no longer adapt to the circumstances placed before it. A spiritual life “polluted” by light in several senses of the term only grows more delusional—more lost in its darkness—and hurdles further and further into the outer desert of despair. Yet by the grace of God, natural darkness can allow supernatural light to shine more starkly. It is by such light that even the seemingly barren desert can reveal itself to be truly an intricate web of interconnected life—a subtle miracle of Creation hidden against a backdrop of overwhelming austerity and precarity. In short, we are called to appreciate the spiritual dynamism of night as the Desert Fathers once did, and a few continue to today, lest we forsake our access to a kairotic and life-affirming opportunity to recognize our own fundamental need and to respond to the needs of others in a manner which glorifies our Creator and exemplifies the self-offering love of Christ perfected on the Cross.
Author: Benjamin Malian, First Year Master of Theological Studies (MTS), Hellenic College Holy Cross School of Theology