To assume the right to judge, or to assume that you have arrived at a settled spiritual maturity that entitles you to prescribe confidently at a distance for another's sickness, is in fact to leave others without the therapy they need for their souls; it is to cut them off from God, to leave them in their spiritual slavery--while reinforcing your own slavery. Neither you nor they have access to life--as in the words of Jesus, you have shut up heaven for others and for yourself. But the plain acknowledgement of your solidarity in need and failure opens a door: it shows that it is possible to live in the truth and to go forward in hope. It is in such a moment that God gives himself through you, and you become by God's gift a means of connecting another with God. You have done the job you were created to do.
Saint Anthony of the Desert says that gaining the brother or sister and winning God are linked. It is not getting them signed up to something or getting them on your side. It is opening doors for them to healing and to wholeness. Insofar as you open such doors for another, you gain God, in the sense that you become a place where God happens for somebody else. You become a place where God happens. God comes to life for somebody else in a life-giving way, not because you are good or wonderful, but because that is what God has done.
Some of the most interesting recent research on desert monasticism has been on the significance and understanding of the common life among the first generations of monks. The surface pattern of "running" or "fleeing" from human contact is much more nuanced than it seems. What is to be learned in the desert is clearly not some individual technique for communing with the divine but the business of becoming a means of reconciliation and healing for the neighbor. You "flee" to the desert not to escape neighbors but to grasp more fully what the neighbor is--the way of life to you, to the degree that you put yourself at their disposal in connecting them with God. The unusual community that is the desert monastery of the first generation is not meant to be an alternative to human solidarity but a radical version of it that questions the priorities of community in other contexts.
The neighbor is our life; to bring connectedness with God to the neighbor is bound up with our own connection with God. The neighbor is our death, communicating to us the death sentence on our attempts to settle who we are in our own terms and to cling to what we reckon as our achievements. "Death is at work in us and life in you," as Saint Paul says (2 Cor. 4:12), anticipating the themes of the desert. He is writing about how the apostle's suffering and struggle make the life of Christ visible in such a way that others are revived in hope. And it is as others discover this life in hope that we receive it too, the gift we could not have expected as we, with such difficulty and reluctance and intermittent resentment, had to learn to let go of our own lives and learn how to attend in love to the neighbor. We love with God when and only when we are the conduit for God's reconciling presence with the person next to us. It is as we connect the other with the source of life that we come to stand in the place of life, the place cleared and occupied for us by Christ.
The desert fathers and mothers might say to young people today, "What's the hurry?" They would be amazed to see the way our culture prizes speed. They might say that the hurried urgency to possess and consume is an index of falsehood and a misunderstanding of the kind of being you are. It is all right to take time. Only in taking time can you realize how much more you are than an individual. By taking time you are built by the character of the world you are in and the people around you. Wittgenstein said the most important thing one philosopher can say to another is to "take your time."
Young people do not become mature religious people of faith unless they have been helped to experience their own humanity. As a theologian, I would say this means being taught to experience their humanity as created and loved and healed. You may not necessarily say all of that to them, but that is the basis on which you move. However, too often we think religious education is about putting in more information. Instead, religious educations, when it is doing its job of "educating the spirit," has to be the conveying--in all aspects of the educational environment--of the "peaceful worthwhileness" of each person.
The difference between the person and the individual is that the individual in this framework simply means one example of a type. For instance, I can pick up an individual glass. There are lots of glasses with varying features, but you can describe them as variations on a single theme. They are examples of a general substance or nature, a type of life or reality. And although they are different from each other, they are, in principle, reducible to on basic definition. Lossky says that when we talk about the personal, we are trying to say something more than that. The person is more than just an example of a type. And a person in Christ, the holy person in a particular way, is more than that too. There is no general type of Christian holiness. There is an infinite variety of different relationships to Jesus Christ, which also becomes relationships with each other.
I love telling people at confirmation services that when I ask the Holy Spirit to come into their lives in this sacrament, I am saying that there is something you can do which nobody else can in the life of this community. I ask them not to forget that because it means that you need the church and the church needs you.
So the saint isn't someone who makes you think, "That looks hard; that's a heroic achievement of will"--with the inevitable accompanying thought, "That's too hard for me"--but someone who makes you think, "How astonishing! Human lives can be like that, behavior like that can look quite natural," with perhaps the thought, "How can I find what they have found?"
It has been said that sanctity is inimitable. While I can think of some very holy people who cry out for imitation because of all their quirks of behavior, the imitability in question is not of that kind. I cannot become holy by copying another's path. Like the novice in the desert, I must watch the elders and learn the shape and the rhythm of being Christian from those who have walked further and worked harder. And then I have to take my own steps and create a life that has never been lived before. At the day of Judgment, as we are often reminded, the question while not be about why we failed to be someone else. I will not be asked why I wasn't Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa but why I wasn't Rowan Williams. The journey is always one that leads into more, not less, uniqueness. It's all to do once again with the call to be persons, not individuals.
And now, a word from Owen:
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