Becoming Desert: A Journal of Hesychastic Struggle in the West - Part VI: Bearing the Absurd Commandments Entry 33

Introduction

I did not go into the wilderness. I was not tonsured on a holy mountain. I live in the West, where noise seeps into the bones and the air is thick with restlessness. Yet something in me aches for the desert, for that place where men and women once wrestled with God and were broken open until mercy filled them.

This is not a manual, not a polished theology, not a record of visions. It is simply a journal of one who seeks hesychasm in hiddenness. I am not a monk in the desert but a struggler in a room. Yet the Fathers said: “Go to your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” So I go.

What follows are fragments from that cell: noise, failure, temptation, tears, glimpses of grace. The desert is not far away. The desert is within.

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Part VI: Bearing the Absurd Commandments

Entry 33: Stranger and Exile

I no longer fit. The conversations of the world feel shallow, its pursuits exhausting. I walk among others, but I feel like a foreigner, even in my own land. The Fathers said: “The monk is a stranger in the world.” Now I know what they meant. It is lonely, but it is also freedom. My home is elsewhere.