Read on Twitter
reading some desert fathers & mothers this morning and here's the funniest one so far:
"They say concerning Abba Sisoes of Babylon that -- wishing to vanquish sleep -- he stood upright on a mountain crag,
"and that the angel of the Lord came and rescued him from that place, and commanded him never to do such a thing again, and not even to hand on this tradition to another."
angel:
but, honestly: this story, and the desert fathers & mothers in general -- the whole thing is paradigmatic of something I've been wrestling with, and something I don't think there's a clear answer to, which is, what do we do with the world & its goodnesses?
we have this tradition of "God is in the goodness of the world & makes it good and it is a way to Him as long as you don't take it too far and end up worshiping it"
but we also have this tradition of "the world is a snare and holiness consists in becoming utterly dead to it"
"a certain brother was travelling on a road, and his aged mother was with him, and they came to a river, which the old woman was not able to cross;
"and her son took his shoulder cloth and wound it round his hands so that he might not touch his mother's body, and in this manner he carried her across the river.
"Then his mother said to him, 'My son, why did you first wrap round your hands with the cloth, and then take me across?' And he said,
"'The body of a woman is fire, and through your body there would have come to me the memory of [the body of] another woman, and it was for this reason that I acted as I did.'"
So, it's twitter and I should therefore be talking about patriarchy and sexism and fear of female sexuality inherent in this, etc, etc, but what I'm actually interested is the sense that in pleasure and/or material goodness as such there's the fear of some kind of contagion
Lately I've been thinking less about "is gay sex bad?" and more about "how do Christians think about sex in general" because the latter has been seeming more germane to me
It seems that, once the dust settles, Christians can generally agree on "marriage good, celibacy better"
With the general understanding that celibacy is very good -- just as the extremes to which the desert fathers go, by and large, is very good -- but neither is for everyone; the Church mediates this kind of radicalism to make holiness possible for everyone
It's clear that for most Christians it is not necessary, and maybe not even a good idea, to try to renounce earthly goods to the extent the desert fathers did -- but at the same time, these people were simply just taking Jesus at his word and doing what he said!
