"Staying"

One of the most telling images for the importance of staying is the advice given by another nameless elder to a brother struggling with temptation: "Go. Sit in your cell and give your body in pledge to the walls”. You have to promise yourself to yourself and to your actual environment, as if you were settling a proposal of marriage. You have to espouse reality rather than unreality; the actual limits of where and who you are rather than the world of magic where anything can happen if you want it to. The fantasy world is one in which I am not promised, espoused, to my body and my history---with all that this entails about my family, my work, my literal physical surroundings, the people I must live with, the language I must speak, and so on. It is a rather startling intensification of the command to love yourself in the right way.

This passage is from the book Where God Happens by Rowan Williams. It’s found in a chapter entitled Staying. I began reading this book months and months ago and for one reason or another put it aside a number of times. Each time I picked it up I read something that spoke to me. I’m making the effort to get through it during my summer months when I’m a little less pulled away though I’m finding I’m as much pulled away as I am during the school year. The subtitle of the book is “Discovering Christ in One Another” but it's really a meditation of lessons of living a devout and spiritual life taken from the desert mothers and fathers.

This chapter on “staying” is just rich. It speaks to me of my wandering mind and the boredom and monotony of everyday living. I must pledge myself to my life as it is and where it is. I can’t forsake the simple things like regular prayer, whether I “see” the mountaintop or the desert valley. This is a rich book that I will need to go back to again and again.