Some old men came to see Abba Poemen and said to him, “We see some of the brothers falling asleep during divine worship. Should we wake them up?” He said, “As for me, when I see a brother who is falling asleep during the Office, I lay his head on my knees and let him rest.” We can be deceived into thinking that the desert monks and nuns—at least those quoted here—were somehow indifferent to sin, or that their notion of relation to one another was a matter of bland acceptance. But they are not exponents of some sort of “I’m OK, you’re OK” method. They actually believe that sin is immensely serious and that separation from God is a real possibility: if you define the purpose of your life, a costly, boring, difficult life in physically harsh conditions, as “winning your neighbor,” you may reasonably be expected to believe that it is a tough and serious business, in which success isn’t guaranteed. But they also take for granted that the only way in which you know the seriousness of separation from God is in your own experience of yourself. Moses writes to Poemen, “If you have sin enough in your own life and your own home, you have no need to go searching for it elsewhere.” And, more graphically, from Moses again, “If you have a corpse laid out in your own front room, you won’t have leisure to go to a neighbor’s funeral.” This is not about minimizing sin; it is about learning how to recognize it from seeing the cost in yourself. If it can’t be addressed by you in terms of your own needs, it can’t be addressed anywhere—however seductive it is to say, “I know how to deal with this problem in your life—and never mind about mine.”
The inattention and harshness that shows we have not grasped this is for so many of the desert fathers and mothers the major way in which we fail in winning the neighbor. Poemen goes so far as to say that it is the one thing about which we can justly get angry with each other.
A brother asked Abba Poemen, “What does it mean to be angry with your brother without a cause? [The reference is obviously to Matthew 5:21 ff.] He said, “If your brother hurts you by his arrogance and you are angry with him because of this, that is getting angry without a cause. If he pulls out your right eye and cuts off your right hand and you get angry with him, that is getting angry without a cause. But if he cuts you off from God—then you have every right to be angry with him.
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 acknowledgment 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. So if we can shift our preoccupations, anxiety, and selfishness out of the way to put someone in touch with the possibility of God’s healing, to that extent we are ourselves in touch with God’s healing. So, if you gain your brother or sister, you gain God.
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