Joel 2:12-18 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2 Matthew 6:1-6.16-18
Once there was a monk whose name was Zossima. He was “renowned for his way of life and gift of words”. “From his infancy he was nourished in the monastic way of life” and, staying in the same monastery for fifty years, “he observed in everything the rule”; adding to it exercises and devotions of his own. Many came to him “to put themselves under the direction of his greater discipline”, and he taught them. He lived happily like this until the age of fifty-three. Then a thought began tormenting him. You have done it, said the thought; there is nobody out there to teach you anything new, that's all there is to it, there is nothing more to achieve, to look forward to, to hope for: just more of the same, and then death.
One day, while he struggled against this and similar thoughts, a voice said to him more or less the following: Indeed, you have done well Zossima. But know this. True perfection is out of reach for human beings; and yet greater achievements than yours are in fact possible, but your mind became so narrow and closed that you can't even imagine them at the moment. “So that you may know how many and varied are the ways of salvation,” go to such and such a monastery near the river Jordan.
So Zossima went there, and tried to place himself under the direction of the Abbot. The latter refused, however, saying “God alone who heals human infirmity will teach us to do what is right”. In that monastery Zossima found a community of old men who were at least his equals in observance, and yet none of them felt they could teach others. Instead, they respected and supported one another in the pursuit of a common goal: “intimate familiarity with Christ their God”. So he joined them. But as it turned out, the main reason why God had led Zossima there was the local custom of observing Lent, very much in keeping with their general outlook on monasticism. After Mass on the first Sunday of Lent, each of the monks would pack some food for the journey. They then embraced each other and left the monastery one by one to wander in the desert, surviving as best they could, fasting and fighting with the demons there, only to come back in time for Palm Sunday.
“There was one rule and command inflexibly observed by all: not to know about each other, or how the others lived and fasted.” So when Lent came, that is what Zossima did. He packed some food, walked out of the monastery and headed for the wilderness, and “something in his soul urged him to go deep into the desert...”
That would be my very loose paraphrase, with copious commentary here and there, of a story written down for us by St Sophronius of Jerusalem (c. 560 – 638). The monk Zossima is the main character in it, but not the real subject. It's not his life that St Sophronius wants us to learn about, but the life of St Mary of Egypt. She was one of the harlots of the desert, a converted prostitute, whom Zossima is about to find living permanently deep within the wilderness, far beyond what he could only reach through extreme Lenten observances, and that just for a short time. It is clear from the way the story is told that the reader is meant to identify with Zossima, and then let himself be led to St Mary of Egypt, and that Lent has a crucial role to play in this journey.
So, first of all, how is each of us Zossima? It is easy to be put off by his outwardly perfect life from identifying with him. But the key point about Zossima is not that he is so good, but that he is stuck and feels trapped. He has achieved something; humanly speaking, he has arrived somewhere. He'd taken on a life-project and he succeeded in it, succeeded by reaching the limits of what's humanly possible, and in his particular case that happened to be quite a lot. But so what? In a way being stuck in a relatively good place makes it all the more difficult to get unstuck. People looked up to Zossima, praised him, sought his advice: what's not to like? On the other hand, he felt that he had no-one to talk to himself, probably wrongly. Sounds familiar? In some ways it's a classic mid-life crisis, but we undergo these trials at every stage of our lives, often finding ourselves on a kind of tolerable but boring spiritual plateau, in a respectable and safe state of affairs which, however, slowly but surely, becomes suffocating from the inside out. It is being the older brother in the story of the prodigal son. Frankly, this is who we are most of the time.
What is the role of Lent then? It's a God-given time for getting dislodged. Time to move out of your comfort zone and explore the wilderness around you a little bit, in a controlled way, knowing that you can always go back. It can give us a sense of travelling light through life, so that we can appreciate being cared for by God better. It's a time for considering the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. We “do” Lent together, as a Church, as a community, and yet each individual is left to wander separately from others, encouraged to find a lonely place in the desert, to keep a secret. After all, one of Jesus's definitions of God is “your Father who sees in secret”. Lent usually turns out to be a joyful season somehow. Part of it must be precisely this sense of setting out on an adventure, the excitement of having a secret which only God knows about. It's all kind of adolescent, but in a good way. We regress for a limited time to playing games, but are justified in doing so by being God's children, and by the fact that these games have an edge to them, they are dangerous.
This brings us to the final lesson of Zossima's story, represented by St Mary of Egypt. And it is that, in the end, nothing beats true repentance; nothing gives greater spiritual power than a healthy sense of sin, which breeds a desire for God. During Lent we expose ourselves a little bit more to the light of Christ. The danger is that grace may actually succeed this time in penetrating into our hearts, and we in turn will feel compelled to change our ways. We recoil from the very thought of that, preferring the narrow, suffocating status quo, our own creation. But what becomes apparent in the light of Christ, what St Mary of Egypt saw while she was still a sinner, is, first of all, God's love for us, and secondly our own great dignity. Sin is merely the shadow side of this first fundamental truth. She ran from these shadows far into the desert, outrunning Zossima's respectable efforts by miles. Lent offers all of us a chance to bridge the gap.
DSP