Daily Reading, May 9
The cell was a sacred space, a place in which a woman could be with herself and the divine Presence and listen. The cell was a place of divine encounter and of ongoing, daily experience of being immersed in God’s presence. Amma Syncletica’s counsel with regard to this uses a tenderly maternal metaphor—that of the mother bird hatching her young. Each woman in Syncletica’s community would have been formed by this teaching as it was repeated and handed down. The life of faith looks like a mother bird, sitting on her eggs. For all we know, that mother bird has moments when it seems like nothing is happening. There are moments when real boredom sets in and the temptation to leave the eggs and do something more interesting arises.
Amma Syncletica’s metaphor speaks directly to one of the dilemmas of the spiritual life—that of coming to terms with the plain old ordinariness of spiritual practice and the life of prayer, of the whole of life becoming prayer. Instead, we are encouraged not to sit, not to persevere, not to struggle with boredom. We are enticed by a variety of means to leave our “eggs” and simply move continually from one interest to another. The result is that we don’t allow ourselves the opportunity to bring forth new life. The “eggs” die because they are not tended. We miss the deeper life of the Spirit because we are constantly moving from one interest to another rather than focusing on one thing.
From The Desert Mothers: Spiritual Practices from the Women of the Wilderness by Mary C. Earle. © 2007. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com