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The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection

Amazon.com Price:  $12.26 (as of 01/05/2019 11:28 PST- Details)

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The fourth-century ascetic flight to the desert indelibly marked Christianity. The faithful who did not embrace the austerity of the desert admired those who did and sought them out for counsel and consolation. The ‘words’ the monks gave were collected and passed around among those too far away or too feeble to make the trek themselves – or lived generations later. In the past available only in fragments, these Sayings of the Desert Fathers are now accessible in its entirety in English for the first time. We have a great deal to be informed from their integrity and their unrelenting courage, from their vision of God – so Holy, so great, possessed of this type of love, that nothing less than one’s whole being could respond to it. These were women and men who had reached a humility of which we don’t have any idea, because it isn’t rooted in an hypocritical or contrived depreciation of self, but in the vision of God, and a humbling experience of being so loved. They were ascetics, ruthless to themselves, yet so human, so immensely compassionate not only to the needs of men but also to their frailty and their sins; women and men wrapped in a depth of inner silence of which we don’t have any idea and who taught by ‘Being’, not by speech: ‘If a man cannot consider my silence, he will never consider my words.’ If we need to consider the sayings of the Fathers, let us approach them with veneration, silencing our judgments and our own thoughts so as to meet them on their own ground and perhaps to partake in the end – if we prove able to emulate their earnestness in the search, their ruthless determination, their infinite compassion—in their own silent communion with God.

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