Disturbance and Stillness

From The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, Benedicta Ward, ed.

There were three friends who each had a reputation for hard work: Each of the three had staked out for himself a way of life he believed faithful. The first one took to heart Jesus’ beatitude ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and chose to spend his life reconciling those who fought one another. The second adopted as his life’s work the care of the sick. The third went out to the desert to live a life of prayer and stillness.

The first, for all his efforts, found himself unable to make peace in a world bent on hatred and vengeance and war. Disheartened, he sought out his friend the healer, to see if he had fared any better. But the second was equally dispirited.

So the two went to the third. They told him of their own lives, how they had pursued the noble ventures of peacemaking and healing but had somehow, along the way, lost heart. They begged him to guide them, to tell them somewhere to go, something to do.

The three sat in silence a while. Then the third, the desert dweller, poured water into a bowl and told them to look at the water. It lapped up against the sides, agitated, swirling and bobbing up and down. They sat a while. Then he said to them, ‘Look how still the water is now.’ When they looked down again, they saw their own faces. The water had become a mirror.

And so the desert dweller said to his friends: ‘It’s that way for someone who lives among human beings. The agitations, the shake-ups, block one from seeing one’s faults; but once one becomes quiet, still, especially in the desert, then one sees one’s failings.’