Sit In Your Cell

September 2, 2015 | A Word From the Desert

‘Sit in your cell and it will teach you everything,’ the desert elders said. The point was that unless a person could find God HERE, in this one place, the cell, they would not find God by going somewhere else. But the elders had no illusions about what it meant to stay in the cell: it meant to stay there in mind as well as in body. To stay there in body, but to think about the outside world, was already to have left it.

Sayings of the Desert Fathers
Artwork: Phyllis Nicoll