The Hidden Riches of the Desert

This essay was written by a Dominican Nun of St. Dominic’s Monastery in Linden, VA. 

Picking up Zena Hitz’s latest book, A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, I recalled a little volume I read soon after entering the cloister: a Thomistic analysis of the religious life in terms of Aristotle’s four causes. Suffice it to say that this is a work of a different sort. As in any lively conversation, Hitz’s book unfolds often freewheelingly and provocatively, resisting linear synopsis and predictable conclusions.

Coming from the decidedly secular realm of academia—written by a Princeton-educated philosopher and published by Cambridge University Press—Hitz’s book speaks to a broad audience that includes both professional philosophers and “anyone seeking insight into his or her own life and the choices that structure it.” The author is a lay professor who once embarked on “desert adventures” of her own, not to excavate and report on some ancient phenomenon, but to experience its timeless power to transform the soul. So have countless men and women before her, whose stories season her own: from Abba Antony of Egypt and Brother Francis of Assisi, to believers of all classes, nationalities, and personalities even now.

As I read these pages, I can imagine myself in Professor Hitz’s seminar room at St. John’s College in Annapolis, or maybe conversing with her at Madonna House, the Ontario-based community where she formerly lived. Her exploration unfolds amiably, passionately, and openly, like an invitation to journey for a while together into a strange land. Or shall I say from a strange land, on a quest for true authenticity?

Hitz casts her net widely and deeply, seeking to understand how Jesus’s words have been written on human hearts and human lives. Most of us can sympathize readily enough with the Gospel of Matthew’s rich young man, the one who falters in the face of the absolute and quite rationally looks for an easier path. But what sense can be made, Hitz asks, of those “who loved God and sacrificed everything to serve him?” “What does Antony seek in the desert that he could not find on his fruitful acres?” What do men and women truly and ultimately seek, however falteringly, still today?

Dependence and Wholeheartedness

Searching for guides along the way of her inquiry, the author is “promiscuous with [her] sources,” drawing on an array of witnesses from East to West. “In doing so,” she remarks,

I reach well beyond any pretense I might have to an expert understanding of these sources, their home communities, or their historical or cultural richness. My hope is that this will make it easier to be philosophical, as the title suggests: to find what is universal, true, relevant, and human in the practices of Christian religious life.

As in her previous book, Lost in Thought, she situates her philosophical ponderings within the context of her own life, here spotlighting a crisis precipitated by her conversion to the Catholic faith. Like Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac at the Lord’s behest, Hitz realizes that unconditional love of God, “wholehearted commitment without compromise,” might demand the renunciation even of what she has held most dear.

Wholeheartedness: If I had to distill Hitz’s theme and goal into one word, it would be this: the term echoes throughout these pages, recalling the earliest monastic literature with its scriptural ideal of the pure and undivided heart. This is the desire the young professor finds burning in herself.

I was tired of using myself and being used; I wanted to live a life that could not be bought or sold . . . I wanted a life that was dedicated, wholehearted, and governed by what I aspired to hold as my deepest values, love of God and love of neighbor.

As Hitz the philosopher duly notes, it is not only Christian ascetics who prize wholeheartedness but her classical forebears as well. Philosophers such as Socrates might embrace poverty for the sake of total dedication to the pursuit of wisdom, and we can “strain every nerve,” as Aristotle says, to live in excellence and to “make ourselves immortal.” Jesus’s followers, in contrast, renounce not only material goods, but such human striving, too; they embrace both physical poverty and poverty of spirit.

This is the shocking realization that Abraham’s story sparks in Hitz, illuminated for her by the Epistles of St. Paul: the recognition of our weakness, blindness, and creaturely dependence. In short, “we do not ‘grasp’ our highest end” as the ancient philosophers propose, for divine communion is ultimately beyond human reach. “Part of the point of renunciation,” she reflects, “is to clear the obstacles to grace: to break our habits of choosing that blind us to what we might receive . . . Christian discipline involves the use of the will to choose to receive and to choose to suffer, habitually and freely and out of love.” Such receptivity, needless to say, is far from mousy resignation. It is the courageous choice to welcome the presence and designs of God in the people and happenings of each day, to make Jesus’s words our own, “Not my will but thine be done.”

“In my beginning is my end, and in my end is my beginning.” This line might describe what Hitz simply terms “the call:” the impetus to leave the world and to pursue religious life. Guided by stories of individuals who have done just that, Hitz situates our human itinerary within the context of eternity. Profound grief and joy alike can inspire insight into the vanity of earthly things, as we glimpse the transience of temporal pleasures and the fragility of our existence. Such a vision can provoke despair, prompting a retreat into “willed loneliness” and the self-protection of lukewarmness. But it can also kindle love in the unveiling of our deepest longing: “God has put the world into our hearts . . . We cannot help wanting eternity—not everlasting activity where our muscles get sore, our eyes tired, and our souls sink into boredom—but a joy that does not end.” This longing for eternity, for what is timeless and complete, is in Hitz’s words, “the shape of God himself that he has put into our hearts.”

Poverty’s Hidden Treasure

How is poverty linked to love, especially communion with the transcendent God? This question is manifestly close to the author’s heart. Poverty responds, she suggests, to a twofold human desire: to live in the truth and to encounter a loving God. Although wealth and power can give us prominence, they can also hide us from ourselves: “We begin to imagine that somehow our success is thanks to our own efforts, and our own just reward . . . The truth about who we are and what truly belongs to us only unearths itself in a crisis, or through deliberate ascetic practice.” Here, Hitz narrates how she tries to peel away the onion skins of her own pride and ambition. At last, she begins serving in a jail—the darkest place she’s ever seen—requiring strength beyond her own:

That was the magnetic attraction of the thing. It was, in part, a burning desire to see the hidden parts of my culture and of myself . . . That was a desire for reality, for truth, and to be changed in myself in accordance with that truth. Underneath that desire was a desire for a communion in human recognition, to recognize my humanity in the incarcerated women—and a hope that they might see theirs in mine.

Transformative as the experience is, Hitz realizes that the totality she seeks is not attained in charitable service tacked onto one’s career. Nor can religious poverty be reduced to solidarity with the poor. Rather, it is rooted in the love of God through conformity to the Poor Man, Jesus Christ. In him, the rich discover their spiritual poverty; the poor, their human dignity; both encounter the truth that they are richly loved. And in receiving this love, each person is empowered to love in turn, so that, within and among us, poverty builds up the kingdom of God.

The Freedom of Abandonment

“Abandonment and freedom” is the final theme the book takes up, “the end for which total renunciation is an effective means.” For her principal example and inspiration, the author turns to Walter Ciszek, a Jesuit tortured and imprisoned for over a decade in Soviet Russia. Abandonment, Hitz knows well, is an “act of faith [that] evades many believers—we are always negotiating, setting conditions, cutting compromises with our plans and desires so that we can feel ourselves to be in control.” Truly to abandon oneself, by contrast, is “to trust without reservation that God is in fact real and present, loving and protecting [us] in his providence.” Like so many missionaries and martyrs, founders and disciples through the ages, Ciszek bears witness that such abandonment flowers in heroic love: “Each person and event presented in a given moment offers a chance to act as Christ would act, to act out of love.” Such a doctrine, Hitz muses, provides a “needed corrective to a moralized Christianity,” for trust in God requires the radical renunciation of belief in oneself. We must come to accept our very brokenness, and so to accept the mercy of God.

I’d like to push on just one more point that bears upon the whole: “The core commitments of religious institutes are not different in substance from the Christian life that all Christians are called to lead, no matter their walk of life.” So why risk the desert at all? Hitz posits: “The difference between religious life and the life of an ordinary Christian lies not in any core principle but in its social role. Religious life sets out to communicate the central teaching of Christianity.”

The idea is appealing, of course, but is it true? Abba Antony’s story sheds some light: “Flocks of disciples chased him into ever more desolate places. His life, written by Athanasius, caused a sensation in late antiquity.” Indeed, it was the catalyst for Augustine’s conversion, also “inspiring religious foundations in the East and the West.” Doubtless, then, the religious life, even the cloistered contemplative life, can serve as a form of preaching to the world around, but such communication, I would contend, cannot be its fundamental goal. Think of Antony venturing into the desert ever deeper: surely it was not to be seen and followed, but to see and follow Jesus Christ! In a word, Christian witness is only fruitful as love’s fruit, when a person is grafted onto Christ. The essential difference, then, lies in the means to pursue the end and the radical nature of that pursuit: the freedom for wholehearted love and divine service that perpetual poverty, chastity, and obedience can give, the consecration of one’s very person for religionem, for the worship of God.

Truth to tell, it would be easy to excerpt any number of passages, arguing that the statements made fall short. And I suspect the author would largely agree, and even that this is part of her approach: to circle round her subject, illuminating first one aspect then another, aware that the full breadth and length and depth are always just beyond our grasp.

This very inadequacy, however, reveals a deeper truth: no one enters the religious life, or at least nobody flourishes and perseveres, purely as the result of philosophical analysis and speculation. More simply put, the religious life is a human reality, but one animated both by reason and by faith. The philosopher, like the biblical Jacob, can wrestle through her dark nights with the deepest meaning of human existence, but to embrace this meaning fully, she cannot merely grasp but must humbly receive. “Faith is a gift of grace, not effort,” Hitz acknowledges at the end; “it is not under our control.” Hence, as Augustine so memorably confesses, to restlessly seek is not enough. I must seek, yes—and seek with zeal—but I must also discover that I have been found.

The featured image is by aarstudio and is in the public domain thanks to Adobe Stock.

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