Desert Spirituality in Downtown Seattle

Charles de Foucald is a good model for us today, how to live as a monk in the world, without a monastery.

We must find a way to develop inwardness and solitude, a “desert”, wherever we are. We must withdraw from the world, to inward stillness and silence.

“To receive the grace of God you must go to a desert place and stay awhile. There you can be emptied and unburdened of everything that does not pertain to God. There the house of our soul is swept clean to make room for God alone to dwell...We need this silence, this absence of every creature, so that God can build this hermitage within us.” – Charles De Foucald

“...to live alone with God...one must cross the desert and dwell in it to receive the grace of God. It is here one drives out everything that is not God.

“The soul needs to enter into this silence, this recollection, this forgetfulness of all created things by which God establishes his rule in it, and forms within it the life of the spirit, the life of intimacy with God, the conversation of the soul with God in faith, hope, and charity…

“It is in this solitude, in that lonely life alone with God, in profound recollection of soul in forgetfulness of created things, that God gives himself to the soul that thus gives itself whole and entire to him.” ~~ Charles de Foucald

Brother Charles imagined Jesus teaching him: “Make for yourself a desert where you will be as much alone with me as Mary Magdalene was alone in the desert with me. It is through detachment that you will attain in this, by driving out all mean [petty] thoughts, all littleness which are not evil in themselves, but which succeed in scattering your mind from me, when you should be contemplating me from morning until night.”

“Fix your mind on me as your work, as you pray; contemplative me unceasingly and give all the time you can to prayer and holy reading, which will unite you to me and though which I will speak to you as I spoke to my parents and Mary Magdalene at Nazareth and Bethany.

“He who loves has his beloved always in mind; that time to him well spent that is spent in contemplating him, and that time to him is wasted when he is out of sight.

“Let your soul melt into mine, immerse yourself into me.

“Think of how often I have told you to hope for the day when you will lean forever on my breast. And since I allow it to you, now to begin to live this sweet life, in silence with Mary Magdalene and my mother and Saint Joseph, lay your head upon my breast and so accomplish your pilgrimage.” de Foucald wrote. 

Thomas Merton said that in our time, the desert is everywhere, especially in the city, filled with howling desolation of loneliness.

“The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of god precisely because it had no value to man…

“Yet look at the desert today. What are they? The birthplace of a new and terrible creation, the testing ground of the power by which man seeks to uncreate what God has blessed… Man no longer needs God, and he can live in the desert on his own resources…

“When man and his money and machines move out into the desert, and dwell there, not fighting the devil as Christ did, but believing in his promises of power and wealth, and adoring his angelic wisdom, then the desert itself moves everywhere. Everywhere is desert. Everywhere is solitude in which man must do penance and fight the adversity and purify his own heart in the grace of God.”

“This then is our desert: to live facing despair, but do not consent. To trample it down under hope in the cross...That war is our wilderness.” [Thoughts in Solitude, p. 20]

Carlo Caretto, a follower of de Foucald’s desert way, said, “If you cannot go into the desert, you must nonetheless ‘make some desert’ in your life. Very now and then leaving others and looking for some solitude to restore in prolonged silence and prayer, the stuff of your soul. This is the meaning of ‘desert’ in your spiritual life…

“You must leave everything and everybody and retire, alone with God.. If you don’t look for this solitude, if you don’t love it, you won’t achieve real contemplative prayer.”