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About this blog

By Anonymous
Wisdom of the Desert is a ministry of Calvary Episcopal Church in downtown Memphis, TN. Contributors include the Revs. Amber Carswell, Scott Walters, and Paul McClain, along with the occasional guest.

We'll be referencing the collections of sayings of the desert fathers, along with "Where God Happens" by Rowan Williams and "Wisdom of the Desert" by Thomas Merton. We hope you'll read along with us.

Visit us at www.calvarymemphis.org for more information!

Popular posts from this blog

Bootstraps & Hermits

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According to Laurence Freeman, some hermits used to say, "If you see a young man climbing up to heaven by his own will, catch him by the foot and pull him down to earth, for it is not good for him." Hard as I pull on my own bootstraps, I’ve never been able to lift myself even an inch toward heaven. Have you? The cliche has never made a lick of sense to me. It makes perfect sense, however, that a bootstrap would provide a fine grip if you’re trying to pull somebody else back down to earth. It seems the bootstrap theology of the hermits of the Egyptian desert was a near perfect inversion of ours. Our conception of economic life is one thing that’s floated off toward the heavens in my lifetime. We’ve increasingly thought of economic health more in terms of disembodied markets rather than incarnate human beings living deeply interconnected lives. It's more about Dow Jones Averages than actual people who get up in the morning and cook a meal or teach a child or install a fauce...
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The Prime Directive

By Anonymous
Some brothers came to a holy hermit who lived in the desert and outside the hermitage they found a boy tending the sheep and using uncouth words. After they had told the hermit their thoughts and profited from his reply, they said, “Abba, why do you allow those boys to be here, and why don’t you order them to stop hurling abuse at each other?” He said, “Indeed, my brothers, there are days when I want to order them to stop it, but I hold myself back, saying, if I can’t put up with this little thing, how shall I put up with a serious temptation, if God ever lets me be so tempted? So I say nothing to them, and try to get into the habit of bearing whatever happens.” — I should start off by admitting to you that I watch Star Trek. You don’t have to watch Star Trek to understand this blog post, but why wouldn’t you? It’s a quarantine, y’all, and it’s a great show. I do, however, have one problem with Star Trek. Set in a time centuries from now, it depicts the human race as havin...
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Painstaking speech

By Anonymous
Technology, folks are saying, will help us overcome the isolation we’re feeling during this pandemic. And to some extent, that’s true. I can see my friends and co-workers in digital replication on Zoom, or glean some good ideas from my creative friends on how to spend the time, or track how communal response is unfolding in communities far from me. But considering the well-established fact that social media hasn’t had an overall positive effect on our relationships, self-esteem, anxiety levels, loneliness, sleep patterns — not to mention our national conversation — I’m more than a little concerned. If social media and the digital existence are our lifelines now, what sort of life will we find answering on the other end of the line? Rowan Williams writes in Where God Happens  (p. 76), “However physically distant we may be from the more obvious temptations, there is always the damage that can be done by speech, by the giving and receiving of doubtfully truthful perspectives, the...
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