Out in the desert, Abba Arsenius was not renowned for disciplining himself specially hard. This offended one of the scrupulous young monks, who used to work as a shepherd, always slept on the ground and ate sparse meals of gruel. So the young monk went to one of the elders, but the elder asked him: Do you know what Arsenius did before he became a monk? No I don’t. He was a tutor to the imperial family, and he slept between sheets of silk. Arsenius has given up rather more than you have.
One of the things you notice about contemplative people -- not always but often -- is that they become less and less interested in passing moral judgement or pinning labels on people. When Benedict in his Rule makes some regulation, he likes to add that this may need to be modified for other monks -- at any rate, the Abbot not only can but should arrange what he thinks best. Fr Laurence Freeman likes to remind us that God does not take one person’s side against another, a notion which may come as a surprise to some.
But (you may also have noticed) the secular culture these days is hugely judgemental. We need to know whom to blame for any untoward event. Our newspapers every day sniff out alleged hypocrisy and moral failure and find plenty of it, and hold it up to public view. A cultural window such as Coronation Street is simply an unending record of the ways people fail each other and accuse each other. This is all very curious, because the secular culture is also dedicated to the view that it is religious people who are the censorious hypocrites.
If you simply can’t be bothered with all this, then stillness and silence are the antidote. When they confronted Jesus with the woman caught in adultery for his judgement, he said nothing. He wrote in the dust with his finger... and eventually spoke not to them but to the woman: I don’t condemn you. Go and don’t sin again. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writes that because of our baptism we are bound to the patient, long-term discovery of what grace is doing with us over the years. In meditation, introduced to our own empty-handedness, our own inner silence where God is, we may glimpse how our own inner frailty and poverty are always known and loved by God, and are in the process of change, and so we find we scarcely know how to pass judgement on ourselves any more, let alone on anyone else.
My favourite desert story, perhaps because of all the years spent in parish churches, tells of the brothers who went to ask advice of Abba Moses because one of their number was regularly falling asleep each evening during the late office. Abba Moses replied: Well, for myself, when I see a brother getting sleepy, I let him rest his head on my knees.
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