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One of the better-known Desert Fathers of fourth-century Egypt, St. Sarapion the Sindonite, went on pilgrimage to Rome. Here, he was informed of a well-known recluse. This recluse, a woman, lived always in one room and never left it. Skeptical of her way of living, for he was a great wanderer, Sarapion visited her and asked, “Why are you sitting here?” She replied, “I am not sitting, I am on journey.”
Being a Christian is being on the Way. Jesus spoke, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (St. John 14.6, ESV). Acts records that “there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way” (19.23, ESV). And writes Bishop Kallistos Ware, in The Orthodox Way, “Christianity is more than a theory about the universe, more than teachings written down on paper, it is a path along which we journey—in the deepest and richest sense, the way of life.”
Notice that—the way of life. Jesus did not create the way to life. Jesus embodied and embodies the way of life. The way of life is godly, for it inheres in God eternally. The way of life is not a religious way of life, is not a moral way of life, is not a spiritual way of life, is not a creedal way of life, is not a Christian way of life, is not a church way of life, … What is it? The way of life.
To follow Christ or be in Christ is to be in the way of life, the Truth that is universal and applicable to all peoples, untouched by the truths that seem to change with time and custom. Jesus is the way, for we enter the journey that is in him. To enter his experience is to enter him. And, rightly, many Christians know that some persons are on the way in Christ and implicitly, for they might not have explicit faith in Christ as historical person, and may never have even heard of Christ, but they have surrendered, through Grace, so to God and the way in Christ, that they implicitly have accepted the Way that is the way of life. They, therefore, may be more Christian than many who have claimed explicit faith in Christ. They may know Christ more intimately than the one who has explicit faith in Christ, without allegiance to name and custom, because they have surrendered, through Grace, into the experience of the way of Christ.
However, the opening story offers us an important insight into the way of life, the Way in Christ. The recluse was living out that Way as a recluse. Too easily we assume that the more active Christian is more faithful to pilgrimage than the Christian who feels called to more solitude. I myself am called to more of a life of solitude, indeed, am vowed to solitude, and thus I know the frustration of being in a profession and Christianity that greatly undervalues the call of such persons and their equal value to the life of the Church.
If we are to have balance on the Way, we must come to appreciate the distinct callings of persons and how they each are called to be pilgrims on the Way in different ways. Some are more active, and some more passive. However, the less active serve the church at a level of spiritual depth and prayerfulness for the world that often the more active cannot, for they have not nurtured the depths that allow such deep compassion in union with God and fellow creatures. Likewise, if pastors practiced more prayerful solitude, then, their people would sense the Presnce more in their being, their teaching, their preaching, and their ministry of compassion.
Likely, the path of maturity for each of us is balancing the more active and more passive aspects of the spiritual Journey. However, the church is suffering much due to a marked undervaluing of the passive aspects of spirituality and not honoring how important persons called to such spirituality are to the life of the church.
We need, for example, pastors who live a more passive spirituality, to help balance the clear lack of balance. Likewise, we need men and women among the laity to vow to a life of prayerfulness in the closet of aloneness, to support the more active ministries of the churches.
Reflection
Are you called to a more passive or more active form of Christian spirituality? Explain your answer.
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