St. Anthony and Kwantlen (The Desert in the City)

Kwantlen is a frenzied place to go to school. Students are often in a rush, running from class to tutorial to study session before getting a “break” when they get to stand in line at Tim Horton’s for 15 minutes during lunch hour. And a major reason for such a hectic education is the goal (and perhaps the pressure) of getting a degree which will launch a solid career path. Not only are that, but a huge percentage of students, one of the highest in the country, also work part- or full-time while attending Kwantlen. So in addition to feeling hectic at school, many of these students might have to drive across the city to get to a job that starts half an hour after a class ends. And if to all of this we add external commitments to a spouse, family, religious community, or friends, then we might conclude that “frenzied” is putting the situation rather lightly.

I suspect that many of us may actually live a similar life to the average Kwantlen student. There are a multitude of pressures coming in from all sorts of places – work, family, church, friends, committees, boards, etc. In a lot of ways, it seems as though such a situation can’t be avoided. How could we possibly escape such pressures? We can and possibly should choose to take on less projects and less commitments than many of us do. But in a lot of ways, I feel like this situation of multiple pressures is sort of the air we breathe, the water we swim in. Baring a radical life-style change, we’re sort of “stuck”; if we choose to take on less commitments then we’ll either take on something else or what we already have taken on will swell and expand to fill the little breathing room we may have managed to create.

What does such a context mean spiritually? How does learning, living, and inhabiting such an environment affect our lives lived before the face of God?

In the first place, I think, it’s a spiritual challenge. It is fatiguing. It is unsettling, fragmenting, disorienting. If our hearts are truly restless until they rest in God, then it is clear that the restlessness of our contemporary life presents a challenge to that aim, that end, that final goal of communion with God. And sometimes it is not clear that such a challenge can be overcome. Where is God to be found? How can we “rest” in him? Even in times of prayer we aren’t “restful”; concerns and anxieties are often the first thing to distract me from prayer, from entering into the word of God in the scriptures.

But is there any unique gift that our fragmented postmodern lives can offer to living with God? Or are we simply doomed by our culture to have (or to want to have) successful careers, a network of colleagues and friends, excellent healthcare, a large house, long life, and all the anxieties that accompany such a life-style?

I don’t really have the answer to this question. I waver between having more despair (which this post suggests) and having more hope, where perhaps spiritual practices of prayer, worship, silence, and solitude can break into our sense of fragmentation, where these practices can create a centre rather than another piece of an impossible puzzle.

In an admittedly different context (Egypt about 1700 years ago) there was a wealthy Christian named Anthony. By this point Christians were no longer being persecuted. They had freedom to worship, they were involved in running society, they now held power a certain amount of power and influence. In that way, somewhat similar to how we might feel studying at Kwantlen: get a degree, get a job, contribute to society! Go, go, go!

In Church one day he heard the gospel reading say “Sell all you have and give it to the poor. Then come and follow me.” Anthony was a literalist – he did precisely that and went off into the desert for a life of prayer, scripture reading, and simplicity. It wasn’t long before he was being joined by others, now known as the “Desert Mothers and Fathers”: the beginning of monastic community.

Not many of us will choose or even could choose such an extreme change in life-style. But we can find some hope in this: Anthony was given a vision of his “spiritual equal”. Who could this possibly be? Anthony had given up everything to follow Christ, surrendered a wealthy life for one of poverty and commitment to relationship with God and others. This vision, though, showed a regular person in the regular city, working a regular job: plumber, lawn-mower, accountant, or what have you.

So the radical retreat and life-style change of Anthony is an important expression of a spiritual yearning for God. But that radical spiritual yearning is available to anyone, anywhere. Our contemporary life, expressed by a career driven place like Kwantlen, does indeed offer challenges. There are things that need to be refused in order to live life with God. But sometimes it feels like we simply can’t refuse the frenzied pace; it’s simply inescapable.

However, I think that Anthony’s vision tells a different story. We can live a radically spiritual life in the midst of a radically non-spiritual context. The intensity of Anthony’s commitment to God is available to us, too. How this is the case, I am not really sure. But Jesus affirms a similar point when he is addressed with the pressures of his day and age: a family that thinks he’s out of his mind. (Mark 3:31-34)

Then Jesus' mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they send someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, "Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you."
"Who are my mother and my brothers?" he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."