I have a kitchen, a mortgage, a husband who works nights, two children now grown, and twenty-two years of rising before the sun. I have never lived in a desert and I expect I never will. When I first read of the holy ones who went down to the lowest place on earth to prepare the way of the Lord, I felt what most students feel: a longing, and then a door closing. That is for them. I have a shift at seven.
This article is what I have learned since the door closed. It is for the student with a kitchen.
Why They Went
The scrolls say they went to prepare the way, and that the way is the study of the Law. That is the official reason and it is true. But the historian, who knew them, adds something the Rule does not say: that they went to be free. He describes men who had despised riches, abandoned pleasure, and so disciplined their bodies that pain did not frighten them, and he says that they lived longer than other men and that they were cheerful. He does not say they were grim. The desert had not made them grim. It had made them light.
The philosopher, describing the cousins by the lake, says it plainly. They fled their possessions as from a plague. They were running toward something, and the desert was where it was, because the desert was where nothing else was.
The Desert Is a Subtraction
This is the first thing I learned. The desert is not a place; it is a subtraction. What the holy ones found at the Dead Sea was not a presence but an absence: no city, no market, no temple, no noise, no one to impress. Into that absence something came that could not come where the noise was. The Lection says the desert does not give answers; it takes away the noise that hides them. I wrote that Lection, and I wrote it in a kitchen at five in the morning, and I meant the kitchen.
Any place can be subtracted from. A kitchen before the household wakes, with the lights off and a single candle, is a desert. A parked car at lunch with the radio off is a desert. A bathroom with the door locked is a desert. The holy ones had the advantage of a desert that stayed subtracted all day; we have to make ours, twenty minutes at a time. But the subtraction is the same, and so is what comes into it.
The Desert Is a Discipline
The second thing. The holy ones did not simply sit in the desert and wait. They kept hours, washed, ate in silence, studied a third of every night, and penalized one another for laughing. The desert was not an escape from discipline; it was a discipline, the hardest one, because there was nothing to blame for failure. A student in a kitchen can blame the children, the shift, the husband, the noise. A man on the terrace at Qumran had only himself and the dawn.
I learned to stop blaming the kitchen. The Morning Watch does not require the desert. It requires rising. The children did not prevent me from rising; I prevented me from rising, and the children were the story I told about it. When I stopped telling the story and rose, the kitchen became a terrace. It was the same kitchen.
The Desert Is a Season
The third thing, and the one I most want the continuing student to hear. The desert is also a season in the practice, and it comes to everyone. The sweetness of the early months fades. The hours grow dry. The texts go flat. The student finds herself in a place where nothing grows and nothing speaks and she does not know why she is there.
She is there because she has arrived. This is the desert the holy ones went looking for: the place where the noise has finally stopped and nothing has yet come to fill the silence. It feels like failure. It is the opposite. Israel wandered forty years in it and came out a people. The holy ones lived a lifetime in it and came out, the historian says, cheerful. The student who stays in it, keeping the hours in the dryness, comes out able to stand without being flattered, which is the only kind of standing that lasts.
The temptation is to leave: to change the practice, find a new method, decide the way was never anything. That is the Israelites asking to go back to Egypt where at least there were onions. Stay. The second thing comes to those who do not leave when the first thing disappoints them.
A Kitchen Rule
For the student with a kitchen, I offer a rule of five lines, after the manner of the ancients but shorter.
- Rise before the household. The hour before anyone needs you is the only desert you own.
- Make it a desert: lights off, one flame, nothing in reach, the door closed if there is a door.
- Keep the four movements of the watch and do not add to them. The desert is subtraction.
- Blame nothing. Not the children, the shift, the body, the house. If you missed the hour, you missed it. Keep the next one.
- When the dryness comes, stay. Do not change the practice. The dryness is the desert, and the desert is where you were going.
That is all I know. It has been enough for twenty-two years. The door that closed when I first read about the holy ones was not the door to the desert. It was the door to the idea that the desert was somewhere else. The desert is at five in the morning, in your kitchen, with the lights off. Go.