Becoming unattached

It is recorded somewhere of Amma Sarah that once as she was going along the road with some nuns a groups of monks came from the other direction. As they came near the monks discreetly crossed to the other side so as not to confront the nuns. Amma Sarah observed, "If you were true monks you would not have noticed that we are women."

"On Guarding the Intellect", taken from the Philokalia:

Abba Isaiah the Solitary:

7) Shut all the gates of your soul, that is the senses, so as to not be lured astay. When the intellect sees that it is not dominated by anything, it prepares itself for immortality, gathering its senses together and forming them into one body.

8-9) If your intellect is freed from all hope in things visible, this is a sign that sin has died in you. If your intellect is freed, the breach between it and God is eliminated.

St. Isaiah the Solitary:

25. The first virtue is detachment, that is, death in relation to every person or thing. This produces desire for God, and this in turn gives rise to the anger that is in accordance with nature, and that flares up against all the tricks of the enemy. Then the fear of God will establish itself within us, and through this fear love will be made manifest.

Saying of the Desert Fathers, The Alphbetical Collection, translated by Sr. Benedicta Ward:

Amma Syncletica:

19. Amma Syncletica said, "There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one's mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts."

Amma Sarah:

8. Some monks of Scetis (an area of many hermits in the Egyptian desert) came one day to visit Amma Sarah. She offered them a small basket of fruit. They left the good fruit and ate the bad. So she said to them, "You are true monks of Scetis."

©1999 by Deb Platt