Healing Through Solidarity
I began this Lent, with a handful of others from my church, camping in caves. We were in a place called Sandstone Castle, an old hide out of Civil War deserters, moonshiners, and centuries of native peoples, most recently the Osage, who were attracted to the natural shelters eroded from hillside. One was large enough for three tents, while there were several smaller caves for single tents. It was the perfect place for the theme of our retreat: desert spirituality. Our guide, a priest named Jason, introduced us to the wisdom of the abbas and ammas who went to the wilderness of Egypt and Syria to fast and pray in the early centuries of Christianity. We tried, for a weekend, to follow their rule—staying in our cells, practicing solitude and silence, fasting as best we could. Ever since, over this Lenten season, I’ve been reading through the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and learning the wisdom of their way.
Many of these saying and stories are strange and some are disturbing, but on the whole they speak across time with a fervor that has been echoing within me. For all their fasting and their tears, what has most struck me about the spirit of these desert monastics is their central concern with winning the neighbor. Abba Anthony, among the most famous desert monastics, said that “Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned against Christ.” Again and again, throughout the sayings, the desert monastics go to great lengths to love their neighbors and win them over to the way of Christ. As Rowan Williams puts it in his great little book Where God Happens, the aim of these monastics was to “heal by solidarity, not condemnation.”
In our reading from Second Corinthians, Paul names this work of healing by solidarity as the ministry of reconciliation. Written during Paul’s own conflict with the church in Corinth, he sees in Christ’s very person God’s desire to heal by solidarity: “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them…” (2 Cor. 5:19). It is in light of this work of reconciliation that we can understand Jesus’s parable that Catherine Wright calls “The Prodigal and His Prideful Brother.”
This is among the most familiar stories of the New Testament but reading it in conversation with the spirituality of the desert monastics can be helpful. In the prodigal son, we have an example of a sinner coming to the reality of himself. This young man who went looking for a life of pleasure, shaming his father in the process, has experienced the key step of recovering his humanity—he has been humiliated. When we are humiliated, we recognize that we are dependent creatures, in need of the community of life and the care of God. Christ’s great humility, made most fully in his incarnation, is an act of solidarity with all of those brought low. It is this solidarity, made through an intensive focus on one’s own sins, that helped the desert monastics become so gentle and merciful to those sinners within and without their communities.
For those of us who read this parable in this light, the invitation is to see ourselves in the prodigal’s shoes, welcoming Christ who comes in humility to restore us. As Catherine Wright puts it in her recent study of Luke, Spiritual Practices of Jesus, “One of the more fascinating elements of the church’s reception of this story is how some ancient commentators practice humility themselves in the way in which they appropriate the text…for some patristic writers the hermeneutical process provides the opportunity for them to humble themselves in repentance.” For the Desert Fathers and Mothers, this spirit of humility carried over to how they delt with sin in their community. Rather than judging their neighbors as the Pharisees did, they saw themselves in the sinners they encountered and extended the patient mercy that they received from Christ to the offending person.
This attitude contrasts with the brother who forsakes all solidarity with the lost and instead sees only his own loyalty unrewarded. This is ultimately where pride leads—a sense of right and righteousness that forgets the goal of reconciliation and communion. Such pride has little to do with whether the prideful brother had been correct in his actions toward his father. Clearly, he’d been helpful and faithful as a son while his prodigal brother had shamed their father and squandered the family wealth. But when his brother returns, humiliated and ready for reconciliation, this brother is unwilling to give up his righteousness for the sake of love.
In this parable, along with the call of the desert monastics to always be working to “win the brother [or sister],” we can hear an important call for our own time. There is much to be right about these days and it seems that the voices who proclaim their rightness are ever shriller. So many of us would love to humiliate our opponents rather than be humble ourselves. But such actions are unlikely to bring about reconciliation, they are unlikely to bring our brothers and sisters and neighbors into the common life of Christ. If we see our aim rooted in communion and reconciliation rather than being correct, then it changes how we live. It doesn’t mean that we give up our claims to truth, but rather that we live that truth humbly. As Paul tells us in Second Corinthians, the ministry of reconciliation has been entrusted to us, we are now to be ambassadors of Christ, following in Christ’s path of healing through solidarity rather than condemnation. The world desperately needs such ambassadors amid all our conflicts, our unraveling communions, our politics of self-righteousness. May we instead live the lowly way of humble solidarity, leaving aside all condemnation, so that we can be God’s ministers of reconciliation in a fractured world.
