Lent with the Desert Fathers
Lent is an especially deserty season in the liturgical calendar. For forty days each year, we remember Christ’s testing in the wilderness and prepare our hearts for Easter through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. And, if you’re like me, you do some intentional reading.
In addition to Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion, which I highlighted last month, this year I also read Lent with the Desert Fathers by Thomas McKenzie. An Anglican priest in Nashville and a Benedictine oblate of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico, McKenzie invites us to reflect on the teachings of the desert fathers – early Christian monastics. Their austere, prayerful lives – lived out in vast, arid places – can be instructive to us whose lives look drastically different.
“Deserts are quiet places, even symbolic deserts like Lent,” McKenzie writes. “When we practice Lent, we shut down some of our normal distractions. This leads to a kind of inner silence.”
Lent is just about over, so this might not be a book you want to read right away. But I hope you’ll consider tucking away this recommendation for next year. I should also say that McKenzie’s introductory guide to Anglicanism is winsome and wonderful.
