The Cell

There is an old word from the desert that has outlived every empire that stood while it was spoken. A young man came to an old one, troubled and restless, and asked him for a word that would save him. The old man did not give him a doctrine or a discipline or a plan. He said only this: go, sit in thy cell, and thy cell shall teach thee all things. It is one of the strangest counsels ever offered to a soul in distress, because it asks for nothing but staying. No journey, no acquisition, no great labor. Only a room, and a door, and the courage to remain.

We do not naturally believe this. We believe the opposite. We believe the answer is elsewhere, that if we could only get to the next place, the next season, the next arrangement of our lives, the trouble would loosen its hold. And so we are always leaving. We leave the room, we leave the hour, we leave the silence the moment it grows heavy. A man can spend forty years fleeing a stillness that would have healed him in forty days. The desert fathers knew this flight by name. They called the restless itch to be anywhere but here a demon, and they were not being dramatic. They had felt its full weight, and they had learned that it lies.

The world has a word for the cell, and the word is lonely. It looks at a shut door and a person sitting behind it with nothing to distract them and it feels a kind of pity, or a kind of fear, and hurries on. But solitude and loneliness are not the same thing, and the difference is the whole of this. Loneliness is the ache of being cut off from communion you were made for. Solitude is the deliberate closing of one door in order to open another. The lonely person has been abandoned. The solitary person has chosen, for an hour, to be with the One who never abandons. You can be desperately lonely in a crowd, surrounded and unseen, and you can be wholly at peace alone in a bare room, because you are not, in fact, alone in it. The cell is not the deepening of your isolation. It is the ending of it, at the only place isolation can truly end.

THE SHUT DOOR

Our Lord gives the same counsel, though we have grown so used to the words that we no longer hear how severe they are. When thou prayest, he says, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret. Notice that he does not begin with what to say. He begins with a place and a door and an act of shutting. Before there is any prayer at all, there is a threshold to cross and a world to close out behind you. The closet in the old tongue is the inner room, the storeroom, the one part of the house with no window on the street. It is the place no visitor sees. That is the whole point of it.

For everything else we do, there is an audience, whether we admit it or not. We are seen at our work and seen at our worship, seen in our kindness and seen in our grief, and something in us is always angling, however faintly, for the eye of the seen. The Lord names this plainly in the verses just before ours, warning against the prayer that loves the corners of the streets, that it may be seen of men. He is not condemning company. He is diagnosing a sickness that follows us even into holy things: the need to be watched, to be counted, to have our goodness register on some face other than God’s. The shut door is the cure. It removes the audience. It leaves you with the only witness who was ever going to matter, the Father which is in secret, and it removes every other reason you might have had to pray at all.

This is why the closet is so quietly terrifying, and why we invent so many reasons not to enter it. When the door is shut and no one can see, the performance has no purpose, and what is left of us when the performance stops is a thing most of us have never met. We meet it in the cell. That is the teaching the old man promised, and it does not come gently.

WHAT THE CELL TEACHES

Sit in a room with the door shut and nothing to do, and you will quickly learn that you did not enter alone. You brought the whole clamor in with you. Every unfinished argument, every small resentment you had filed away, every appetite and worry and half-formed plan, all of it comes and sits down beside you, because it lived in you the whole time and only the noise kept it hidden. The cell does not put these things into you. It shows you what was already there. This is its first and hardest lesson, and it is a mercy disguised as an affliction. You cannot heal what you will not see, and you will not see it while you keep moving. The stillness holds the mirror still.

Then comes the boredom, and we should not be ashamed of it, for it is part of the schooling. Boredom is what the restless soul feels when it is finally deprived of its distractions, the withdrawal of a long addiction to stimulation. It feels like nothing is happening. In truth a great deal is happening, the way a great deal happens in a field that has been plowed and left to lie fallow through a hard season. The work is underground and looks like death. If you flee the boredom, you flee the only ground in which a real prayer could ever have taken root. Stay, and the boredom itself becomes a kind of altar. In your patience possess ye your souls, the Lord says, and he means it here, in the long unremarkable middle of an hour when nothing seems to come.

Somewhere in the middle of the boredom a particular voice will rise, and it is worth knowing its name before it speaks, so that you are not deceived. The old monks called it the noonday demon, the spirit of listlessness that comes when the first fervor has worn off and the end is not yet in sight. It does not tempt you with anything grand. It simply makes the present moment unbearable and every other moment attractive. It tells you the hour is pointless, that you would be more useful elsewhere, that a real prayer would feel like something and this feels like nothing, that surely God does not require you to sit here wasting a morning. Every word of it is aimed at one thing, to get you up and out the door. This is the enemy the desert fathers fought hand to hand, and they left us their one reliable counsel, which is not to argue with it and not to obey it, but simply to stay. Do not get up. Let the voice talk itself hoarse. It cannot make you leave. Only you can do that, and the whole of your growth is in the refusing.

And then, if you have stayed long enough and often enough, something shifts that you did not manufacture and cannot summon at will. The room that felt empty is not empty. The One who was there before you arrived, who saw you in secret the whole time you thought you were alone with your noise, makes himself quietly known. Not always as warmth, not usually as feeling, more often as a settling, a weight lifted from the chest, a sense that you have been met. This is the reward the verse promises, and it is worth saying clearly what the reward is not. It is not a mood. It is not a spiritual achievement you can display. The Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly, and the reward is himself, given to a soul that finally stopped running long enough to receive him.

THE PATTERN OF THE LORD

If all of this sounds like a hard and lonely road, it is worth remembering whose road it was first. The Son of God, who had no sin to confront and no self-deception to be cured of, who was himself in unbroken communion with the Father, still rose before the light and went out to be alone. In the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed. That is Mark’s plain report of an ordinary morning in the busiest season of the Lord’s work, when the whole town was at the door wanting him. He did not stay for the crowd. He withdrew. Luke tells us it was his habit, that he withdrew himself into the wilderness and prayed, and that once he went out into a mountain and continued all night in prayer to God. At the very end, in the garden, with his soul exceeding sorrowful, he went a little further from even his closest friends and prayed alone in the dark.

Consider what this means for you. The solitary place was not a concession the Lord made to weakness, because he had none. It was where his strength was renewed and his obedience was forged. If the one man who did not need the cell would not do without it, then our own hunger for company and noise and constant motion is not a sign of how connected we are. It is a sign of how much we have to learn. He went to the solitary place because that is where the Father was met most fully, and he calls us to follow him there, not because he wants us lonely, but because he knows what waits in the quiet, having gone ahead of us into it himself.

YOUR CELL THIS MORNING

You do not need a monastery for any of this. The desert fathers had actual cells of stone, but the cell was never mainly a place. It was a practice of staying, and the practice can be kept in any room with a door. The trouble is that our doors no longer shut. We carry in our pockets a window on every street in the world, and it glows and hums and asks for us without ceasing, and as long as it is within reach the door is open no matter how firmly it is closed. So the first act of entering the cell, in our age, is not sitting down. It is putting the glowing thing in another room, face down, silent, out of arm’s reach, and leaving it there. Shut that door before you shut any other.

Then sit. Do not wait to feel prepared, for you will never feel prepared, and the feeling of preparation is one more thing to chase. Sit down as you are, distracted and reluctant and full of the day, and let that be the offering. You need not fill the time with words. The Father is not waiting to be informed of your affairs. Say the name of Jesus slowly, or say nothing, or say only the plain and ancient plea for mercy, and when your mind wanders, and it will wander a hundred times, do not scold it and do not despair of it. Bring it back the way you would bring back a small child who has drifted from your side, without anger, again and again, for the bringing back is itself the prayer. No hour of this is wasted. The wandering and the returning are the whole of the work, and the returning is what teaches the heart where home is.

And do not fear that this is a selfish way to spend a morning, that while you sit behind a shut door the people who need you are left wanting. The opposite is true, and it is one of the quiet miracles of the cell. What you receive in secret does not stay in secret. It overflows. The person who has been met by God in the morning is a different person at the table that afternoon, more patient, less brittle, harder to provoke and quicker to forgive, because he is no longer running on the fumes of his own effort. You cannot pour from an empty vessel, and the world is full of good people gone dry, giving and giving out of a reserve that was never refilled. The cell is where it is refilled. The love you carry back out the door to your family and your neighbor is the love you first received alone, with no one watching, from the Father who is in secret. Go in for their sake as much as your own.

Do this on a Sunday, alone, with the door shut, and do it again the Sunday after, and the cell will begin to teach you what no sermon can, because the sermon can only point and the cell will actually take you in. It will teach you patience with yourself, which is the beginning of patience with everyone. It will teach you the difference between the noise you mistook for your life and the quiet that was your life all along. And it will teach you, slowly, past all your fleeing, that you were never as alone in that room as you feared, that the door you shut to keep the world out was the same door that shut you in with God, and that he was there, in secret, the whole time, waiting only for you to stop leaving.