Saint Sisoes the Great

Yeah, bush souls. Ever met up with yours?

If you have, you’re lucky. Truth is, the modern world has forgotten how. Never mind St. Anthony’s cave; we only get about 20 minutes to ourselves a day if BLS numbers are to be believed. Meanwhile, we spend several hours daily staring at magic rectangles.

As a result, ours is a culture full of people who are not quite themselves.

Let’s try to define that, then get back to Sisoes. He might be able to help us fix this.

Seclusion & Society

Steely-eyed Patrick would rise alone before dawn and greet the day “come hail, rain or snow.” His monks would climb mountains barefoot, traipse through old-growth forests and kneel on the moss beneath ancient rowans to recite the psalms. They’d row to the Hebrides and the Faroes and spend hours, days, weeks at a time in total withdrawal. Theirs was a life of constant shifting between the shoulder-tight claustrophobia of communal living and the remote seclusion of the wild.

I’d like to make a case for how important this is as a practice. In particular, there are three things we can find out there that are hard to come by in our apartments, houses, offices and coffee shops.

Psyche, Spirit and the Bush Soul

The first is our psyche. I mean the internal stuff: following the downward path toward memory, shame, identity, grief and regret. Psyche is all about confrontation.

I think most of us would rather get a root canal from a rusty knife than make that trip. It’s part of why we reach for our phones at night, turn on the Bluetooth speaker in the shower and fire up our favorite podcasts on our commute—any distraction to keep from “dwelling on things.”

Even worse, sometimes we treat what we find down there as embarrassing. The past was the past, we were stupid back then and there’s no point in dragging it back out again.

None of that is healthy. It’s very important to hear our psyche out and be brave enough to regularly square up with her. If we don’t, she’s just going to come back later with Mid-Life Crisis, Grief or some other unwanted houseguest, and we’re not going to be able to get rid of them so easily. Far better we set aside time and space outside our routines to give her our due attention.