"Deserts have a long religious history. Think of the biblical stories of the ancient Israelites migrating through deserts after they had been freed from slavery in Egypt, and the stories from the New Testament of Jesus being tempted in the desert. Early Christian monks and hermits were deeply influenced by such stories, drawing from them the lesson that the desert is an important place. It's the place to which one flees the cacophony and distractions of the marketplace and town square in order to hear and contemplate the voice of God in solitude. (Of course, the practice of withdrawal was a Graeco-Roman ideal as well as a biblical one, and some early monks were surely influenced by pre-Christian philosophical ideas about the power of solitude too.) Alone or in monastic communities -- which, paradoxically, blended the communal and the solitary -- monks found something surprising in the harsh desert environment: while they went there in search of silence, they found that the desert, too, is rich with sound -- which one can appreciate if one pays attention. One has to learn to listen to the subtle, natural sounds of the desert in order to become quiet and still enough to "listen with the ear of the heart," in the words of the sixth-century AD monk Benedict of Nursia. Kim Haines Eitzen has written a book about the sayings, anecdotes, and stories of these desert monks, based on her reading of a wide range of texts written in Greek, Coptic, and Latin between the third and seventh centuries, including letters, treatises, and philosophical and practical instructions for monastic life. This material speaks to the interdependence between humans and other animals, and between humans and the environment. The author highlights the ways in which monks wrestled with the sounds of the desert and how they used these to cultivate a quality of inner listening. She invites her readers to reflect with her on what we might learn about our own world from their experience and stories -- how, in the midst of our cacophonous surroundings, we might cultivate a sense of inner quietude. And how we might grapple with the tensions that those early monks also felt, between the pulls of solitude and community. Accompanying this book are a set of audio recordings the author made in desert environments"-- Provided by publisher
