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Desert Fathers and Mothers: Early Christian Wisdom Sayings—Annotated & Explained is unavailable, but you can change that!

The desert fathers and mothers—ordinary Christians living in solitude in the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Arabia—chose to renounce the world in order to deliberately and individually follow God’s call. They embraced lives of celibacy, labor, fasting, prayer and poverty, believing that by denouncing material goods and practicing stoic self-discipline, they would find unity with the...

The word for “desert” in Greek is eremos and means “abandonment.” It is the term from which we derive the word “hermit.” The desert was a place to come face-to-face with loneliness and death. Nothing grows in the desert. Your very existence is, therefore, threatened. In the desert, you are forced to face up to yourself and to the temptations in life that distract you from a wide-hearted focus on the presence of the sacred in the world.
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