What sustains faith when prayer feels flat and God seems distant—and there's no clear tragedy to explain it? Anglican priest and former New York Times columnist Tish Harrison Warren joins Macie Bridge to talk about weariness, burnout, and the quiet middle stretches of a long spiritual life. Drawing on her new book What Grows in Weary Lands, she turns to the Desert Fathers and Mothers for a resilience that resists both flaming out and numbing out. "It felt like the call had dropped, like the line had gone dead." In this episode with Macie Bridge, Warren reflects on her own season of spiritual aridity and the ancient counsel to stay in your cell rather than escape. Together they discuss the difference between burnout and weariness, acedia and the noonday demon, perseverance, silence as countercultural practice, and the world as a womb. They explore why escape rarely heals and what it means to trust the slow work of God. Episode Highlights "It felt like the call had dropped, like the line had gone dead." "I do not think vitamin D will solve what I'm talking about." "We're not having to hold our life together in the midst of weariness with will power and duct tape." "We kind of bring Times Square with us wherever we go now." "God doesn't need me to be impressive or achieving." About Tish Harrison Warren Tish Harrison Warren is a writer and an Anglican priest. She is the author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, named Christianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year, and Prayer in the Night, which won both Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year and the 2022 ECPA Christian Book of the Year. She formerly wrote a weekly newsletter for The New York Times on faith in public and private life and was a columnist for Christianity Today; her essays have appeared in Comment, The Point, and Religion News Service. She currently serves as the C. S. Lewis Theological Writer-in-Residence at Baylor's Truett Seminary, is a senior fellow with The Trinity Forum, and an assisting priest at Immanuel Anglican Church. (Source: tishharrisonwarren.com) Learn more and follow at tishharrisonwarren.com, Instagram @tishharrisonwarren, and X @Tish_H_Warren. Helpful Links and Resources What Grows in Weary Lands (newest book): https://tishharrisonwarren.com/whatgrowsinwearylands Liturgy of the Ordinary (most popular book): https://tishharrisonwarren.com/liturgy-of-the-ordinary Curt Thompson, referenced on the brain and community: https://curtthompsonmd.com/books/ Show Notes - Writing from the middle of the process - Weariness vs. burnout—bigger than the occupational - "It felt like the call had dropped, like the line had gone dead." - Two years at The New York Times—top of a career, bone-tired - Spiritually tinged exhaustion, distinct from depression - Comprehensive difficulty—work, marriage, church, politics, drama - Post-COVID burnout talk; why the church rarely names this - Craving emotional highs in contemporary Christian faith - We lack stories of long, steady faith - "I do not think vitamin D will solve what I'm talking about." - Discovering the Desert Fathers and Mothers - Acedia, the noonday demon—sloth, boredom, irritation, doubt - Flame out, numb out, or go deep - The cell as guiding metaphor—a rhythm of prayer and work - "Stay in your cell"—counsel of St. Moses and Arsenius - Resisting the lie that escape elsewhere brings contentment - "The cell is actually this transformative place." - Curt Thompson: the brain isn't made to do hard things alone - A desert mother's maternal metaphor—the world as a womb - "What is happening right now matters"—hope without escapism - Grace: "we're not having to hold our life together... with will power and duct tape." - "Part of our weariness is it is too noisy. The world is too noisy." - "God doesn't need me to be impressive or achieving." - Trusting the slow work of God #TishHarrisonWarren #WhatGrowsInWearyLands #ChristianResilience #Burnout #DesertFathers #SpiritualFormation #Weariness #Acedia #Hope #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld Production Notes - This podcast featured Tish Harrison Warren - Interview by Macie Bridge - Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa - Hosted by Evan Rosa - Production Assistance by Noah Senthil - A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about - Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
What sustains faith when prayer feels flat and God seems distant—and there's no clear tragedy to explain it? Anglican priest and former New York Times columnist Tish Harrison Warren joins Macie Bridge to talk about weariness, burnout, and the quiet middle stretches of a long spiritual life. Drawing on her new book What Grows in Weary Lands, she turns to the Desert Fathers and Mothers for a resilience that resists both flaming out and numbing out.
"It felt like the call had dropped, like the line had gone dead."
In this episode with Macie Bridge, Warren reflects on her own season of spiritual aridity and the ancient counsel to stay in your cell rather than escape.
Together they discuss the difference between burnout and weariness, acedia and the noonday demon, perseverance, silence as countercultural practice, and the world as a womb. They explore why escape rarely heals and what it means to trust the slow work of God.
Episode Highlights
"It felt like the call had dropped, like the line had gone dead." "I do not think vitamin D will solve what I'm talking about." "We're not having to hold our life together in the midst of weariness with will power and duct tape." "We kind of bring Times Square with us wherever we go now." "God doesn't need me to be impressive or achieving."
About Tish Harrison Warren
Tish Harrison Warren is a writer and an Anglican priest. She is the author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, named Christianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year, and Prayer in the Night, which won both Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year and the 2022 ECPA Christian Book of the Year. She formerly wrote a weekly newsletter for The New York Times on faith in public and private life and was a columnist for Christianity Today; her essays have appeared in Comment, The Point, and Religion News Service. She currently serves as the C. S. Lewis Theological Writer-in-Residence at Baylor's Truett Seminary, is a senior fellow with The Trinity Forum, and an assisting priest at Immanuel Anglican Church. (Source: tishharrisonwarren.com) Learn more and follow at tishharrisonwarren.com, Instagram @tishharrisonwarren, and X @Tish_H_Warren.
Helpful Links and Resources
What Grows in Weary Lands (newest book): https://tishharrisonwarren.com/whatgrowsinwearylands
Liturgy of the Ordinary (most popular book): https://tishharrisonwarren.com/liturgy-of-the-ordinary
Curt Thompson, referenced on the brain and community: https://curtthompsonmd.com/books/
Show Notes
#TishHarrisonWarren #WhatGrowsInWearyLands #ChristianResilience #Burnout #DesertFathers #SpiritualFormation #Weariness #Acedia #Hope #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: Hello, friends. Here's a quick announcement before the show begins today for the life of the world as a podcast is now six years old and approaching 250 episodes, and we thought it'd be a good time to revisit our strategy, revisit our production style, have a look at where we've been, and do some planning for the future.
We're gonna run new episodes through the rest of June, but then in July and August we're gonna take a production break and return with brand new episodes in September. It's an honor to produce the show to speak with wise and thoughtful and creative people. We're grateful that you've joined us as listeners to this point, and we're excited to bring you.
What's next? Enjoy today's episode from the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. This is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Tish Harrison Warren: What does it mean to deepen in faith over time and to deepen in faith through the whole of the human experience, not just excitement or newness, not just in zeal, and then not just in in deconstruction, but like what is reconstruction and what is losing faith and finding it again.
Evan Rosa: There's a common experience toward the middle or the end of a life of faith.
Some mystics call it the dark night of the soul to others, it just feels like a barren, empty wasteland, a place of dryness, a desert where the tenets of faith seem real, but God seems distant, where explanations feel lacking and there's no clear tragedy, mishap, suffering that would have caused it.
Tish Harrison Warren: Have come to see perseverance as this incredibly important virtue that we do not talk about enough, think about enough, talk about how this is formed enough as a culture, including a church culture.
I just don't think we are talking about this virtue enough, and I think it's really, really necessary.
Evan Rosa: In an experience of that and a search for language to describe it, te and Warren turned to the desert, mothers and fathers, the Ammas and Abbas.
Tish Harrison Warren: Prayer and work went really, really hand in hand for the early monks.
And so they would work, pray, fast, sleep, eat all in kind of the cell, so it meant to stay in the vows they had taken, stay in the place in the community they were in, but also stay at the habits of faith. Continue. They had a rhythm of prayer and work that they did every day, and it was kind of like, keep at it.
Keep doing what you're doing. Don't abandon prayer. Don't abandon the habits of faith, don't abandon your community or place. The reason that they said this is that it was really important to the Desert fathers and mothers that we resist. The lie that it is escaping something that will make us content that in the middle of struggle, the lie is somewhere else.
I would be more happy somewhere else. I could be more used by God, even somewhere else. I could be more satisfied spiritually. And so we externalize the solution. Where they felt like the struggle, particularly struggles of weariness in God's distance are not solved by escape, but by going deep, by going deeper into God, deeper into understanding of ourselves, even deeper into prayer and the practices of prayer and deeper into community and deeper into the vows that you've taken.
And so they wanted to. Essentially get rid of the escape hatch and say that the way of depth, the way of following God is to remain and to give yourself to these practices.
Evan Rosa: What Tisch here is describing is an old word, a vice called AIA or aia, a spiritual torper, a restless pull to be anywhere. But in the moment and place, you're in a feeling beyond boredom. Beyond laziness, almost an obsessive thought. It hits you in the middle of the day, the middle of life, the middle of difficulty, the middle of creativity.
It's called the noonday demon. But the desert tradition had counsel for that. They named the vice and they developed a program to respond to it. The program is simple, stay in your cell. It's not about white knuckling the endurance, it's about the conviction that escape rarely heals you, that it's the very place you're in, the one you want to flee from where formation happens.
So stay.
Tish Harrison Warren: Was helpful to me is that I think. It was sort of a trite, like, oh, just keep praying, just keep, you know, like that can be sort of almost dismissive of the struggle, which you don't just, there's just not even a whiff of that in the Desert Fathers and mothers. So instead of it being kind of like, well, there's nothing we can do to, like, life sucks, just keep going.
There was this sense that the cell is actually this transformative place that this very struggle that's trying to push you out. Of the place you're in is the thing that if you remain, if you build resilience, if you sort of work that muscle of perseverance and resilience, eventually this is the ground that will bear fruit.
And that was so hopeful to me. It just let it lent to theological depth, to remaining in practices of faith that felt more rooted than what I had found in Evangelicalism and sort of encouragement to like, like just keep praying or just, you know, keep at it or it felt like, no, this is, it's actually the staying.
That is the place of formation. It opens up these possibilities of formation that you really don't have, you lose if you uproot from that or if you move on too quickly. It felt like in the staying of the cell. Is the way that hope is restored. It's the way that joy is encountered. It's the way that confidence is restored in the midst of doubt, but it, it doesn't happen through like going on the epic journey to find ourselves out there in the world.
It's to actually discover where God is in the middle. It's finding God in the middle of it. And that was just, it was so hopeful to me.
Evan Rosa: T. Harrison Warren is a writer, an Anglican priest, a former columnist for the New York Times, an author of many books, including Liturgy of the Ordinary Prayer in the Night, and Now What Grows In Weary Lands. In this new book, she draws on her own season of exhaustion and the wisdom of the earliest Christian monastics to find a resilience and a perseverance, a stability that endures.
She recently joined Macy Bridge for a conversation on the experience of spiritual aridity and the ancient counsel to stay in your cell rather than escape. Discussing burnout, weariness perseverance, silence as a countercultural practice, and what it means to trust the slow work of God. Thanks for listening.
Macie Bridge: Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It's so exciting to be with you.
Tish Harrison Warren: I'm so glad to be here.
Macie Bridge: I've just finished reading your new book, what Grows and Weary Lands, and it was such a joy to read. I, I'm really excited to, to get your thoughts on the writing process and, um, so many of the contents, because I was really energized by how vulnerable and transparent you were throughout the manuscript about how much you were writing.
From the middle, as you put it in the middle of the process of these ideas as they were kind of coming to fruition in your own life. I think the place that I wanna like launch our conversation is just with this title, what Grows In Weary Lands. We talk a lot about burnout and use these different words for kind of weariness in our world.
And I would love if you could start us with just like, how did you start thinking about weariness? What does weary mean to you and how is it maybe different from those words, like burnout that we're hearing all the time?
Tish Harrison Warren: Yeah, I think it encompasses burnout, but it is not just about burnout. I mean, when I started writing this book and part of what.
Made me desire to write this book is I had worked for the New York Times for two years and it was like top of my career in lots of ways, and a joy to work there. I mean, I really enjoyed working at the times, but especially towards the end of my time there, I was just exhausted. It was a big job. I had three kids.
I have a mom with Alzheimer's, and the combination of that felt like. Almost constantly overwhelming, but also just deeply, deeply wearing, and I was experiencing, I think, something like burnout, but it was spiritually tinged for me. I mean, as someone who writes about spirituality and theology, every, everything is spiritually tinged.
Like Yeah. This particularly felt like it wasn't just, man, I'm working a lot. It was as a profound sense of God's distance, a sense that prayer itself seemed difficult. Yeah, anything creative felt difficult. Things that I had once really enjoyed did not feel as enjoyable. Some would hear this and say, well, you were depressed.
I have experienced depression. This felt different in the sense that it was not that I was totally blank or didn't enjoy anything, but I was just profoundly exhausted and spiritually exhausted, and so I would go to pray and that felt really difficult. It felt like nothing was happening. In the book, it felt like the call had dropped, like the line had gone dead.
Mm-hmm. And a friend of mine kind of encouraged me, just check in with what you feel every, every morning. And what would often come up was just, I'm just really weary, I'm just really tired. And I don't think that just meant physical. I mean, I don't even primarily mean I was physically tired. It was sort of a sense of languishing and a sense that things that.
Had once connection with God and connection with joy that had once felt easier, seemed suddenly to be harder. And in the midst of that experience, I had a ton of friends that were expressing similar things that were talking about burnout a lot. This was kind of coming outta the COVID years and everyone was sort of talking about dealing with burnout and.
I just became intrigued about this experience. I think burnout is part of it. I just think that idea really comes out of kind of the occupational psychology world, very focused on our work, whereas. What my friends and I and people around me seemed experiencing was much more comprehensive. It was, it did involve work, but it involved relationships that were hard.
It involved marriages that were struggling. It involved spiritual life. It involved, uh, disillusionment with the church, the local church or the broader church in America. It involved being sick of politics. It involved being sick of drama in the world. I mean, just, it was kind of this comprehensive difficulty.
To sort of get through the day where things just felt hard and heavy. So I wasn't like, I'm gonna write a book about this, but it was out of my own, sort of like, how do I keep going? How do I keep being a Christian in the midst of prayer being so hard? How do I keep being a friend when. When things feel difficult or awkward there, keeping a mom, keeping a daughter, keeping a, like, how do I say my marriage, when my marriage is struggling?
It was these kinds of questions and then I, I kind of ended up bumping into all these voices. Like kind of throughout time in the church, I really focus in this book on the Desert Fathers and mothers. But I draw from a lot of different traditions and what really surprised me was how often the experience of weariness and burnout and spiritual desertion or desolation was spoken of again and again and all different.
Christian traditions. And so I thought this is just really interesting that this is so commonly talked about, but I feel like it's so rarely discussed in the church.
Macie Bridge: Yes.
Tish Harrison Warren: And so that was kind of what drew me to these ideas of weariness.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm. Thank you. Yes. And you talk about how we associate or look for these emotional kind of highs or even, I think maybe anticipate some emotional lows in our lives of fake.
Um, and I think you see that a lot in like even contemporary Christian media of like trying to cultivate these highs, but it's not really in our. Current conversation in the church that sometimes lives of faith are just getting through these seasons and, and you, I think you write explicitly that we lack stories of long, steady faith.
And so you ended up looking back. To find those. So take us into the desert, mothers and fathers beloveds of mine. I'm so excited to hear more about them from you. So where did you like hook in with those as you were thinking about weariness for yourself?
Tish Harrison Warren: Yeah, so the same, I mean, I agree with what you're saying.
I think there is a sense, maybe particularly in Evangelicalism, but
Macie Bridge: yeah,
Tish Harrison Warren: I honestly think it's not just evangelicalism. This has affected broader American Christianity, is that we want it to feel a certain way. We want faith to have a certain experiential quality.
Macie Bridge: Yeah.
Tish Harrison Warren: And to feel exciting or feel.
Passionate or feel even a passion for I think justice or a passion for Jesus, or you know what, this looks different according to your particular subculture, but there is a sense of kind of, I don't know, inner experience that's part of this. Yeah.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm.
Tish Harrison Warren: And then, like you said, I do think there's also resources out there.
For loss, I mean for times of deep suffering, times of grief, and those are super important. I mean, my last book is on suffering. I think that's good, but I think we're prepared in times of grief or loss or tragedy that things will be hard. We have categories for that. I think that what was disorienting to me is that things felt difficult, but there was no clear tragedy.
There was no recent grief, there was nothing. Things were okay in my life, not perfect. Um, and things were struggling, but nothing, it was all very kind of normal stuff. Yeah, typical stuff. And so I just feel like we have fewer resources to talk about that. And then to go back to the Desert Fathers and mothers.
I had read a ton about burnout on, because I was wrestling with this and deciding whether to stay at the times and really struggling. And so I was, there was just so many articles about languishing and burnout and exhaustion, and so I was reading and they were somewhat helpful, but it felt like it wasn't scratching the itch that I had.
It felt. Honestly it, some of it felt like it was pretty surface. It was dealing with, I have this line in the book that I felt like I was wandering around saying, you know, my soul thirst, my flesh faints in a dry, and we Leon, when there is no water, and then people were popping up and like, but have you tried better work life balance?
And it just felt like, like. I was, I was needing something. Of course I
Evan Rosa: have.
Tish Harrison Warren: Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Like I do not think vitamin D will solve what I'm talking about as helpful as vitamin D supplements can be. But I think, yeah, so I. Started kind of looking around in the tradition for resources and then honestly, I mean, I just really bumped into this book.
I have lots of books in my house. You can see some behind, and my husband has a PhD in church history, so we have tons of really great books on all parts of the tradition. I mean, lots and lots of books, so I. Sometimes just pull one out and start reading. And I had read the Desert Fathers and Mothers in seminary, but just uh, really.
Small amount, just kind of samples and understanding who they were a little bit. I remember being interested in them, but they were super weird and, and a lot of what I had focused on was kind of reformation and post reformation were, you know, 19th to 21st century Christian thought. And so, you know, I knew about these guys and women, but not a lot.
And so I started reading. Just on a whim, started reading the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and what intrigued me was how much they wrote about. God's distance. They wrote about Acadia or Sadia, this sloth, boredom, irritation. They wrote about struggling with doubt. They, they took these really intense maning vows to go out in the desert, in the wilderness, but at some point they weren't feeling it anymore.
And they wrote about that. And it was intriguing to me. I mean. 1700 years were between me and some of these men and women, and. It was intriguing to me how contemporary they felt. They spoke in parables and metaphors, so they don't, they don't quite, and they don't sound like someone you would hear on Instagram, but the emotions of boredom and irritation and frustration and God sort of seeming to disappear, that felt like something I could really connect with.
Mm-hmm. And it felt like they were so outside of my context. That they didn't have. In some sense an agenda for me.
Macie Bridge: Yeah. Yeah.
Tish Harrison Warren: Like they, they weren't trying to sell me books. They weren't coming from a particular Christian subculture. They weren't trying to convince me of anything. They were just like human beings wrestling with these experiences of weariness and boredom.
Mm-hmm. And so I was so hooked and ended up just reading sort of everything that I could get my hands on about the Desert Fathers mothers and specifically their, their writings themselves. I think that we don't have a ton left over, but I. Read as much as I could.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm. And unfortunately you write that there is no cheat sheet that's secretly in there.
Yes. In their writings. We can't skip over the long work of the life of faith. And that's what you started finding in them.
Tish Harrison Warren: Yeah, I think I just wanted vision of how we talk about the Christian faith over time. I grew up in an evangelical context that I think focused a lot on the conversion and discipleship.
Getting people to a sort of like a, I think an early understanding of faith. An experience of faith. It was very experiential. And then I've, as I've. Age and been in all kinds of Christian circles, gone to seminary and worked in the academy, worked at the times. There's a lot of conversation about deconstruction.
Macie Bridge: Yeah.
Tish Harrison Warren: And that's not all bad. There are helpful things in that conversation and unhelpful things. I think both. So we talked so much about conversion and we've talked so much about deconstruction, deconversion, but we don't talk much about decade after decade is following Jesus at. Age, you know, 40 the same as it was at age 20 or age 60, or you know, I think what does it mean to deepen in faith over time and to deepen in faith through the whole of the human experience, not just kind of.
Excitement or newness? N not just in zeal and then not just in kind of leaving the faith or decon. I know that deconstruction is always leaving, but in deconstruction, but like what is reconstruction and what is losing faith and finding again and again, and these were not just what is it, but how do, where do we find these stories?
Mm-hmm. I think. I am, I'm in my mid forties and so there's a whole lot of stories out there of women kind of getting in their mid forties, being dis discontent in their life and then like radically changing it, right? Moving to Tibet, moving to Tibet, whatever going on, like going on an adventure around the world.
Macie Bridge: I was gonna say, I really resonated with you. You used the term of like, when we hit the desert people. Either, um, I think it was numb out, flame out, or go deep. Yeah. And you really need to be go deep, but that numb out and the flame out is kind of what you're talking about here of like, what do we do when we hit this spot?
Tish Harrison Warren: Yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm. And I think we all are going to hit that spot. Mm-hmm. Whether it happens to you in your mid twenties or thirties or forties, or. You know, sixties, whatever, you're going to hit a spot. Mm-hmm. Where things just feel harder than you thought they would be. And it maybe there isn't a deep tragedy.
You're not in the middle of grief, but you're in the middle of life and it feels like disorienting. And in that it does feel like the options of our culture are we slave out like, and by that I mean just blow it up and start over again with, you know, whatever that looks like. New spouse, new family, new adventure, new job, new church.
Like just leave it. It if it's not working or we stay, but we, it's the slow numbing effect, whether it's through, we just know that we're kind of drinking to get through the day, but don't wanna admit that to ourselves. Or we are numbing out on screen addiction or TV or food or even, I think. Sometimes politics can be used.
Politics is very important, but it can be used to kind of numb out to what's actually happening inside of us or happening inside of our homes. We distract ourselves and there's just myriad options in our culture to distract ourselves with. I say in the book, this is the couple that stays together, but just.
Kind of goes into just silent bitterness over time where we're not really feeling, we're not really being honest with ourselves about who we are, what we are, our disappointments in life, and it does feel like. Those were sort of the options before me, and I wanted another option, and I actually considered both.
I mean, in the middle of this I, it would be wrong to say I did not consider kind of blowing up my life and starting over it. It would be wrong to say I didn't consider just like numbing out in various ways, but I just wanted to know like, what is it? What's here? Like mm-hmm. What is the point of this part of my life and the part that isn't going to make.
You know, a chapter in the memoir is the only option. When things feel heavy and hard is the only option to blow it up and start over, or to just sort of get through it and try to get, you know, a nice house and have nice kids and just be content and contentment is great, but I mean, contenting ourselves with sort of not really examining our lives.
Macie Bridge: Yeah,
Tish Harrison Warren: and I just wanted a different option.
Macie Bridge: Well, so you turn to the desert, mothers and fathers who are literally in their cells in the desert. Yeah. And then you take that metaphor of being in the cell as kind of a guiding metaphor for a lot of the book and into this idea of, okay, you're not gonna flame out, you're not gonna numb out. We're gonna go deep, we're gonna get in the cell.
Would you open up how you think about that metaphor, how that helped you personally, and also as you kind of led into the book, what does it mean to be. In the cell to the folks who are listening and thinking, well that sounds awful.
Tish Harrison Warren: Uh, for me it was unbelievably hopeful that finding that language of staying in the cell was transformatively hopeful to me, even though it wasn't easy, but that language was used.
Often by the Desert Fathers and mothers over and over again. And it essentially was that in times of spiritual exhaustion, weariness, boredom, the sorts of things we're talking about God's distance. The older monks, the elders would say to younger monks, stay in yourself. And they would say some, like one of the quotes, I think this is.
You know, eat, drink, sleep only. Do not leave your cell. Arsen. It might have been arsenia. I might be quoting wrong. I'm sorry. If there's any scholars out there that have this memorized, it's in the book. So it was this idea of like, take care of your body.
Macie Bridge: Yeah.
Tish Harrison Warren: Get rest, but stay in the cell. And what did that mean?
Okay. The cell was the place that Mon Cell, of course, is a place that Monk prays for the Desert Fathers and mothers. It was often a hut or a cave, and it's when they prayed and worked. It's when they spent most of their hours. Prayer and work went really, really hand in hand the rhythm of prayer and work for the early monks.
And so they would work, pray, fast, sleep, eat all in kind of the cell. So what it meant for them to stay in the cell. Was to stay literally in the desert and in the community that they were in. 'cause even though many of these lived alone, they lived alone sort of together. They lived with other, they lived in their own cell or hut, but with other monks kind of close by that they would live life with to some extent.
So it meant to stay in the vows they had taken, stay in the place, in the community they were in, but also stay at the Habits of Faith. Continue. They had a rhythm of prayer and work that they did every day, and it was kind of like, keep at it. Keep doing what you're doing. Don't abandon prayer. Don't abandon the habits of faith.
Don't abandon your community or place. The reason that they said this is that it was really important to the Desert fathers and mothers that we resist the lie, that it is escaping something that will make us content that in the middle of struggle, the lie is somewhere else. I would be more happy somewhere else I could.
Be more used by God, even somewhere else. I could be more satisfied spiritually. And so we externalize, um, the solution. Where they felt like the stru, the struggle, particularly struggles of weariness in God's distance are not solved by escape, but by going deep, by going deeper into God, deeper into understanding of ourselves, even deeper into prayer and the practices of prayer and deeper into community and deeper into the vows that you've taken.
And so they wanted to. Essentially get rid of the escape hatch and say that the way of depth, the way of following God is to remain and to give yourself to these practices. The reason this was helpful to me is that I think there's sort of a trite, like, oh, just keep praying, just keep, you know, like that can be sort of almost dismissive of the struggle, which you don't just, there's just not even a whiff of that in the Desert Fathers and mothers.
So instead of it being kind of like, well, there's nothing we can do to like, life sucks, just keep going. There was this sense that the cell is actually this. Transformative place that this very struggle that's trying to push you out of the place you're in is the thing that if you remain, if you build resilience, that subtitle of the book is on Christian resilience.
If you sort of work that muscle of perseverance and resilience, eventually. This is the ground that will bear fruit.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm.
Tish Harrison Warren: And that was so hopeful to me. It just let it lent to theological depth. To remaining in practices of faith that felt more rooted than what I had found in Evangelicalism and sort of encouragement to like, like just keep praying or just, you know, keep at it.
Or it felt like, no, this is, it's actually the staying that is the place of formation. Mm-hmm. It opens up these possibilities of formation that you really don't have, you lose. If you uproot from that or if you move on too quickly, they really understood that if you stay in your cell, that's the place God will meet you eventually.
Mm-hmm. And that, that is also the cure, that it's, they didn't see it as. You know, you stay in your cell 'cause pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It felt like in the staying of the cell is the way that hope is restored. It's the way that joy is encountered. It's the way that confidence is restored. They talk through the language of confidence being restored in the midst of doubt.
But it, it doesn't happen through like going on the epic journey to find ourselves out there in the world. It's to actually discover where God is. In the middle. Going back to what you were saying about in the middle, it's finding God in the middle of it. Mm-hmm. And that was just, it was so hopeful to me.
Macie Bridge: Yeah. Thinking about that hope, what you're saying about it being a practice, the practice is the hopeful thing. I think when I tend to pray and find hope in the idea that, well, if I'm bringing these things to God, God will do something with them and there will be change, and that is my source of hope.
This. But kind of forces me to reorient to. No, the practice itself is the source of hope. Like it. It is within me doing this practice that I can anticipate and hope for transformation with God, not necessarily that I'm projecting onto that thing that I'm praying for being the source of hope. It's actually in this space of prayer that transformation happens, and you talk a lot in the book about this is a work of resilience and perseverance to sustain ourselves, to keep and to motivate ourselves, to keep staying in.
These practices staying in the cell. As our listeners come to this and are thinking about in from the world that we're living in, that it can be kind of hard to locate hope outside of ourselves right now as they're entering the cell with that like desire for hope. What do you speak to them and what, where does Hope play into the practice of perseverance and your understanding of it?
Tish Harrison Warren: Well, part of why I wrote this book is because I found perseverance to be an incredibly uninspiring idea. It did not seem like an inspiring virtue to me. Resilience and resilience doesn't seem like an inspiring, it just seems like, oh, it's just this thing that you is foisted upon as we have to do. It also wouldn't have been the top, if you would've asked me what are the most important virtues of the Christian life?
I just don't even. I would've said it, I would've said, you know, charity Justice seeking, I don't know, truth telling and faithfulness, but I have come to see perseverance as this. Incredibly important virtue that we do not talk about enough, think about enough, talk about how this is formed enough as a culture, including a church culture.
I just don't think we're talking about this virtue enough, and I think it's really, really necessary. We feel weary because life is wearying and we all hit parts, especially if we are trying to do good. Yeah. If we're doing good, you will. Weariness is part of that and, but I, but then I think we're told that feeling is wrong.
Or that feeling indicates something wrong. Mm-hmm. As opposed to that, that's really normal. And then we are called to learn perseverance. And that perseverance is not, it's not boring. It's this like beautiful thing that transforms the human experience and that I just had no vision for that. And so this book is really me trying to find the inspiration in what perseverance is.
And so. That was, I don't know if that answered your question of where hope itself comes from. Mm-hmm. So I talk in the book about hope coming from a few different places. One is community. I think that we can't carry hope as individuals very well or very long. In the book, I quote Kurt Thompson saying The brain is made to do a lot of hard things, but it's not made to do them alone.
And so I do think. Part of what the church, the local church even is meant to be, is a place we could be really, really honest about. How hard like life is and hard things in our life, but even how hard the middle is, how hard even normal, typical life is. Mm-hmm. And carry hope for one another. Mm-hmm. And carry hope for our world more broadly.
And we do that through all kinds of ways. We do that through, of course, living life together, prayer together. But I also think the sacraments, I mean, I'm an Anglican priest, so I have to say that, but it's true. I think that Eucharist is a practice of hope. It's proclaiming death, destruction, darkness, desolation, and the presence of God in the middle of that, and transforming that.
But I also think I talk in the book about. A Scatological hope. The hope of Jesus setting things right, and I specifically draw on this metaphor that am Sinica uses. She's a desert mother and it's a super maternal. It's cool, you know, she was a woman that was profoundly respected even by men in the early church and has this very maternal metaphor of our world being like a womb.
Which I love the idea of, because when we talk about the hope of Jesus setting all things right, or the hope of what theologians would call, you know eschatological hope. Hope that at the end of things, Jesus will. Rain and be, you know, as revelation Jesus says, beholds, I, I made, I am making all things new.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm.
Tish Harrison Warren: But that can sometimes be reduced to escapism. Like, yeah, we get out of this world and. We flew away to the buy and buy, and so it's all kind of going to hell in a hand basket and let it get there as quickly as possible so we can escape. Right? And I, I'm very resistant to that understanding of life.
And so I was really drawn to this idea of CLE as idea of the world as a womb. Because, because, I mean, I've had. Three children and two pregnancy losses. Like I understand even in a deeply bodily way that what happens in the womb matters and lots of stuff is happening in the womb. Like it's not an inert place.
It's not a place that doesn't matter. It's not a place that isn't important, that it's a place that. Lots of really, really important formation is happening. Mm-hmm. That will affect us forever. Mm-hmm. Even, you know, outside of the womb is of course affected what happens inside the womb. Mm-hmm. But that the womb isn't meant to last forever.
The womb yields to another form of life. Mm-hmm. And so this idea of. What we are experiencing today, even on like a regular Tuesday, yes, is is part of our formation. It's part of who we're becoming and so what is happening right now matters. And it matters because it gives way to eternity, and eternity is part of right now, just as who we are now.
Mm-hmm. It was part of who we were in the womb in a very even scientific, biological sense. Of course, TCA did not have. You know, the understanding of a pre prenatal development that we have now, but I think her metaphor was more profound than she could have even realized, and we know that because of embryology.
What I loved about it is that continuity between what she saw as the end of things and now, and this hopeful idea. That who we are now participates in that. So she actually says like, enjoy the sun that you have now. Enjoy the world that you have now, but let it point you to the sun of righteousness. So it's not a denial of anything happening in the world, both the darkness or the light, but it's, it's asking you to not only look at that, but to look beyond that as well.
And I do think that Christian Hope unavoidably is a scatological 'cause It is in Jesus and Jesus setting all things right. But I love that this woman from 1700 years ago gave us this metaphor that honors both. The restoration of all things, but also what we're doing today.
Macie Bridge: Yeah.
Tish Harrison Warren: And I think the older I get and the, it's not just that, it's, the violence in the world right now is pretty overwhelming.
Mm-hmm. And you realize how little control I have, I can do little things. I can care for my family, I can vote, I can advocate, I can pray, and those things matter, but I cannot. Stop the darkness that I see in the world. Mm-hmm. And so I hope. Has to be something bigger than what I can do or what society can do.
It has to be when in when. I am not in control of much like a baby in the womb, to continue this analogy, there has to be something more that is coming.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm. With all that in mind, how the heck do we stay in the cell?
Tish Harrison Warren: Yeah. So I talk in the first part of the book, it's kind of about staying in the cell and.
What that means to stay in the cell. And then I make this turn in the book and I am like, but how? And also why? Because I think if it's like we're staying in a cell 'cause there's, what else are we gonna do? And we have to, or we have some, if it's only moral duty then it, we can feel like an animal trapped in a cage.
And I think that malforms us. I think that is spiritually even bad for us. So I say, you know, it's not just. That we stay in the cell, but kind of how and why. So I don't wanna promote a kind of stoicism. I think in the face of the darkness we've had in the world, there has been kind of a resurgence.
Certain quarters, especially younger men of stoicism and being really interested in stoicism. I actually think even early Christians had a lot that they valued about stoic philosophy. Mm-hmm. And so there's something good about that, but it is a elevation of the will and of resignation. That I think does not form us well.
Yeah, and I do think it's a denial of hope. I think there's not. Hope in the stoic understanding of reality. So, I mean, part of me, I, I do not mean this in a cheeky way, but part of me is like, well read the rest of the book. 'cause it is like a long explanation on how to stay in the cell. But also, I think I talked about hope.
Hope is what takes perseverance and endurance and transforms that into expectation and to patience. So in instead of just kind of persevering and enduring, 'cause that's all we can do. It transforms it into a posture of expectation. We can wait because we know that God is at work in the world. We can be patient because we know that we aren't just going to wait and wait and wait and wait, but eventually our patience bears fruit.
It yields something. Yeah, a harvest comes. But then I also talk about grace and the way that Grace transforms our efforts in staying in the cell. I think there's a way we can. Talk about staying in the cell that really emphasizes religious or moral duty in a way that is harmful to people. And I think I write about Grace in the book as a way that we can embrace waiting and struggling even, and even failing with hope That.
This isn't all on our shoulders, that we're not having to hold our life together in the midst of weariness with will power and duct tape.
Macie Bridge: Yeah.
Tish Harrison Warren: But that we can kind of fall apart and Grace is enough in that. So I will just name, I talk about hope, I talk about grace and the experience of delight in that chapter.
Mm-hmm. And then I talk about practices of silence and stillness, and then I talk about community and doubt and how we basically, how does y'all with doubt? Mm-hmm. And then I talk about death and resurrection.
Macie Bridge: I wanted to dig in a little bit further on this practices on solitude silence, because it's one of my favorite topics of conversation.
I've talked about it on the podcast before, so listeners might be familiar. But one of the ways that you, you talk about our need for silence and moments of silence within the world that we live in, and you are right each day we are sent from a place of security, warmth, and quiet rest in God, into a world that is often convulsive, raging, and tumultuous.
And I was dwelling on those. Words this weekend as I was in walking around New York City, I was taking a little stroll on my way from Times Square down to Grand Central, and I'm a girl who was raised in the woods and I have a very busy time locating God in the trees and in nature and in the quiet away from people.
But this weekend, as I was. Walking through the streets of New York, which I don't wanna be dramatic, but to me they do sometimes feel convulsive, raging, and tumultuous. It's just not the environment that I'm used to. And I think that a lot of us struggle with creating space for silence and solitude in our lives.
And I think you touch on this, but like I, I was wondering if you would speak to like, those things aren't separate from the world. Like we, we are fully in the world and then we need to create that space within ourselves and our lives. Who and how do you do that for yourself as a priest? And how do you think people should be thinking about that in avoiding this, like the world versus our quiet time?
Or is that the helpful way to be thinking about it? I'm struggling with those ideas.
Tish Harrison Warren: Yeah, those are great questions. Yeah. I do think that we, I do think that as a practice we need to set aside certain times of mm-hmm. Quiet of silence times every day, and those could be very short, but times. Where we are off, where we are turned off, and we are silent times in the week, and then maybe longer times in the year, but that's gonna look really different for someone who lives in New York City versus someone who lives out in a.
On a farm or in the woods. But it's also gonna look really different for someone who's retired versus someone who has like a newborn baby in their house. Or is a student or someone who works overnight, you know, and Yeah. Is up at night and asleep during the day. Like this is gonna look really different according to context.
Mm-hmm. But I do think. The whole of the Christian tradition and I really focus on the Desert Fathers and mothers calling us to this makes silence as a practice. This really important. Part of the Christian life, and I think it's a really important part of restoration from burnout specifically and from weariness.
I think part of our weariness is it is too noisy. The world is too noisy. We weren't made for a world that was this noisy, and there's biochemical reality to that. But there is also, I think, a spiritual reality to that and needing to descend into recreating silences as. Patricia has talked about and so, so how does that look?
I think it looks like intentionality. I think sometimes the times of silence are really small that we can have, if you live in New York City, you won't necessarily be able to go for long walks in the woods. Right. For me, this also has been very like seasonal. There are times when I really practice withdrawal.
Much more than other times that I engage and I, I quote Gregory the Great, the former Pope from I think the sixth century talking about. How he kind of longed to live a life in the woods in silence and was thrust into the noise and the busyness of being a pope. And he dealt with that by kind of immersing himself in that, and then retreating really intentionally into times of quiet.
He was. Cleric and not married. So that looked different for him than it would for other people, but I still think we can follow kind of a rhythm of engagement and withdrawal that we kind of need to establish. And you have to look at your own life and see, you know, what that is. If that's 10 minutes in the morning or turning off all noise on the way to work.
It is counter-cultural though. It's always counter-cultural. I mean, yes, New York City, if you're on the subway and you're not looking at your phone and you take your, your buds out and you just sit there and that is like. People get a little worried about you. Yeah. Like it's such a cultural act. It's weird, but I do think like it's counter-cultural to practice silence and we have to now.
Mm-hmm. And it's increasingly counter-cultural. I talk a lot in the book about digitization. Because now you can be in the woods with all the noise of New York City with you in your pocket. Yeah. And so we kind of bring Times Square with us wherever we go now. And so resisting that is another level of, I think, embracing silence that we have to be intentional about.
Macie Bridge: As you were writing from the middle of your lifetime of faith, what did you learn about God from the process of this book?
Tish Harrison Warren: Yeah, that's a great question. I wrote this book to who I was three or four years ago because I felt. So incapable of going on, I felt, I don't mean I, I don't, I wasn't self-harming, but I just meant I didn't know how to keep going in faith and in the life I had.
But I didn't wanna leave it. I just felt stuck in so many ways and felt uninspired. I think I'm a person that needs inspiration and I didn't have any. And so I didn't know how to keep going and I didn't know where I was. I was really, um, disoriented because I hadn't really been taught to expect. Just times of perhaps even long and fulfillment in the Christian life.
So I thought I was doing something wrong. I think I have continued in faith because I wrote this book. I think I needed it. What have I learned about God? I think that God, there's so many things I have learned. One is. God doesn't need me to be impressive or achieving, or even like achieving some spiritual state, some level of faithfulness, some sense of love towards him.
He meets being in. Dullness and desolation and exactly where I am and doesn't need more from me, like what he calls me to is himself not any kind of even emotional achievement and faith or spiritual achievement. This is. Really basic Christianity that I'm talking about. But I think what I mean, so everyone may be like, yes, I, I know I learned that very young, but I think that I experienced grace.
I think that what I found out in the desert. Was a call back to Grace. The other thing I think I learned is that the relationship that we have with God is really long and that that's a good thing that I feel, again, back to grace. I think there's a grace in. The longevity that we will experience many, many feelings and about our life and about God and he, God is patient, really patient.
And so we are not, we are in a hurry for things to be resolved, but there is a freedom, a real freedom that comes in trusting the slow work of God that. We don't have to have it resolved or figured out. I the book you said, I write very much from the middle in the book, and that's a hundred percent true.
That was hard for me. 'cause I feel like most religious books, most Christian books write from a place of, I've been through this, I have learned about this, and now I'm telling you how to get through it. Mm-hmm. But I don't think the desert is something to rush through. I don't think it's something to get through.
I think if we could just get out of it as quickly as possible we would. Mm-hmm. And I think that misses the point because when you're in the desert, when you're in the midst of a sense of spiritual. Desertion or Aridity, what I call and talk about in the book is Aridity. Every impulse you have is to just make it stop.
Whether that is escaping and leaving faith altogether, or trying to gen up some kind of spiritual experience. And I really think what we need is to resist that impulse and two. Drill down into our lives to see the goodness that is in them, to learn contentment and patience in the midst of them. And that brings all this beauty.
I do feel like now I don't know if I'm out of the desert or not, I don't know. And if I am, I don't know if it's permanent, but I experience a level of joy that I did not have four years ago. I can say that really clearly. I'm not even sure that comes fully across in the book 'cause it's been more since in the last year I think.
But it's been learning. Kind of to love the beauty of my life that is here in the midst of the imperfection of it, but also the real and completeness of it and the disappointment in it. It's all very real. So I think I trust in the slow work of God in a way that I did not before. Think I'm a little less like, hurry it up already, dad, than I was before.
Macie Bridge: Amen to that. Well, Tish, thank you so much for joining me today and for writing this book for those of us who are or will be or have been in the desert. It's really been a joy to be with you. Thank you.
Evan Rosa: For The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Tisch Harrison Warren, interviewed by Macy Bridge, production Assistance by Noah Sentil. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith dot Yale dot edu and life worth living dot Yale dot edu.
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