Calling Australian Desert Christians
Austrlaian CAH Guardian Bruce Challenor has just published LIVING GOD’S WORD: Ancient Wisdom from Early Monasticism. We have placed a copy in our pilgrims' Library on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. I have written the following preface:
Billy Graham once said ‘God has no grandchildren’. He meant that each person needs to be personally born of the Spirit. When Christianity in the Roman Empire became second-hand in the third century, people who wanted to live all-out for God alone migrated into the deserts and engaged in radical experiments with God.
In this book Bruce Challenor, who has long experience as a counsellor, and more recently as a Guardian of the new monastic Community of Aidan and Hilda www.aidanandhilda-au.org links teachings of the desert fathers and mothers with his own inner life journey. He provides exercises. A dedicated reader might take a year to seriously engage with them.
Nearly a thousand years after these desert fathers and mothers in the area of Egypt known as The Thebaid, a Northern Thebaid emerged in the deserts of Russia. Australia is a land of deserts. I recall a retreat in a desert in North Australia. An Aboriginal pastor joined us on a dry salt lake. I sense the time is right for an Australian Thebaid. Could you be part of it?
