Hi, everyone. On January 26, the holy Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of a great solitary of the desert. His name was Symeon, and he’s been called “the ancient one.” Now, Symeon was someone who dwelt at the foot of the mountains north of Antioch, first in the desert itself and then later on in a cave. He had come to really love the eremitcal life, the life of complete solitude in the Lord, and he practiced it in the most severe manner he could find.

Well, he eventually ended up in a cave, and all sorts of stories surrounded his time there. One of them involved two Jews who had gotten lost on their journey because of the storms and all of the disturbances in the sand in the area, and they found themselves at the opening of Symeon’s cave. They went in and saw the old man and asked him if he could help them back onto their path. Well, Symeon said that he would be glad to. In fact, he had two brothers he was going to send with them to escort them on their journey. Not long after this, two lions appeared. Now, the two Jews were quite upset at this, but the lions did as they were told, and they did indeed accompany these two fellows back onto the path from which they had lost their way.

At another time, there was a man who, as he was harvesting, on his threshing floor he had stolen some hay from another farmer who was in the area. To his dismay, it caught on fire and began burning, and he didn’t know what to do. So he ran to Symeon’s cave, and he asked the great Father, “What should I do, Father? Tell me what to do, because I’ve got this hay burning, and everything I’ve got is going to burn down!” And Symeon simply said, “Well, if you will return that which you have stole from others, the fire will indeed go out.” And so it happened, not from any dousing of water, but as soon as the man returned what he had taken, the fire went out of its own.

At another time, Symeon had cultivated a desire to visit Mount Sinai, and so he did, wanting to retrace the exact steps of Moses himself. And he got there and everything had seemed quiet, but Symeon wasn’t getting the response from the Lord that he had hoped that he would. So he stayed there and stayed there and stayed there in solitude until finally he heard a voice from heaven saying that it was time for him to depart. When he opened his eyes, there were three apples in front of him, which Symeon took and ate, and then went along his way.

Now, Symeon encountered many such things in his life. Some of them may seem fantastical to us today because what we don’t understand is that, in our very busy and harried and crazy lives that we live, the idea of God somehow seems to recess into the clouds, far away from us. Things are just a little “too real” for us in this age of cell phones and computers and unceasing media [barrage] that we get every day. But when one is brought, quietly, in the midst of the desert, with no sound, with nothing around, face to face in a holy place, such as Mount Sinai, then indeed one can hear the voice of God, who has perhaps been speaking all along, but yet we never were really listening. Such it is with so many of the Desert Fathers like Symeon, and we read their stories and we think, “My goodness! Could this have really happened?” But then if you’ve ever been to a quite place where you’re all alone with no one but yourself and your own thoughts, and you gaze into the sky, then the world can seem a much more realistic place and certainly a different place than the one in which we live every day.

Symeon himself, the great ascetic, the ancient, finally reposed in the Lord sometime around 390 AD. If we want to have a profitable spiritual experience, well then I would suggest that we would turn to the lives of the Desert Fathers which are so absolutely pithy, to the point, and zero in on so many spiritual problems from which we can gain great spiritual growth and achievement and certainly learn a lot of lessons about life in God.