ONE OF the well-springs of Christian spirituality is to be found in the early quest for the monastic life in the desert. In the 3rd and 4th centuries in Egypt the harshness and stillness of the desert became a place of stripping down and of encounter with God. This has earlier roots in the Biblical tradition in the exodus journey of the people of Israel through the desert of Sinai, and in Moses’ encounter with God in the wilderness in a bush burning with fire yet not consumed; a place which was holy ground.

Stories about the desert fathers and their pithy and provocative sayings were collected and became a resource for later generations. St Anthony, the first hermit, who withdrew to the desert to lead a solitary life, taught those who came to him that our human life and death are with our neighbour. “If we gain our brother we gain God, if we offend our brother we sin against Christ.”

Another early monk, Abba John the Short, told his disciples that “it is impossible to build the house from above downwards, but only from the foundation upwards”, and when he was asked what he meant, replied: “The foundation is your neighbour, whom you must gain. That is the first requirement. For on him depend all the commandments of Christ.” St Benedict, whose Rule so powerfully shaped Western monasticism, taught that all who came to the monastery were to be received as Christ himself.

The desert fathers, for all their quest for solitude, knew that human beings are relational beings. A human person is not an isolated individual. We are, the Christian faith teaches, made in the image of a God whose very being is a dynamic communion of love. That love that comes down to the very lowest part of our need, so that, as the psalmist says, “if I go down to hell Thou art there also”. The God with whom we have to do at the ground of our being and who meets us in our neighbour is a God who does not stand aside, and is not aloof, but is a God whose majesty is as his mercy.

The discipline of the desert was an experience of testing and temptation. It was place where there was spiritual warfare and wrestling, an encounter with demons, fears and fantasies welling up from within and mirages without. It was in this context that on the anvil of the spirit a true discernment is hammered out, a discernment which demands humility. As Jesus says in the Beatitudes: “How blessed are those who know their need of God, the kingdom of heaven is theirs.”

The spirituality of the desert is still a living reality in the Coptic monasteries of Egypt, among which there has been a remarkable renaissance in the last decades. In June one of the main figures of this revival died. Father Matta el-Meskeen, Matthew the Poor, was the spiritual father of the monastery of St Macarius in the Wadi el-Natroun, which Copts call “the place of the weighing of the heart” — the heart being in the Bible and in the desert tradition not the place of feeling, but of willing and of choosing.

Matthew the Poor, educated as a pharmacist, went to the poor monastery of St Samuel in Upper Egypt in 1948. For nine years he lived with 12 disciples in caves in the Wadi al-Rayan deep in the desert, until he was called to be spiritual father of St Macarius in 1969, a monastery which now houses a community of 130 monks. His books, The Communion of Love and The Orthodox Life of Prayer have influenced many.

I spent two months in St Macarius monastery in 1979. I asked Father Matta then about his experience of God. Faithful to the desert tradition he replied: “I have had far more experience of God through others than directly myself. I am always eating, as it were, of crumbs that fall from the table prepared by God for others through me” — and that, surely, is true for all of us.

He once asked theologians meeting to discuss Christian unity how many of them were prepared to die for it, “for if you are not prepared to die for it there is no point in coming here to talk about it”. Because, he wrote, it is our Creator who calls us to pray, “we should always begin our prayer with overflowing thanks”, giving God the glory, confessing our sinfulness and repenting, “for as much as our hearts are pure, God finds his rest in us”.

Saints are those whose hearts God has touched. That surely was true of Father Matta el-Meskeen, a desert father of our own day, for whom I with many others thank God.

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe