Kim Haines-Eitzen

The desert was a place of profound paradox that sparked the imagination: a place hot and cold, deathly dry but also home to violent floods, dangerous and yet potent with revelation and salvation, seemingly empty but with abundant evidence of humans and other animals, and surprisingly noisy and silent. It is in these paradoxes where we can best understand the cultivation of listening among ancient monks.

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Originally published in Haines-Eitzen, Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks— and What It Can Teach Us, Princeton University Press (2022). Republished here with thanks.