An American in Paradise
Journey Back to Eden: My Life and Times Among the Desert Fathers
by Mark Gruber, O.S.B.
Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2002
(208 pages; $18.00, paperback)
reviewed by Mike Aquilina
Mark Gruber has done what most Christians can only read about in books of ancient history. He spent a year in the Sahara desert, sharing the life of the desert fathers—men who have, for the last two millennia, followed the austere way of John the Baptist.
What began as fieldwork for a doctorate in anthropology soon became a pilgrimage and ended in a profound personal transformation. In a most remarkable book, Journey Back to Eden: My Life and Times Among the Desert Fathers, Gruber has gathered up his journal entries, letters, prayers, and marginalia from that period and woven them into a moving narrative.
Gruber, a Benedictine monk who now teaches at St. Vincent’s College in western Pennsylvania, begins his story as a graduate student at Stony Brook on Long Island. He’s a Benedictine monk, but very much a product of American culture. He finds himself in an awkward situation when a professor demands a dissertation topic as a prerequisite for remaining in her class. Panicked, Gruber responds with information from a photo caption he had skimmed, that very morning, in National Geographic magazine.
He would study the Copts, the native Christian minority in Muslim Egypt. The Coptic Church, one of the “monophysite” churches that rejected the Council of Chalcedon (451), includes by most estimates from five to seven million members, about a tenth of Egypt’s population.
And so he does. He arrives in Cairo, thinking himself fortified by a large fellowship grant, which had been wired there in advance. Unfortunately, the deposit somehow got lost in Egypt’s antiquated national-bank system. So he has nothing to go on but the few dollars in his wallet. Disinclined to wear his habit in public in a Muslim land, he stays, at first, among North Africa’s drifters in seedy hotels.
Gruber presents himself to the Coptic patriarch, Pope Shenoudah III, who gives him letters of introduction and outlines an itinerary for his travels. The patriarch also makes it clear that Gruber should start wearing his Benedictine habit and grow a beard. Pope Shenoudah received Gruber as an anthropologist but sent him forth as a monk to visit the monasteries of the Sahara.
In the desert, Gruber encounters communities of monks who live within enclosures built in the era of the church fathers, and in a manner not much different from that of their spiritual ancestors. The monks wear a coarse habit, eat no meat, and hold no possessions. They each keep to a small cell and keep silent, except for the times they gather together to chant the Psalms or celebrate the Liturgy. Their daily worship consists of several three-to-four-hour periods of sung prayer, all done while standing. In the course of a single day, they chant all 150 Psalms as well as other traditional canticles.
The monks receive Gruber as a monk, though with much curiosity, since he is an American and a “Roman.” They give him a cell and assign him a spiritual director, Abuna Sidrak. Another monk, Abuna Elias, an elderly man returning to the monastery after many years as a hermit in the desert caves, befriends the American and eventually adopts him as “Isaac” to his “Abraham”: the recipient of insights gained through long years alone with God.
Gruber is at first intimidated by the monks’ austerities. He has never fasted, even in Lent, the way they fast in ordinary time. His monastery back home chants in a month the number of Psalms these monks chant in a day. When some monks ask him to celebrate Mass for them, he worries about what they will think of the typically quick Western Liturgy. So he sings all the prayers—instead of reciting them—and packs the service with as many traditional devotions and hymns as he can recall. After an hour and forty-five minutes, he concludes the Mass, and the monks gratefully speak of its beauty—but complain that it was over when they were just getting started!
Mike Aquilina is vice president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology (www.salvationhistory.com) and a general editor of The Catholic Vision of Love catechetical series.
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