Years ago I picked up Thomas Merton's book, The Wisdom of the Desert, which was really just his personal

compilation of sayings, little paragraph sayings of the Desert Fathers, the many Desert

Fathers in the third and fourth century of Christianity. And I want to read something from the introduction because I love it. It says

in the 4th century AD the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, and Persia, were peopled by a race of men who had

left behind them a strange reputation. They were the first Christian hermits who abandoned the cities of the pagan world to live in solitude.

Why? Why did they do this? The reasons were many and various, but they can all be summed up in one word

as the quest for salvation. Society, which meant pagan society limited by the horizons and prospects of life in this world,

was regarded by them as a shipwreck

from which every person needed to swim for their life.

Now these were men who believed

that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets

and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster.

Welcome back to the Ransantar Podcast.

John Eldridge in the studio this week with my son Sam Morgan Snyder. We are trying to bring in for a

landing here a series on the world and this is the second half of the conclusion because we just didn't want to rush

some counsel some hope some directions some stories of what does it look like to not let oneself drift along

passively to swim for your life from the shipwreck of the world.

How do you do that well without, Morgan you were talking about like the extremes of that,

like one extreme is like, yes, we're all going to go become hermit's.

Right?

So enjoyed the series and been reflecting on it.

It really feels like there's kind of three postures of soul with this

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