Who
Syncletica was born around the year 270 in Alexandria, into a wealthy Greek Macedonian family. She had two brothers, both of whom died young, and a sister who was blind. By the standards of the time she could have married well. There were offers. She refused them.
When her parents died, she did not change her mind. She gave the family money to the poor, took her blind sister by the hand, and walked out of Alexandria to a small tomb in the burial ground beyond the city walls. The tomb had belonged to a relative. She and her sister stayed there. Before she went, she had a priest cut her hair, the old sign that a woman had given herself to Christ and would not turn back.
She lived in that place for the rest of her life. Word of her spread slowly. Other women began to come. Some asked one question and went home. Others stayed and built their own small cells nearby. She had not asked for any of this. The women called her amma, mother, the way the men in the desert called their teachers abba, father. She was among the most respected of the ammas.
She died around the year 350, at about eighty years old, after a long illness that she bore with great patience. Twenty-seven of her sayings were written down and kept. They survive in the Apophthegmata Patrum, the great collection of desert wisdom. They read like the words of someone who has done the work herself.
The saying
In the beginning there are a great many battles and a good deal of suffering for those who are advancing towards God, and afterwards, ineffable joy. It is like those who wish to light a fire; at first they are choked by the smoke and cry, and by this means obtain what they seek.
From the Apophthegmata Patrum, Sayings of Amma Syncletica
What she meant
The women who came to Syncletica often arrived expecting peace. They had heard that the desert was a place where the soul rested in God. What they met instead was a struggle they had not foreseen.
The cell was not quiet. The mind, taken out of the city, did not become silent. It became loud in a new way. Every old wound, every unforgiven word, every restless desire seemed to rise up at once.
Syncletica did not soften this. She told them the truth. The beginning of life with God is hard. The fire of prayer does not light easily. There is smoke first. The eyes water. The chest tightens. It feels as if nothing is happening, or worse, that things have grown harder, not easier.
But the smoke, she said, is part of the fire. If you stay at the small task, the praying, the patience, the not running away, the smoke clears in time and the fire catches. What comes after is not the relief of leaving the work behind. It is a quiet joy that the work itself has made.
Voices that came after
Twelve hundred years after Syncletica sat in her tomb cell, a Spanish Carmelite nun named Teresa of Ávila sat down to write about prayer. She had the same problem the desert mothers had. How do you teach people who have only just begun, when the first stretch is so much harder than they expected, and so many give up?
Teresa borrowed an image from her childhood garden. The soul, she said, is a garden, and prayer is the watering of it. There are four ways the water can come. The first is the hardest. You draw it up from a deep well, by hand, with a rope, bucket by bucket. It is exhausting. It is the prayer of beginners. And it is exactly there, she said, that most people stop, before they have learned that the labour itself is part of the love.
The beginner must realize that, in order to give delight to the Lord, he is starting to cultivate a garden on very barren soil, full of abominable weeds. His Majesty pulls up the weeds and plants good seed. And with the help of God we must strive like good gardeners to get these plants to grow, and take pains to water them, so that they will not wither but come to bud and flower and give forth a most pleasant fragrance.
Saint Teresa of Ávila, The Book of Her Life, ch. 11 (1565)
Syncletica, twelve centuries earlier, would have nodded. Different image, same desert wisdom. The garden takes work before it gives fruit. The fire fills with smoke before it warms the cell. Whoever stays will be glad.
Why it still matters
We are, most of us, beginners in prayer. And we live in a time that has very little patience for beginning.
Our culture promises results, quickly, with the right method, the right app, the right ten-minute practice. We try one approach. It feels dry. We try another. It feels dry. And we conclude, quietly, that God is not really there for us, or that we are not made for prayer, when really we have only met the smoke.
Syncletica would tell us to stay. Not to expect ease. To kneel down anyway, on the morning when nothing is happening, on the evening when the heart is restless. The smoke is not a sign that the fire is failing. The smoke is the fire beginning.
And there is a kindness in her image. She does not say the smoke is unimportant, or that we ought to be ashamed of it. She does not promise that holy people skip the difficult years. She says the smoke is part of the same fire. To breathe through it is not failure. It is the beginning of the thing. The saints went through this. Mary herself, in her hidden years, must have known the long obedience that does not yet feel like grace.
We are in good company in the smoke, and we are not the first to wonder whether the fire will come.
A line to carry into the week
First the smoke, and then the fire.