Before he was a saint, he was the most feared bandit in the Nile valley. A tall, powerful runaway slave who had killed men and stolen from anyone who crossed his road. He stumbled into a desert monastery hiding from soldiers, and he never left. The man who had spent his whole life running ended his days teaching the brothers a single sentence about staying.
Who
Moses was born around the year 330 in the upper Nile, in the country we now call Ethiopia or Sudan, and the Egyptian fathers gave him the name the Ethiopian simply to distinguish him from the other Moses in their stories. He had been a slave in the household of an Egyptian official, and was dismissed by his master for theft and, the records say, for murder. He fled into the western desert and joined a band of robbers. Within a few years he was their leader.
He was a giant of a man, fast and strong and afraid of nothing. The brigands of his troop terrorised the farms along the river, and he was the one peasants spoke of in low voices at night. He hated authorities and hated Christians in equal measure. He once swam the Nile with a sword in his teeth to settle a quarrel with a shepherd who had crossed him. He was, in every external thing, exactly the wrong material for a monk.
One day, hiding from the soldiers who had finally come for him in earnest, he came across a small monastic community in the dry valleys of Scetes, the place we now call the Wadi El Natrun, west of the Nile delta. The monks fed him. They asked nothing. He stayed. He asked to be received as a brother.
Something had happened in him that he could not have explained even to himself. He had spent his life among men who took what they wanted by force, and he had walked into a place where men had given everything away on purpose, and seemed, somehow, more free than he had ever been. The contrast struck him like a hand. For the first time in years he wept, and the weeping did not stop for a long while. The records say the brothers found him on the floor of the chapel, asking God to forgive a list of crimes he could no longer remember the end of.
He was instructed first by an old monk of Scetes called Isidore, and later, the tradition holds, by Saint Macarius himself. They did not soften the truth of what he had been. They made him sit with it, name it, ask for mercy, and learn, slowly, that he had been forgiven. From that day Moses lived as a man who had been bought back from a life he no longer had the right to live. Whatever the brothers told him to do, he did, and more. He fasted to the edge of what his body could bear. He kept all-night vigils. There are stories of him walking seven miles to a well and carrying water back to the cells of the older monks who could no longer make the journey themselves, and of him doing this in secret, before dawn, so that no one would know.
But the deepest part of his conversion was something the records mention almost in passing. He had been a man who took. He became a man who gave. He had been a man who judged everyone he met by whether they were useful to him. He became a man who would not judge anyone at all.
The years that followed were not easy. He had a temper like a furnace, and the old habits did not leave him quickly. The brothers tell stories of his anger, his pride, his sudden returns to violence. Once, a band of his old companions came to the monastery to rob him in turn, and he fought them all four off and tied them up and carried them on his back to the abbot to ask what should be done. The abbot told him to forgive them. He did, and the four robbers became monks themselves.
In time he was ordained a priest by Saint Theophilus, the Patriarch of Alexandria. There is a story that on the day of his ordination, the patriarch said to him, now you are altogether white, Father Moses, meaning altogether holy. And Moses, knowing his own life, smiled and said only, outside, yes, your holiness; God knows the inside.
He died around the year 405, when a band of Berber raiders attacked the monastery. He had told the brothers, when they heard the raiders were coming, to flee. He stayed himself, with seven other monks who would not leave him, because, he said, those who live by the sword die by the sword, and he had lived too much of his life by the sword to lift one again. He met them at the door. He is now numbered among the patrons of nonviolence and of those struggling to leave a violent past behind.
The saying
Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.
From the Apophthegmata Patrum, Sayings of Abba Moses
What he meant
The advice came from a man who had spent the first half of his life running. He had run from masters, from soldiers, from the law, from himself. He had filled the empty hours with theft and with anger because he could not bear to be still. He knew, better than any of the gentler men around him, what the alternative looked like. The alternative was the cell.
The cell, for a desert monk, was not a metaphor. It was a small room of mud or stone, no taller than a man, with a single door and a mat on the floor and a clay jar of water. A monk sat there, prayed there, slept there, wove a few baskets to sell for bread, and read the psalter. He did not leave for any reason that could be avoided. Sit in your cell, the Desert Fathers said, and your cell will teach you everything.
The lesson is not chiefly about a room. It is about staying. About the discovery that the small place, the unglamorous routine, the marriage you are already in, the family you are already part of, the daily round, the present hour, is the school God has given you. The cell teaches the things that travelling cannot teach. It teaches you about yourself, slowly. It teaches you to bear your own company. It teaches you that the noise inside is louder than the noise outside, and that until you can sit with the noise inside, you will not hear Him.
There is another story about Moses that the brothers loved. A young monk had fallen into a serious sin, and the brothers gathered in council to decide how to discipline him. They sent for Abba Moses to come and join the judgement. He came carrying a leaking basket of sand on his shoulder, the sand pouring out behind him as he walked. They asked him what the basket meant. My own sins flow out behind me, and I cannot see them, he said, and today I am coming to judge another. The brothers fell silent, and the young monk was forgiven.
Voices that came after
Sixteen hundred years after Moses sat in his cell at Scetes, a Trappist monk in the hills of Kentucky began translating the sayings of the Desert Fathers into English. His name was Thomas Merton. He published the small book in 1960, under the title The Wisdom of the Desert, and it gave the desert back to a generation that had nearly forgotten it.
Merton himself lived in a hermitage in the woods, alone, away from the main abbey, trying to keep some of the silence Moses had kept. He wrote in the preface to his little book that the Desert Fathers were not running away from life but running toward the only kind of life that lasts. They went into the cell, he said, not to flee the world, but to learn to love it rightly.
What the Fathers sought most of all was their own true self, in Christ. And in order to do this, they had to reject completely the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion in the world.
Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert (1960)
The cell, Merton understood, is where the false self is undone. It is where the world’s verdicts stop reaching you, and you begin to hear who you really are in God’s sight.
Why it still matters
We live among more distractions than any human beings have ever lived among. We carry small bright machines in our pockets that promise to deliver us, again and again, from any moment we cannot bear. We have lost the art of the cell, and our souls feel it.
The cell for us is not a stone hut in the desert. It is the kitchen where the same dishes wait. The job that has stopped being interesting. The marriage that asks a thousand small fidelities. The hour of prayer that, most days, feels empty. The body that is no longer young.
Moses would tell us, in his slow, kind, ex-bandit’s voice, to stay there. To sit. To stop running. The cell is the place God has chosen to meet you. It will teach you everything you need to know about yourself, and slowly, slowly, about Him.
A line to carry into the week
Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.