The Light of the Spirit

The Desert Fathers – monks who lived in the Egyptian desert in the fourth and fifth centuries – were in many cases extraordinary people, as is illustrated in this passage from a book by Stelios Ramfos quoted in a fascinating essay on St Pambo of Nitria on the Logismoi blog:

Amongst the holy hesychasts of the Gerontikon, then, Pambo, Sisoes and Silvanus were literally light-bearing and their spiritual work (that is, their charism) was to concentrate in their persons the lightning of divinity and send it out into the world.

It was not by chance that their faces shone with the light of the Spirit—it was their spiritual ‘work’.

Which means that this strange and rare property had to do with their ascetic existence itself, the heart of their struggle.

In order to understand what this radiant face signifies we need to look more closely at the kind of life each of them led.

It was said of Abba Pambo, for example, ‘that for three years he persevered in petitioning God and saying, ‘Do not glorify me on earth.’ And so God glorified him, so that no-one could gaze into his face from the radiance that shone from it’.