Until I get to the middle of the process—it’s horrific. It’s like I don’t know what I’m doing but I know how to do it, and it’s very strange.
—Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, on the artistic process

As I’ve noted before, I often struggle with writing, as I labor with the new life I’ve undertaken since leaving a fulltime job couple of years ago. I often feel in the wilderness, running forward in the dark, plagued by the bad dreams I’ve had since childhood. In the creative process, I sit for hours, unable to access the interior landscape where I find my thoughts.

In short, I need a lot of help. Recently, I went to the Benedictines for it.

I’ve been intrigued by the order since I read Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography years ago, so when I read about an upcoming retreat at Windsor, Maine’s Transfiguration Hermitage, I decided to attend.

The subject was the desert ammas, or mothers—mystics of the early church, about whom I know nothing, in keeping with my general ignorance of all things theological. I’d learned about the desert fathers through reading Norris and later was very surprised to find out that there also had also been desert mothers, including Ammas Syncletica, Theodora and Sarah.

Windsor, a tiny farm community near Augusta, is not far from me. Oak leaves rattled in the trees as I drove over the Sheepscot River to the Hermitage, past houses where Halloween ghosts festooned the trees and pumpkins grinned. The usual combination this time of year—a foreboding and a blaze against the dark.

The daylong retreat was led by Mary Forman, who teaches at St. John’s University in Minnesota; her book, Praying with the Desert Mothers informed the discussion. There were about twelve of us—all women, as so often seems at these things, all seekers, at different levels of engagement and agreement with the church.

I was amazed by Forman’s discussion of the lives of the early mystics. “They were often wealthy and extremely beautiful, these virgins,” she said, who like their male counterparts, left the secular world in the fourth and fifth centuries to pursue personal holiness. Their way of life came into being after Christianity had become legal, beginning to take on some of the trappings of the Roman Empire.

“So the practice of the “white martyrdom” began to appear,” writes another commentator, Mary Earle, “women and men going to the deserts of Egypt and the Holy Land, and seeking to live out the Great Commandment: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

According to Forman, there were twice as many women in the desert as men; so many people went to there that it became crowded, a tourist attraction. The ammas sometimes lived in solitude, sometimes in monastic community. Many of them knew each other, were in contact with the men (the abbas) as well.

The desert also had many forms. It could be the enchanted garden of prayer that ancient Hebrew writers refer to. But it could also be harsh and inhospitable: the land of the dead and the dwelling place of demons, as the Egyptians believed, the sterile desert of the “red land.”

For the ammas, who “had qualities to whom God apportioned labors equal to that of men,” it was often the battlefield, a place where one is plagued with the ferocity of bad dreams, combat between the god of life and the god of death.

I’m not really familiar with the work of Tuymans, the Belgian figurative painter to whom I alluded in the epigraph, who was recently the subject of a New Yorker profile. I am haunted however, by the commonplace images in what I’ve seen of his work: a childhood passion play, Dachau, 9/11. They remind me that to explore history and memory, the dark land, is disquieting, as he observes regarding the creative process.

To gird myself, I think of the mothers and fathers, too—of their faith as they left a world filled with despair and boredom and crossed the thresholds of desert caves. I remember their vibrancy, their boldness.