The Gift of the Cell
Jesus said, “But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
Matthew 6:6
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus speaks of the hypocrites whose prayers and pious acts are designed to draw attention to themselves and not to God. Jesus calls for His followers to find a hidden, quiet place, not to ensure privacy, but to ensure the right attitude when approaching prayer. Attention before, during and after prayer should be on God and not motivated by self-promotion or self-absorption. The purpose of prayer is to direct our attention and bring glory to God alone.
We see echoes of this verse taken up in the monastic life of the early church and beyond. The monastic cell was a simple room of those men and women who lived lives dedicated to God, generally having a basic cot and, if fortunate, a desk and a chair. The cell was the one space monks and nuns had for themselves alone and for their prayers. One of the most revered monks of the Desert Fathers living in the wilderness in fourth century Egypt, Abba Moses, told a young monk who came to him for spiritual advice, “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”[1] With this teaching, the abba sent the young man back to his life to live it as prayer and not be distracted trying to do pious acts as the means to draw closer to God.
Twentieth-century Christian pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a different experience in a prison cell. Bonhoeffer was a Nazi dissenter and was involved in a failed attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life after which he was arrested in April 1943. Until his execution one month before the Allies liberated Europe, he prayed and wrote prolifically from his prison cell. In one of his prison letters, Bonhoeffer wrote, “A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.”[2]
This Advent, give praise and thanks to God that Jesus “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Phil 2:7), who by His birth, life and death, opened the door of true freedom and eternal life for us once and forever.
[1] The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, tr. Benedicta Ward, SLG (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984), 139.
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Letter from Bonhoeffer at Tegel prison to Eberhard Bethge, November 21, 1943” in God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas, tr. O.C. Dean, Jr., ed. Jana Riess (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 13.
