Countless saints have felt called to the wilderness, many of them subjecting themselves to the harsh conditions of the Egyptian desert.
Medieval hagiographers often praised the saints’ actions and focused on the numerous miracles that would occur while being alone with God.
St. Jerome was one of those saints who felt God calling him to the desert, but when he wrote about it to a trusted friend, he was honest about the struggles he endured.
Being in the desert isn’t easy
He wrote to Eustochium, one of his spiritual daughters, about his difficult experience in the desert:
I used to sit alone because I was filled with bitterness. Sackcloth disfigured my unshapely limbs and my skin from long neglect had become as black as an Ethiopian’s. Tears and groans were every day my portion; and if drowsiness chanced to overcome my struggles against it, my bare bones, which hardly held together, clashed against the ground. Of my food and drink I say nothing: for, even in sickness, the solitaries have nothing but cold water, and to eat one’s food cooked is looked upon as self-indulgence.
St. Jerome didn’t experience spiritual ecstasy in the desert, but only pain and suffering.
Oddly enough, he was frequently tempted to lust and sexual sin while in the desert:
Now, although in my fear of hell I had consigned myself to this prison, where I had no companions but scorpions and wild beasts, I often found myself amid bevies of girls. My face was pale and my frame chilled with fasting; yet my mind was burning with desire, and the fires of lust kept bubbling up before me when my flesh was as good as dead.
In the midst of his temptations, he would place his weak and frail body before Jesus Christ:
Helpless, I cast myself at the feet of Jesus, I watered them with my tears, I wiped them with my hair: and then I subdued my rebellious body with weeks of abstinence. I do not blush to avow my abject misery; rather I lament that I am not now what once I was. I remember how I often cried aloud all night till the break of day and ceased not from beating my breast till tranquility returned at the chiding of the Lord.
Ultimately God was not calling St. Jerome to remain in the desert, and he returned to public life, spending much of his time translating the Bible into Latin.
He used his time in the desert to draw closer to God in suffering and to wrestle with his own demons, knowing that he needed to purify himself further in order to move forward in the spiritual life.
And today we celebrate...