Celebrating the eleventh day of Christmas: Extreme spirituality

The eleventh day of Christmas coincides with the feast day of Simeon Stylites (c. 390? – 2 September 459). No, I hadn’t heard of him either. He was zealous for Christ, entering a monastery before he 16 years old. So committed was he to acts of extreme austerity that the other monks asked him to leave.

He decided to live in solitude, fasting completely for Lent and somehow surviving. Crowds of pilgrims searched him out, seeking advice and, I guess, wanting to “catch” some of his holiness. As he tried to escape the attention, he moved on top of a pillar. He went from stone to stone over the years, moving higher and higher as he sought solitude for his prayers and practices, living the rest of his years on a cold stone platform. Thirty-seven years all together.

As Edward Gibbon remarked in History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

In this last and lofty station, the Syrian Anachoret resisted the heat of thirty summers, and the cold of as many winters. Habit and exercise instructed him to maintain his dangerous situation without fear or giddiness, and successively to assume the different postures of devotion. He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet…

Before I started my MA in Christian spirituality, I wondered about levels mysticism and these extreme forms of austerity and spiritual practice. Had these anchorites reached the pinnacle of spiritual life? I concluded through my MA readings a strong “no.” Although we can learn from those who withdraw from the world, I don’t believe they have a higher status than those who live in community. Transformation of one’s life – not extreme practices of penance or solitude – is what reveals God at work.

But I don’t want to dismiss Simeon all together. The crowds sought him for his wisdom, meaning that even in the desert he couldn’t escape from engagement with others. And he remained humble and obedient to his fellow monks, for when they wondered if he lived on the pillar out of pride or obedience, they demanded that he come down. He obeyed, and so they decided that he was following God – and they let him stay.

Over to you – what do you think of these extreme practices? Have you ever embraced something like a long fast or a time of solitude? If yes, how did you fare? Did you grow in your faith?