Desert Daughters, Desert Sons: Rethinking the Christian Desert Tradition by Rachel Wheeler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Desert Daughters, Desert Sons: Rethinking the Christian Desert Tradition by Rachel Wheeler Kyle A. Schenkewitz (bio) Desert Daughters, Desert Sons: Rethinking the Christian Desert Tradition. By Rachel Wheeler. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019. ix, 178 pp. $19.95. Collections of wisdom from the early desert tradition, like The Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, are perennial classics for the study of Christian spirituality; and Desert Daughters, Desert Sons will permanently shift how this body of literature [End Page 333] is read and applied to the spiritual life. Rachel Wheeler writes with a penetrating lens to see and imagine what is just beyond the pages of the recorded apophthegmata. Wheeler is attentive to both the text on the page as well as what is occluded, missing, and discounted. This inquiry is squarely focused on the neglect of women, the absence of women, the rejection of biological relationships, and the subordination of women's lives and experiences in this literature. Wheeler ably demonstrates that "men were never entirely able to get away from women, as much as they might have desired, tried to, and led us to believe they had" (3). On Wheeler's examination, the literature of the desert tradition was "full of women" for those willing to perceive them (2). Desert Daughters, Desert Sons refocuses the reader's attention to attend to the women in the Sayings who appear as background characters of many male-centered stories, as foils for men's spiritual pursuits, and as gendered others to be overcome by men's spiritual achievements. Desert Daughters, Desert Sons not only brings the lives of women in these tales to the fore, but highlights how women had much to offer, teach, and exemplify in the desert tradition. As much as this book offers a necessary corrective to a surface reading of these ascetic texts, Wheeler's aim is also reconstructive. Wheeler utilizes a hermeneutic that "consider(s) possibilities about the lives" the women depicted in the desert tradition to provide a "liberating vision . . . to reassess what is our present reality and to reimagine what might be our future" (17). One of the central themes of this book is how this re-reading of the desert tradition can foster a way of love when one considers the characters of the Sayings as real persons with biological families. Her title points readers to the fact that the ammas and abbas of the desert, indeed every individual mentioned in the literature, were also daughters and sons, as well as biological mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and even spouses. Attending to the biological ties that are often neglected and rejected in the ascetic literature provides ample evidence of the ways these ascetics fashioned new, spiritual relationships at the expense of their familial relationships. According to the opening chapter, Wheeler's explicit motivation for this book is for a current audience that seeks in the early desert communities models for encountering God in daily life. The desert stories "offer contemporary readers a portrait of a lifestyle that, because independent of the explicit vocation that eventually derived from this context, might still feel possible for spiritual seekers today" (30). This literature is still being read and inculcated in Christian lives today and with it the bias, exclusion, and negative portrayals of women. By "peering into the margins" of the text and highlighting peripheral figures, Wheeler elicits new and deeper spiritual significance for the reader. The common thread of exemplary men overshadows the women in the background who were "leading their own lives, dealing with their own ordeals and successes, which seem not to interest men" (32). Wheeler brings to the fore intriguing questions that reshape the reception of the monastic wisdom these stories attempt to communicate. For example, in a passage where Poemen interacts with a monastic brother who had a pregnant wife the husband is instructed to repent and send his wife and newborn away having given them whatever they needed. Wheeler contends that attempting to solidify his monastic goals and resituate his obligations toward his spiritual family at the expense of his physical and biological family this husband and father was in the wrong. Wheeler's reasons are based on the...