A typical Egyptian monastery:
Archangel Gabriel at Fayoum

The Great Skete:
Egypt 4th Century AD

Macarius the Egyptian started his ascetical life in a village and later moved to a more remote place of small foothills between the Nile delta and the Sahara desert in the west. Macarius at first walked forty miles to Mass, but was later ordained priest to serve the brethren who joined him, and the pilgrims who visited the skete. He was a great spiritual director. The skete was largely composed of individual hermitages with one or more larger buildings and a central church. Within this environment the monks spent their days in solitude, praying, growing their own vegetables and working at craftwork, which they sold in the local market to meet their needs, giving any surplus to the poor, and. The members of the community varied greatly - including recluses, penitents and a negro brigand who became legend for his hospitality!

They specialised in studying the passions of the human heart and the way to combat them, so as to reach union with God. They pioneered our understanding of spiritual discernment. Macarius saw the devil as a purveyor of quack medicines, laden with little bottles, offering the monks one after another till he found one that they liked. They did not go to the desert to escape from the difficulties of the world, but because they wanted to fight the devil on his own ground. It was the life of solitude which exposed the raw battle between good and evil, and enabled them to defeat evil at the root. In many cases, the result of the life of solitude was effective intercession and charismatic gifts. For this reason their prayers and counsel were much sought after, and everyone - from the destitute to the local bishops - beat a path to their door.

“Finis Terrae:” Gaels, Celts & Scots - 6th Century AD

In maps of the Roman Empire, the outer Hebrides are labelled “finis terrae” - the ends of the earth. Our Lord told his disciples to take the Gospel to the “ends of the earth” - so early monks and nuns did just that. They settled in little stone or wood ‘villages’ of hermitages - a monastic equivalent to the crofting community, which often grew into a real village, as families came to live nearby! On Iona the monks worked at copying manuscripts, farming, weaving, smithcraft and kept a seal farm.

The monks of the western isles maintained a tension in their lives between the hermitage and the mission. Many of them were renowned for their periods of reclusion, solitary vigils and penances, but they were equally renowned for taking themselves off into the glens, building a little hermitage and oratory, and giving religious instruction to the locals.

Remains of a monastery
in the Garvellachs, W. Scotland

The Church in Cannich traces its origin to St. Bean (pron. Ban), one of Columba’s companions who built his cell just down the road from here, and succeeded Columba as Abbot of Iona. Cuthbert made a point of seeking out places to pray and preach where where the nature spirits, local gods and traditional charms had a great following. Columba, with the spiritual strength developed by monastic vigils, was able to challenge the Druids in Inverness, and show himself their spiritual master, leading to the baptism of King Brude of the Picts. In later monastic it was the Valliscaulians, combining the ‘solitude’ of the Carthusians with the ‘community’ of the Benedictines. who flourished in the Highlands at Beauly, Fortrose and Pluscarden.

Big Sur Camaldoli Hermitage California

St. Romuald: The Camaldoli Benedictines - 9th Century AD

Romuald was a nobleman, who became a monk of Cluny, the Benedictine monastery famed for its chant and liturgy. Through his studies of the desert fathers he came to a vision of a more solitary way of life within the Benedictine family. Monasteries of his Congregation, like those of the early monks of Egypt, allow for a great variety of charism within a single community. Monks from Romuald’s monastery formed the Camaldoli hermitages on the wooded mountainside of Tuscany, from which the name of the Congregation is taken.

Vision for the Scottish Highlands
‘The desert shall blossom as a lily’

We are living through a very barren patch in religious life in the Highlands. Recent figures showed no female novices at all in Scotland. There are two aspects to be considered - who is seeking for God and what can the Highlands offer religious life which is unique to this area? Many people are seeking God - of that there is no doubt, but the search today is taking different paths, often non-Christian What will challenge them?

The renewal of the hermit life after Vatican II has been very marked. It is increasingly the starting point for new communities. In Mull there are three hermits who have just written their community constitution. In Australia several hermits are adopting Camaldoli constitutions, with the intention of finding a site where they can live together - something similar can be done here.

The entrance to Cannich Glen is a few yards from the Skete. This is about eight miles in.

In England, a group of hermits - living in far flung places at present - following the Carthusian Rule are gradually getting together a basis for community life. As in the early church, the hermitage is increasingly the starting point for new directions in community.

Reversing our expectations, and taking the hermit life as a starting point we can see that the Glens of Scotland have much to offer the budding monk or nun who is drawn -compelled even - to the search for God. In Scotland we have an environment which has fostered many monasteries in the past and can do again. The mountains have a particular challenge - like God himself, their grandeur is not subdued by human activity. In Scotland, the landscape itself, like the life of prayer, cannot be pinned down and tamed, even if it courteously allows you to live, for a while as a “pilgrim upon the earth.” It is tough, with a toughness which corresponds to monastic life itself.

It is also a place of suffering - Culloden, where the Jacobite army made its last stand is thirty miles away. At the farm down the road a baby was murdered in it’s cradle in the bloodbath which followed. The massacre of Glencoe is held up as an early example of genocide and later, two hundred crofts were cleared near here - some people having their homes burnt over their heads - and packed off to the States and Canada, often in timber barges less seaworthy than the slave ships. This leaves a mark on a people’s spirit, and it is a mark monks and nuns have a vocation to heal. As the Carmelites wished to go into Auschwitz, and the early hermits ardently desired to heal the desert, so the beauty and sorrow of the Highlands is a powerful call to the monastic heart dedicated to implanting the love of God in the deserted places of the world.

In the brave survival of the Church in the Highlands during the Reformation we have a Church of martyrs and confessors, in the hidden places of the world - a worthy successor to St. Bean when he set up his solitary monk’s cell in Cannich. It is this church of the first Highland monks which can blossom again in a renewal of the hermit and skete way of life. It is for this Church, so beloved of the Lord, He says “Leave your home and your family and come, follow Me.”