In the sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, there’s a strange story. There were three friends who were monks, all earnest and faithful. One of them, motivated by the call in Matthew’s Gospel to be a peacemaker, chose to spend his time seeking to “make peace between men who were at odds.” The second monk, motivated by Christ’s concern for the vulnerable, decided to “visit the sick.” The third chose to “go away to be quiet in solitude.”

The first monk did some good helping others to reconcile, but he grew sad over conflicts he could not solve. He felt “overcome with weariness.” So he went to visit his friend who was tending the sick, only to discover that his friend, too, was “flailing in spirit.”

The two men visited the third monk and told him about their exhaustion and sense of futility – what today we might call burnout.

The third monk sat silently for a long while, then he poured water into a cup. “Look at this water,” he said. The water was murky with silt. But after they sat together for a while, the water settled. “See now, how clear the water has become,” said the third monk. “So it is with anyone who lives in a crowd; because of the turbulence, he does not see his sins: but when he has been quiet, above all in solitude, then he recognizes his own faults.”

Each time I read this story, I want to argue with it. Don’t some of us have to live in crowds? Doesn’t someone have to make peace? Doesn’t someone have to visit the sick?

Yet that’s exactly what intrigues me about this story: how countercultural and counterintuitive it is to me. The first and second monks are motivated by such good and virtuous things. Their work is urgent and important. If this parable were told today, they would be the clear moral heroes, pouring themselves out in service to others. Yet despite their passion, or maybe because of it, they find themselves overcome by weariness and discouragement. Their solitary friend implies that they’ve lost perspective. They cannot see themselves, their faults, or their limitations clearly. What they need is withdrawal and quiet.

In college, I became unlikely friends with a chain-smoking Franciscan priest. Like all Franciscans, he’d taken a vow of poverty. He was brilliant and kind, and I could not doubt his commitment to the marginalized. Soon after graduation, I bumped into the friar, and we caught up. I told him about my job running a church-based program for recent immigrants, which provided tutoring and ESL classes for kids and help for families in poverty. It was beautiful and rewarding work, but also intense, difficult, and draining. A few minutes into our conversation, he looked at me with compassion and said matter-of-factly, “You don’t have the life of prayer and silence necessary to sustain the work you are doing.”

I was taken aback. What does he know? I thought. I was zealous and passionate about seeking justice and helping others – perhaps a little like the first two monks. My friend was not telling me to quit my job, but he was calling me to learn to be more like the third. And, in the end, he was right. Within a couple of years, I was burned out and discouraged. I had been all energy and fire, but I simply did not have the practices of prayer and solitude necessary to cultivate the wisdom, humility, and stability of heart that my life and work demanded.

The desert monks tended to value withdrawal obsessively. One would have to in order to leave civilization and survive as a hermit for decades. Though the Desert Fathers and Mothers universally insist that we must respond materially when someone sick or in need crosses our path, at times their writings seem to elevate solitude and withdrawal as being more spiritually important than participation in the workaday world.

In contrast, our culture tends to be equally obsessive in the opposite direction. We overvalue work, accolades, output, and applause. We live in and among the crowd, nearly constantly. Today, many would feel as if the third monk wasted his life. What’s he good for? What’s he contributing to society? Or to the GDP? Or to the causes of justice? Why does he even matter?

Yet here he is, the exemplar in this weird, ancient story, calling to us from another place, culture, and time, asking us to reexamine our true purpose.

It’s not that, in our day, we never see solitude or stillness as valuable. We likely think of them as necessary acts of “self-care.” Yet we primarily view them as means to the end of more exertion, more rigor, more impact. They are merely fuel for a machine whose chief purpose is output and productivity. But this story implies that solitude and silence are our orienting goals, the rehumanizing rhythms that teach us that we are not, in fact, machines, but creatures – creatures with faults, limits, beauty, and worth, creatures made to dwell deeply with God.

If we see solitude and stillness primarily as a means to more productivity, we will try to get by with just enough to keep us going and no more. But if these practices are essential to our very being, to our purpose and humanity, then we will orient our work and our days, our weeks and our years, around them. These countercultural, seemingly wasteful things will become our first, most important, order of business. The third monk will turn out to be our surprise hero.

To be sure, most of us will not – and should not – follow him into a life of complete withdrawal. We have responsibilities: jobs to do, neighbors to care for, children to raise, meetings to attend, and dinner to make. Yet the Desert Fathers and Mothers remind us, in their lives and their sayings, that we are created, first and foremost, for connection with the Source of all life. When we lose this primary connection, even for the sake of important and needful things, we wither. We find ourselves, like the first and second monk, overcome by weariness, flailing in spirit, and unable to carry out our purpose.

To be restored will inevitably take some intentionality and require us to embrace different practices that shape how we use our time. This is difficult work. But the only way to grow deep in these weary lands is to be still and silent long enough to put our ear to the ground and hear the rumblings of our hearts, our longings, and our Creator. If we are to learn to see ourselves and the world clearly, we have to have moments, days, and seasons when we let the silt of our lives settle.

Excerpted from What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience by Tish Harrison Warren (Convergent Books, May 12, 2026). Copyright 2026 by Tish Harrison Warren. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.