This author once thought that only men we called to be hermits, but in her studies she learned that she was very wrong. Here are some excerpts:
http://www.peregrina.com/matrologia/desertmothers2.html
It seems to me that to characterise as Desert Mothers only those who were physically isolated from others -- as I did in the first of these papers -- is to miss the point. The desert experience was (and is) an inner spiritual state, characterised by a self-imposed exile and a turning away from the concerns and passions of the external world.
Our present social turmoil is, in fact, what binds us to the Egyptian and Syrian deserts of the fourth century and the towns and villages of thirteenth century Brabant. Our decadent urban society is similar in many ways to the world in which these holy women lived and, like them, many of us yearn to withdraw into the desert, to escape the fearful temptations to which we are being subject but, alas, as in thirteenth-century Brabant, there are few handy deserts into which we can easily retire. My study of these women, therefore, is something more than an interesting but abstract historical study. We can learn much from their example as spiritual models for our confused and spiritually bankrupt Western European society.
Two characteristics seem basic to the desert experience: radical separation from the world and radical poverty. Essential to this conversion are four elements which Gabriele Winkler ascribed to the encratics, an early sect of Syrian ascetics: poverty as uprootedness from comfort and wealth; the dissolution of origins and family ties; homelessness as a precondition for the proclamation of the Kingdom; and the dissolution of what previously constituted oneself.
For these later hermits, physical separation from others was less important than a mental and spiritual isolation from the world and its affairs. Thus arose what would appear to be the anomalous concept of communities of recluses who lived within society and displayed no external signs to distinguish their eremetical vocation. For them, the existence of physical solitude became secondary to psychological solitude. Their uprootedness from society was an inner and spiritual displacement, although sometimes this renunciation manifested itself externally in voluntary pilgrimage.
As with their Desert forebears, radical poverty was central to the aims of these new hermits. Like them they wished to become new apostles, to recreate "the path of the apostles" (vita apostolica) by the kind of self-renunciation enjoined by Christ who had said "whoever wishes to follow me, let them renounce themselves and take up their cross and follow me" (Lk 9: 23). They took this command literally and energetically pursued a life of real material poverty, much to the dismay of the official Church and the rich monastic orders.
Their most radical renunciation by far, however, was what Winkler described as "the dissolution of what previously constituted oneself." It is this profound ascesis which proves the soul's merit and is the occasion for the outpouring of Divine graces. Complacency is the worst enemy of the soul and even these women who, according to hagiographic convention had been impossibly sanctimonious as children, had to endure a complete collapse of their self-image before they could achieve union with God.
*****
Unmaker,
Let me learn to abandon myself fully to You.
Rabboni,
Teach me how to listen to You as I have wished in the past.
Father,
Show me what You want of me, so that I can become more and more Your child.
Maker,
Create in me that depth, that solidity and stillness that I so desire.
Changer,
Grant me the capacity to contain all that I must contain, at the same time allowing myself to be contained by You (for You are the only One who can truly contain me).
Servant Love,
Let me be the embodiment of peace and blessing to all I encounter.
Still One,
In times of desperation, may Your calm descend upon me, that I may show Your truth and love to the world.
Faithful One,
Hold me when my fear becomes too large, and remind me that I am able to trust others without losing any of my identity.
Triune God,
May my identity become one with Yours.
May my life be ever pleasing to You, O Lord.
Daily may I pray this prayer.
Nightly may I see Your hand in all things.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.
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