Amma Syncletica: Does obedience set you free?

From: https://www.lychnos.org/venerable-amma-syncletica-alexandria/

“As long as we are in the monastery, obedience is better than asceticism. The one leads to pride, the other to humility.”

— Amma Synkletika

The spiritual practice most associated with Lent is asceticism: giving things up, refraining from some pleasure, or even restricting some necessity (e.g. eating less). But beyond this practice, what is the point of Lent? Any Lenten practice should help us to return to the source of our being, to the grounding of our existence, to the eternal, to God. This is the point of Lenten practice. But the practice itself often distracts us from the point.

In her pithy saying above, the Desert Elder Amma Syncletica, gives us a good description of the temptations associated with giving things up. She was well aware of the competitions among the desert Christians in the severity of their ascetic practices. Instead of the self-centered striving of asceticism, her prescription for true spiritual pra…