Sayings of the Urban Fathers and Mothers by James Ashdown (review)

Reviewed by: Sayings of the Urban Fathers and Mothers by James Ashdown Tim Vivian Sayings of the Urban Fathers and Mothers by James Ashdown. Fairacres Publications 198 (Fairacres/Oxford: SLG Press, 2023. Pp. 76. Paperback, $13.12; Kindle, $8.36. ISBN 978-0-72830-344-7). The front cover of this book has the title in white, but bold and bigger red ink gives us " Desert" and writes above it "Urban." When I think of great urban fathers and mothers I think first of saints like Dorothy Day, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and Greg Boyle. In this volume, Ashdown, a licensed lay urban minister, offers 193 short "reworked" sayings modeled on the desert ammas and abbas (p. 3). The book has a brief introduction, then eleven short chapters of sayings by topic, ranging from one page to twelve pages (the longest chapter is "How to Live with Sexual Desire"). The first two topics/chapters are "How to Keep Growing and Never Grow Stagnant" and "Why Being Quiet is Important," two central topics of the early monastics; a chapter, "Holy Arnold: A Holy Man of East London," one long story, concludes the volume. In the introduction, Ashdown begins with a first-rate, perennial, question: "What would happen if the great giants of early monasticism, such as St Antony, Arsenius, and Moses the Black happened to be living among us now?" He's speaking specifically of "the urban wilderness of inner London" and sees "a curious connection between the two places" (all p. 1). In just three pages (the introduction) the author offers one of the very best brief statements about monastic spirituality then and now that I've read. For example, he states, "that rather than rejecting human life for some kind of abstract, spiritualized existence, [the early monastics] were, in fact, exploring the limits of what it means to be human" (1). Towards the end of the introduction he expresses a main purpose of the book: The Desert Fathers [and Mothers, I'll add] lived, in some ways, as a reaction to the first stirrings of Christendom, in which the way of Jesus began to be transformed into a state ideology. This is why the Desert Fathers [and Mothers] so valued their independence and can appear at times to be proto-anarchists. Here is an immediate connection to our modern age, where Christendom is breaking down, and Christianity is no longer taken for granted as the foundation of the western state. Maybe the 'urban fathers [and mothers]' are an exercise in imagining a post-Christendom spirituality (3). [End Page 241] Those familiar with the apophthegmata, the sayings and stories of the desert fathers and mothers, will recognize reconfigurations of the ancient texts. Perhaps the most glorious thing about the book is that women abound: pages 23–27 have twenty-six sayings, twenty by women. It can be startling, and awakening, to see "fried chicken," "Coke," a "kebab shop," "Big Mac," "10 Downing Street," and ecological concerns, many of them. I have two suggestions: (1) With sayings, give references to the sayings of our monastic ancestors so the interested reader may compare and contrast them. (2) Since these are urban ammas and abbas, use contractions that makes speech sound more like today's everyday language. Finally, for readers interested in short books of apophthegmatic sayings for reading and/or lectio, I highly recommend a book I'm using now, The Book of Mystical Chapters: Meditations on the Soul's Ascent from the Desert Fathers and Other Early Christian Contemplatives by John Anthony McGuckin. [End Page 242] Tim Vivian Bakersfield, California Copyright © 2024 American Benedictine Review, Inc