Holiness did not always look the same.
In the 3rd century, in the deserts of Egypt, one man decided that the only way to be honest before God was to disappear from everything else.
Anthony the Great, later recognized as a saint, left his home, his inheritance, and ordinary life to go where almost no one wanted to stay. He is often regarded as the first monk, not because he founded an order, but because he lived the idea before it had a name. No monastery yet. No rulebook. Just heat, silence, prayer, and time.
He lived that way for decades. People eventually found him, learned from him, then left him again.
When he died, around 105 years old, he chose to die alone. No crowd. No grave marker. Even his burial place was kept secret. For Anthony, holiness meant stripping life down until nothing was left to perform.
That made sense then. The world he lived in was unstable and violent. Faith needed space to breathe. Solitude was not escape. It was survival.
Fast forward almost nine centuries.
Now we are in 12th-century England, in a green, cold place far from the desert. Monasteries already exist. Silence is scheduled. Prayer has structure. And yet, a different struggle appears. People live together in quiet places, but the heart can still harden.
This is where Saint Aelred of Rievaulx belongs.
Aelred was a monk and later abbot at Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire. Before that, he had known public life and power. He chose the monastery, not to escape people, but to learn how to live with them rightly. His concern was not noise from the outside world. It was distance growing inside quiet walls.
Aelred wrote about friendship, not as something soft or sentimental, but as something demanding. It required patience, truth, correction without cruelty, and presence without control. For him, holiness was tested daily in shared life, not proven by withdrawal.
At first glance, the paths look opposed. Anthony walked away from people. Aelred stayed among them.
They were answering different problems. They were not choosing opposite truths, but responding to different needs of their time.
Anthony lived in a time when faith could drown in chaos. Solitude purified intention. Aelred lived in a time when faith could turn cold. Relationship revealed character.
One cleared the ground. The other examined what grew on it.
Holiness does not have one shape. Some are called to step back so life becomes honest. Some are called to stay so love becomes real.
What matters is not copying a saint’s lifestyle, but understanding why it existed in the first place.
Holiness adapts to the wound of the time. And that is why both paths still speak.
Learning the saints’ way—day by day.
⌨ ᴛʸᵖⁱⁿᵍ ᴏᵘᵗ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᵉ ʙˡᵘᵉ ᵈᵃʳᵉᵐ ᵐᵘˢⁱᶜ ᵇˡᵒᵍ
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