(RNS) — Tish Harrison Warren had everything going for her.
A job as a priest at a church she loved. A family she adored. Good friends. And a dream gig writing about faith for The New York Times. And yet, she, like millions of Americans, was exhausted.
And God had gone silent.
“I would sit to pray, but it felt as though the line had gone dead. I did not feel a sense of God’s nearness. I didn’t feel much of anything at all,” writes Warren in her new book, “What Grows in Weary Lands,” out Tuesday (May 12) from Penguin Random House.
“And I’d begin to think, is anyone there?”
Warren, who is ordained in the Anglican Church in North America, found a way forward with the help of some friends and advice from the desert fathers and mothers, a group of ancient spiritual guides who fled into the desert to find God more than 1,500 years ago. Their advice, Warren writes, helped her build a sturdier spirituality for taking on the modern world. Rather than spiritual hacks, they offered advice for long-term spiritual health.
“Do all the boring stuff for a really long time,” Warren told RNS in a recent interview.
For Warren, one of the first steps was getting off social media, especially X, then known as Twitter. At the time, Warren was still writing for the Times — she left in 2023 — and loved the give and take of social media. But it became too much, she said, and some friends staged an intervention.
“I feel like my brain was being rewired in a way by social media that really wasn’t good for me,” Warren said.
Her friends agreed.
“The most insightful thing they said was, ‘This isn’t just a matter of time management,’” said Warren. “It’s a matter of energy management, and this is sucking energy and attention that you need for other things.”
Warren, who admits she can easily be distracted by social media debates, handed over her password for X to a friend, who promptly changed her credentials for the site. Now, the only way for Warren to post about her new book is to ask a friend to do it.
She tells the story about the social media intervention in a chapter entitled “Let the silt settle,” taken from advice given by one of the desert monks. The idea is that with a bit of patience, the noise of the world around you will settle down enough for you to hear God clearly — in the same way silt settles to the bottom of a glass filled with muddy water.
Leaving social media didn’t fill Warren with spiritual bliss. But it has given her more space to think and to focus on what’s happening right around her, instead of what’s happening online.
“Overall,” she said, “I’m just less plugged in online and more plugged in to the conversations that are happening in my own home.”
At first glance, advice from ancient monks seems an odd fit for the modern world. They sought to escape society and had no interest in being spiritual influencers. Instead, they distrusted crowds and tried to escape them. Yet people flocked to the desert to hear what they had to say.
“They kept running away from the crowds, and the crowds kept trying to find them and get advice and prayer,” said Warren.
And they were weird. They often talked about fighting with literal demons, sold off most of their possessions and claimed that birds would bring them food at the end of a long fast. And some went to extremes to be alone.
Like Simeon the Stylite, who lived for several decades atop a tall pillar.
“He was in a cave, and people kept coming to him for advice and wisdom,” Warren said. “So he just moved up in the air and got away from everyone, which is insane. I’m not saying this is how the normal Christian should live their life.”
In another chapter, Warren recounts the story of a monk who felt like a failure because he could not find spiritual peace and decided to go back to his old life. Before he could do so, he ran into another monk, who told him to “stay in your cell,” a reference to the caves that monks lived in.
The point, said Warren, is to seek spiritual peace by settling down in one place and practicing habits like prayer and studying Scripture, and not chasing after spiritual experiences. While the emotional high of spiritual experiences in worship services or other settings is important, she said, that’s not enough.
“I really do not think that sustains faith over the long haul,” she said.
Despite their solitude, the monks also believed in the importance of community. They often lived near enough to one another to share their spiritual struggles and to help one another out. That’s another lesson that applies today, said Warren, at a time when people have lost faith in organized religion. Churches, she said, like every human institution, are flawed and in constant need of reform, but they still provide the community we need.
“Otherwise,” she said, “we have nothing but our personal spiritual brands. And I think that is really bad.”
In the interview, Warren, whose previous books include “Liturgy of the Ordinary” and “Prayer in the Night,” said hard work and spiritual practices aren’t a guarantee of spiritual peace. Sometimes, she said, God is silent and times are hard, no matter what you do. But the spiritual habits can help people build resilience in weary times. And that’s important, she said.
These days, her life is filled with family — Warren and her husband have three kids — ministry at Immanuel Anglican Church in Austin, where Warren is an assisting priest, prayer and writing. “What Grows in Weary Lands” is her fifth book, something that still surprises her.
Warren began blogging and writing essays more than a decade ago, when she was in campus ministry in Nashville, and the group she worked with ended up in conflict with Vanderbilt University over the group’s requirement that its leaders be Christians. Editors eventually found her work, leading to her books and a two-year stint at the Times.
There has been a lot of hard work and a lot of grace along the way, something she said is true about writing and the spiritual life.
“It’s all been a gift,” she said.