She was a Desert Mother from Roman Egypt in the 4th century.
Her name, Syncletica, is derived from the Greek meaning “heavenly assembly.”
She was of a wealthy background and is reputed to have been very beautiful. From childhood, however, she was drawn to dedicate her life to God.
From the time she took responsibility for her family’s affairs, after her parents’ deaths, she gave to the poor all that had been left to her. With her younger blind sister, Syncletica abandoned the life of the city and instead resided in a crypt, thus adopting a hermetic lifestyle. Her holy life soon gained the attention of locals and, gradually, many women joined her to live as her disciples
The true desert is within as Amma Syncletica remarked with very feminine sagacity:
Many live on the mountains and behave as if they were living amidst the uproar of a city, and they are lost. It is possible while living amongst a crowd to be inwardly solitary and while living alone to be inwardly beset by the crowd.
She also wrote:
A treasure is secure so long as it remains concealed; but when once disclosed, and laid open to every bold invader, it is presently rifled; so virtue also vanishes once it is known and made public. Just as wax melts in the presence of fire, so also does the soul disintegrate in the face of praises and lose its vigour.
In her day, certain women were considered oracles in the pagan world. They were known for their ecstatic prophecies and generally amassed a significant following. Regarding the truth of their “prophetic utterances” she said,
“Just as some uneducated people and sailors have a kind of a hazy knowledge of winds or rainstorms from the character of the clouds, so also these people have a confused foreknowledge from demons. Actually they make some prophecies by guesswork, as also do mediums.”
There is a certain prognostication utilized by psychic mediums influenced by demonic forces. Their foretelling is, at best, guess work. God alone knows the future, Scripture makes that abundantly clear.
To her, vulnerability was of more worth than reputation.
“Those who are describing their own successes should also try to mention the weaknesses that go with them.”
Richard Rohr and Mary Earle quote from The Life of Blessed Syncletica:
If you find yourself in a monastery do not go to another place, for that will harm you a great deal. Just as the bird who abandons the eggs she was sitting on prevents them from hatching, so the monk or the nun grows cold and their faith dies, when they go from one place to another.
Amma Syncletica is counseling us to not run from ourselves. She is encouraging us to stay faithfully with whatever new life is being hatched within us….
She is addressing a universal human temptation—to miss our lives by living completely on the surface. After all, our culture encourages competition and ambition, and we are highly mobile. If we are not careful, that mobility can create a kind of rootlessness that will injure us and those with whom we live and move and have our being. This is the kind of rootlessness that is internal, that is caused by our not staying with anything long enough to grow deep roots….
In the desert, men and women were counseled, “Go to your cell and your cell will teach you everything.” … The cell was a sacred space, a place in which a woman could be with herself and the divine Presence and listen. immersed in God’s presence.
The wisdom of the desert tempers our instinct to avoid boredom and discomfort:
Amma Syncletica’s bird metaphor speaks directly to one of the dilemmas of the spiritual life—that of coming to terms with the plain old ordinariness of spiritual practice and the life of prayer, of the whole of life becoming prayer…. We are enticed by a variety of means to leave our “eggs” and simply move continually from one interest to another. The result is that we don’t allow ourselves the opportunity to bring forth new life. The “eggs” die because they are not tended. We miss the deeper life of the Spirit because we are constantly moving from one interest to another rather than focusing on one thing.
