One day Abba Daniel and Abba Ammoes went on a journey together. Abba Ammoes said, “When shall we, too, settle down in a cell, Father?” Abba Daniel replied, “Who shall separate us henceforth from God? God is in the cell, and, on the other hand, God is outside, too.”

Abba Daniel’s story is a particularly interesting one. It shrinks the space between the fourth century Desert Monastics and the spiritual seekers of the 21st century down to nothing. Not much has really changed, it seems. Lest we are inclined to think that monastics of the desert in the fourth century had one common view of life, it’s time to think again. Abba Daniel and Abba Ammoes, the younger monk, are both of them in an Egyptian desert in a period of great change in society. They see life through two different filters.

Abba Daniel, the elder, the spiritual father or guide of the younger man, knows that life is a whole. He has been in the desert for years. He knows by now that monastic life in the desert is no more protective of the spiritual life than it would be anywhere else. Abba Ammoes, on the other hand, sees the world—life outside his cell—as his spiritual enemy. He wants to know when they will be safely back in their cells again, spiritual again, religious again.

We do very much the same in our own time, it seems. We compartmentalize life between the sacred and the secular. Religion on Sundays: work and play all the other days of the week. Care for the poor when we make out our taxes: profit-making every other day of the week.

But Abba Daniel is truly religious, truly immersed in God, truly contemplative. He sees everything in life as the Word of God, teaching him, requiring something from him in return. “What can separate us from God?” he asks the young man. Meaning, of course, except ourselves. He does not claim for himself either difference or privilege. He moves into his cell as the same person who came out of it. The same values, the same obligations, the same goals. Like Jesus, he moves into and out of his cell freely, he moves easily with the world around him. Like Jesus, he is in the world but not of it. He does not lose himself in its values when he is outside his cell.

Abba Daniel, wise old monk, knows that the purpose of the spiritual life is not to separate us from others. On the contrary, it is meant to unite us; but all too often it is used to divide us. Only the really spiritual, the real religious in every tradition, know that the One God wants us all to be one. We are meant to identify with the hopes and fears, and the needs and struggles, of the whole world—because the world is God’s and we are God’s agents on earth. No, the world cannot separate us from God. Only we can do that.