Today I spent some time reading about the Desert Fathers and Mothers - a group of 3rd and 4th Century Christians who felt a call to head into the desert to find Christ.  They encountered him through lives of simplicity - prayer, labor, and some form of community.  The barren desert landscape and their own unflinching honesty led them to struggle/wrestle with their own need for inner conversion, peace, and healing.  Pretty soon word got out about these crazy/holy folks in the countryside and people began to go out to learn from them.  This gave rise to a type of communal living, and it's in this that the roots of monasticism are found.  The monastery where I am this week, St. John's in Collegeville, Minnesota, follows the Rule of Benedict.  Benedict gave monastic life much of the character, spirituality, and vitality that continues to be seen today.  There are Roman Catholic, Episcopal, and some Lutheran monasteries that continue to follow the Rule of Benedict.  Back to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, also known as the Abbas and Ammas, I read some commentaries and thoughts about them and their spirituality from a variety of writers today.  One person that really spoke to me was Barbara Brown Taylor.  In her book, An Altar in the World, here's what she has to say: 

"The wisdom of the Desert Fathers includes the wisdom that the hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince, or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it." 

What does it mean when Jesus tell us to love neighbor as we love self?  How do you live that commandment?  God's peace to you.