Four women stand near the root of Christian monastic life, and almost nothing of their lives survives. Amma Sarah, Amma Syncletica, Amma Theodora and Amma Matrona were honored as spiritual mothers in the fourth-century desert. Sister Laura Swan, a Benedictine nun in the Pacific Northwest who gathered what remains of them in The Forgotten Desert Mothers, places them in the three hundreds and is frank about the limits: “we actually don’t know anything about their life. It’s only their sayings that survived.”
The conversation this guide draws on does not quote any of those sayings. What Swan does describe in detail is the way of life the desert ammas and abbas shared, along with the fuller stories of two other women: Olympias, a deacon in Constantinople, and Maria, a harp player who prayed in a cave near the road to Jericho. So the question here is practical. What did these women do, and what would it look like to try it now? Swan’s answer points to four disciplines: prayer on a fixed rhythm that kept going between the hours, Scripture carried in memory and spoken aloud during work, simplicity aimed at a pure heart, and giving to the poor before anything else was spent.
You can use this guide alone over one week or with a group across two meetings. Each section pairs one discipline with Scripture and something to try. Nothing you write needs to be shown to anyone.
Before you read further
Take an index card. On one side, write the first three names that come to mind when you hear “early church leader.” On the other, finish this sentence in your own words: To pray without ceasing would mean… Keep the card. You will come back to it.
One word of background. Swan explains that amma, mother, and abba, father, were honorifics from Coptic Egypt for someone recognized as an elder in the spiritual life, a person who had spent years seeking God and wisdom. The title was earned by a life, which is why the life is what we study.
Discipline one: prayer that does not end when the hour ends
Swan describes a rhythm the early church inherited from the Jewish community: at least morning and evening prayer, built on the Psalms and other Scripture. Maria the harp player kept the hours seven times a day. Travelers between Jerusalem and Jericho heard her playing and chanting from her cave, and Swan adds that “Sound carries really well in a desert.” After many years they noticed the music had stopped, went looking, and found she had died.
Her pattern echoes the psalmist: “Seven times a day do I praise thee because of thy righteous judgments” (Psalm 119:164). That is poetry, not a rule for how many times you must pray. It describes a life that returns to God again and again.
The fixed hours were never the whole point. Swan says the ammas teach “that prayer is not just something we do in the morning, in the evening, when we sit down to an intentional prayer time.” Instead, “they talk about cultivating a constant prayer, a constant awareness of God.”
Paul gives the church at Thessalonica a short command: “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Read the surrounding verses, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18. Paul sets prayer beside rejoicing and giving thanks, which are dispositions you carry rather than events you schedule. One way to connect Swan’s account with Paul, offered here as an interpretive suggestion rather than a report of how the ammas themselves read him, is that the fixed hours trained a habit meant to run through the rest of the day.
Try this. Choose two anchor times tomorrow, one near waking and one near evening. At each, read one psalm aloud. Then pick a recurring moment in your day, such as washing your hands or starting the car, and let it cue you to turn your attention to God for one breath. At night, notice how many cues you caught and how many you missed. Missing most of them is information, not failure.
Discipline two: Scripture carried in the body
Two details from Swan change how we picture their Bible reading. First, it was spoken: “you didn’t actually read silently in that time, even if you were all alone, you were still reading out loud.” Second, it was memorized and joined to labor. Most supported themselves with handwork such as weaving rope or making baskets, and Swan says “they would be doing their work with their hands while reciting the entire Bible.” The purpose, in her words, was “so that they can constantly re-remember God.”
Swan also says they memorized Scripture in Hebrew and Greek. You do not need to match that to learn from it. The principle is older than the desert:
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
Moses spoke those words to Israel in Deuteronomy 6:6-7. Look at where the words travel in that sentence: the house, the road, bed, morning. Scripture was meant to occupy ordinary time. Psalm 1:2 describes the same life from the inside: “But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.”
Try this. Choose a short passage, perhaps Psalm 1 or Psalm 23. Read it aloud each morning this week. Then recite what you remember while doing a task that uses your hands but not your full attention: folding laundry, chopping vegetables, walking, sweeping. Pay attention to whether speaking the words changes how you hear them.
Discipline three: simplicity aimed at the heart
Here the ammas need careful reading. Swan warns that their teaching can sound to modern readers as if they distrust the body. Some women cropped their hair, wore men’s robes and tried to live without gender, aiming to become like the angels. Swan does not ask us to copy those methods. She says “I think living well is enough of an asceticism.”
What she wants us to keep is their aim: “really their goal was purity of heart.” Jesus names the same goal: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). A pure heart in that saying is an undivided one, not split between God and competing loyalties.
Swan ties this to a call to simplicity that is mostly interior but also exterior. The life of faith is about relationship with Jesus and with one another, she says, “And it’s not so much about institutional church and governance and power.” She describes the spiritual journey as “three feet long, but five miles deep,” and adds, “It’s to go within and not look for something out.”
Test it. Draw a line down the middle of a page. On the left, list what the desert women did: leaving cities, fixed prayer, handwork, memorization, cropped hair, giving first. On the right, write the purpose each practice served. Circle the purposes you share and cross out any method you think belonged to their time rather than to the gospel. Be ready to give a reason for each crossed-out item. This is the difference between imitating a person and learning from one.
Discipline four: giving that comes first
The desert life was not a retreat from neighbors. Swan says that when the ammas and abbas went into villages to sell their goods and buy supplies, “the first 10% went to the local deacon” to be redistributed to the poor. The giving came before the shopping.
Olympias shows the same discipline at a far larger scale. Swan calls her one of the wealthiest women in the Roman Empire. She led a monastery of 250 to 300 women who served the poor, preached and taught, and she supported John Chrysostom with money and friendship after he was driven out of Constantinople for condemning the imperial family’s corruption. Swan stresses how she gave: “she gave her money away responsibly.” She funded orphans, widows, new churches and missionaries, and “she’s very careful about how she gave her wealth away.” Swan identifies Olympias as a deacon; how that history bears on church office today is a question faithful Christians answer differently, and this guide leaves it with them.
Paul’s instruction to Timothy fits her closely: “Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy; That they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to communicate” (1 Timothy 6:17-18). Paul assumes the wealthy will remain in the church and tells them what to do with what they have. Generosity, on this reading, is stewardship that requires thought.
Try this. Before your next grocery or supply run, set aside a portion first for someone in need, through your church or a person you know. The amount is yours to decide, and nobody needs to know it. The discipline lies in the order: the poor come before the cart is full. This is not a formula for getting more back. It is a reminder of whose the money is.
What would they ask of a church?
Swan reads the ammas as prophetic voices who stepped away from the culture, politics and power of the empire and modeled being in the world but not of it. Jesus prays for that kind of disciple in John 17:15-16, asking not that the Father take them out of the world but that he keep them from evil. Swan adds a sharp observation about how churches treat such voices: “we prefer our prophets dead, not alive.” She urges listening to prophetic voices today, because “if they disturb you, that’s really good.”
That standard is hard to apply honestly, because a voice can disturb you and still be wrong. The test is Scripture, not discomfort. But the desert women suggest a fair question for any congregation: how much of its energy goes to prayer, the word and the poor, and how much to status and governance?
A group exercise. Bring a recent church bulletin or calendar. Sort every listed activity into four columns: prayer, Scripture, care for the poor, and everything else. Much of the last column may be good, so do not judge it quickly. Then ask what one change would bring the church closer to these priorities without simply adding another program.
Questions for discussion
- What happened when you tried each practice this week, and what do you make of it? If you did not try one, what kept you from it?
- Swan says only sayings survive for Sarah, Syncletica, Theodora and Matrona. How should that limit what we claim about them, and does it change how much weight their example can bear?
- The desert women joined Scripture memory to manual work. What work in your life could carry Scripture, and what work would make that impossible?
- Where do you draw the line between the goal of purity of heart and the methods used to pursue it? What did you cross out in the exercise, and could someone reasonably disagree with you?
- Olympias gave carefully, not carelessly. What would it mean for a church, not just an individual, to give the way she did?
- Swan says that through small and big things “we will touch people’s lives in ways that we don’t even know.” Do you find that idea persuasive, troubling or something else, and why?
For a group, cover the first two disciplines in one meeting so people can practice them during the week, then the last two, the church exercise and the questions in the second. Invite people to report what they tried, but never ask anyone to share what they gave or what they wrote. A discouraging week is an honest result worth discussing.
Back to your card
Read the names and the sentence you wrote at the start. After a week of anchor times, spoken psalms and first-portion giving, would you change either side?
Of most of these women, Swan says “there’s absolutely no evidence that they thought anyone else other than their immediate followers would ever know that they had ever existed.” Their practice reached us anyway. Which of the four disciplines will you keep once this week is over?