Fr Raphael Vereshack
14-02-2005, 04:10 PM
Monasticism in the 21st Century: A Viable Alternative or a
Forgotten Ideal?
by
Mother Ephrosynia of the Convent of Lesna, France
A brother went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, "Abba, as
far as I can I say my prayer rule, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I
live in peace as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?"
Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His
fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, "If you will, you
can become all flame."
This is what monasticism is: a longing for God that knows no limits. It is
the beginning of the Age to come, of the Kingdom of Heaven still here on
earth. The Church calls monasticism the Angelic Life. According to Holy
Tradition, in the 4th century an angel appeared to St.Pachomius, the first of the monks struggling out in the Egyptian desert to
establish a monastic community, and gave him a bronze tablet, inscribed
with a Rule for his monks to follow. From Apostolic times to the present
day thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people have left
everything they had and scorned everything that this world has to offer in
order to follow Christ and to live the Gospels more fully.
At times this impulse has been stronger, at times weaker, and the Holy
Fathers speak of monasticism as a barometer of spiritual life in the
Church. When monastic life flourishes, the faithful are really striving
spiritually, and conversely, when few people find inspiration in the
monastic ideal, monasteries diminish and are ignored, spiritual life
amongst the faithful is on the decline. At the end of the 4th century, when persecution of Christians ceased and the Church knew peace
for the first time, but the zeal of converts hadn't cooled, and many
Christians desired to give everything to Christ, monasticism even became a
mass movement. One of the travel writers of the period, St. Palladius,
tells of his visit to "Oxyrhynchus, one of the cities of the Thebaid (in
Egypt). It is impossible to do justice to the marvels, which we saw there.
For the city is so full of monasteries that the very walls resound with the
voices of monks. Other monasteries encircle it outside... The temples and
capitols of the city were bursting with monks; every quarter of the city
was inhabited by them... The monks were almost in the majority over the
secular inhabitants... and there is no hour of day or night when they do
not offer acts of worship to God... What can one say of the piety of the...
people, who when they saw us strangers.. approached us as if we were
angels? How can one convey an adequate idea of the throngs of monks and
nuns past counting? However, as far as we could ascertain from the holy
bishop of that place, we would say that he had under his jurisdiction
10,000 monks and 20,000 nuns. It is beyond my power to describe their
hospitality and their love for us. In fact each of us had our cloaks torn
apart by people pulling us to make us go and stay with them." Closer to our
own time, in Russia in 1907, towards the end of the spiritual revival of
the 19th century and before the Revolution there were 24,000 monks and 66,000 nuns, about 90,000 monastics, living in 970 monasteries.
On the bleak side, the countryside of France, where my monastery is, is
peppered by empty monasteries in ruins, remnants of the Age of Faith, as
historians call the Middle Ages. They are testimonies to the spiritual
barrenness of France, where more people believe in astrology than in
Christ, and people spit at me on the streets because they think I'm a
Moslem. It would never occur to them that a woman wearing black might be a
nun. The scene at the airport here in Ottawa when I arrived was nothing
like the scene in Oxyrhyncus when St. Palladius walked through the gates,
and you could probably travel clear across Canada or America and not see a
single monastery nor meet a single monk or nun.
But is monasticism completely a lost cause today? True, to modern eyes, the
monk is increasingly a figure of yesterday, someone silly and eccentric.
People think of roly-poly Friar Tuck from Robin Hood or of the sinister,
murderous monks in the novel "The Name of the Rose". The word "nun" brings
to mind Mother Theresa or silly movies about nice but rather dumb women
wearing strange, uncomfortable clothes. Even in someone with a more
Orthodox frame of mind the word "monastic" applied to our times calls up
the image of St. John of Shanghai, of Fr. Seraphim Rose, or the New Martyr
the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, and we wonder what can these saints possibly
have in common with us? Is anything from their lives and experiences at all
relevant or applicable, and how can we, Orthodox Christians of the 21st
century, even dare to aspire to imitate them? The Sayings of the Desert
Fathers and the lives of the founders of monasticism abound with dire
warnings that monasticism, especially the strict asceticism of past
centuries, will be just about impossible in the latter days. Once, when
"the Holy Fathers were making predictions about the last generation, they
said, "What have we ourselves done?" One of them, the great Abba Ischyrion
replied, "We ourselves have fulfilled the commandments of God." The others
replied, "And those who come after us, what will they do?" He said, "They
will struggle to achieve half our works." They said, "And to those that
come after them, what will happen?" He said, "The men of that generation
will not accomplish any works at all and temptation will come upon them;
and those who will persevere in that day will be greater than either us or
our fathers". Reading St. Ignaty Brianchaninov's instructions for
contemporary monastics, first published a little over a century ago and
known in English as "The Arena" can be downright depressing. "We are
extremely weak," he says, "while the temptations that surround us have
increased enormously... Spiritual activity is quite unknown to us. We are
completely engrossed in bodily activity and that with the purpose of
appearing pious and holy in the eyes of the world and to get its reward. We
have abandoned the hard and narrow way of salvation... we monks are
diminished more than any nation, and we are humbled in all the earth today
for our sins...." At the end of the Arena, St. Ignaty uses the image of
beggars eating the scraps left over from a sumptuous banquet to describe
the monks of the latter days, where the Lord says to them, "Brothers, in
making my arrangements for the banquet, I did not have you in view. So I
have not given you a proper dinner, and I am not giving you the gifts which
have all been given away according to a previously made calculation which
only I can understand." If someone today so much as even dares think of
monasticism everything around him, both worldly and Orthodox, of the Church
seems to say, "Forget it! Don't even try! It's absolutely useless!"
In spite of the hardships and the off-putting advice of even the most
authoritative Orthodox sources, many people still do choose to leave
everything and everyone behind, to take up the cross of monastic struggles
and to follow our Saviour. I don't think that it's too optimistic to speak
of a sort of revival of monasticism in our times. In the 20 years that I've
been struggling to be a monastic my monastery has doubled in size. Every
week we get letters and phone-calls from women and girls that want to come,
to enter or to learn more about our life. They are clearly searching for a
deeper, more intense spiritual life and some form of dedication. Our
monasteries in the Holy Land are growing and flourishing. Since the years
of Perestroika in Russia hundreds, if not thousands of monasteries have
been opened. When I travel there, on the street every few feet of the way
someone comes up to ask where I'm from, what monastery, for prayers, for a
word of advice or consolation. They weep at the very sight of a nun and
press lists of names into my hands, and their last kopecks and rubles. A
very serious writer noted in surprise that in Russia more tourists visit
monasteries than exhibits, museums or zoos.
What is it that continues to draw people to this way of life that is
essentially a mystery, something that even the holiest monks speak of with
awe and trembling? Above all, monasticism is the way of repentance. Not of
the sort of repentance when we stop to sigh and feel sorry about the bad
things we've done and then quickly move on to the next item on our list of
things to do, or mumble a list of sins at confession so that we can go to
Communion, but the sort that means a complete turn-about, a conversion, a
profound change of lifestyle. This is the repentance of the Prodigal Son of
the Gospels, who comes to realize that his entire way of life has been very
wrong, and who leaves it all behind to go home to his father to ask
forgiveness. The service of monastic tonsure begins with a stichera
paraphrasing this parable: "Make haste to open unto me Thy fatherly
embrace, for as the Prodigal I have wasted my life. In the unfailing wealth
of Thy mercy, O Saviour, reject not my heart in its poverty. For with
compunction I cry to Thee, O Lord: Father, I have sinned against heaven and
before Thee." It is this longing for our Heavenly Father's embrace, for His
forgiveness, and for a home with Him that still makes people turn their
backs on everything and trudge along this rocky road.
The first step along this road is renunciation of the world, leaving it
behind. This does not mean simply quitting school or your job, closing your
bank account, moving to a monastery, putting on black and saying your
prayers. According to the Holy Fathers the term "world" means the sum total
of all our passions, attachments, opinions, petty likes and dislikes;
everything that distances us from God and prevents us from discerning His
Will. "No one can draw nigh to God save the man who has separated himself
from the world. But I call separation not the departure of the body, but
departure from the world's affairs", says St. Isaac the Syrian, one of the
greatest monastic fathers of all time. "...No one who has communion with
the world can have communion with God, and no one who has concern for the
world can have concern for God", he continues." If you truly love God",
begins St. John of the Ladder, another monastic guide, "and long to reach
the Kingdom that is to come, if you are pained by your failings and are
mindful of punishment and of the eternal judgement, if you are truly afraid
to die, then it will not be possible to have an attachment, or anxiety, or
concern for money, possessions, for family relationships, for worldly
glory, for love and brotherhood, indeed, for anything of earth... Stripped
of all thought of these, caring nothing about them, one will turn freely to
Christ..."
At this point the most common question is "how do I know?" How do I know
that I'm called to the particular form of renunciation of the world that
monasticism represents? All of us have to leave the world in the sense of
struggling to overcome our passions in one way or another; there's no
question about that. But how can a person be sure that the Lord means for
him to do it by embracing the monastic life? How can we discern the will of
God in this case? It's very true that there's no specific "monastic type"
or particular character trait that defines someone as a candidate. My
monastery has all sorts of people: fat, thin, old, young, outgoing, very
shy, well-educated, high-school drop-outs, of the sweetest disposition, and
some can be downright nasty at times. They did all sorts of things: one was
a magazine editor, another a seamstress, someone was a semi-professional
ball player, another sister has a PHD in philosophy, one of the youngest
sisters came to us practically off the streets. Some of them had happy
childhoods, others hated their parents, some of them were extremely
successful at what they did, others hated their jobs. But all of them at
some point in time became convinced of the necessity of dropping everything
and starting along the road home to their Heavenly Father.
People often talk of vocations and callings, assuming that there has to be
some sort of mystical experience to convince you to become a monastic. It's
true that a lot of monastics can look back to a particular event that was
the turning point in their lives. 9 times out of 10 there's nothing really
otherworldly about it. If you hear voices or see angels probably the last
place where you belong is a monastery! One of our sisters made her decision
during an akathist before a miracle-working Icon of the Mother of God. All
of her friends had gone dancing that night, but she chose to attend this
akathist, and in the middle of it, it dawned on her that she was having a
really good time; much better than she would have had dancing, and that it
would make sense to do this full-time, as it were. Another sister was moved
by the example of 2 nuns she met at the Synod Cathedral in NY. They were
there to collect money for the Holy Land. Someone from the parish attacked
them for no reason, accusing them of taking food from the kitchen without
permission. Most of us would have tried to reason and explain the mistake,
but one of the nuns, in a beautiful example of monastic humility, simply
made a prostration and begged forgiveness. The fact that there really are
still people today who try to do what the Gospels teach was a real
revelation, and within a year this girl was a novice. Someone else was
moved by a passage from St. John Cassian. One of our older nuns made her
decision when her parish priest asked her if she knew anyone that might
consider entering being a nun. This was soon after World War II, and this
person had assumed that there were no longer any monasteries left, that
monasticism wasn't even a possibility. And when the priest asked,
everything fell into place for her.
Even if there is such a moment, the choice and the decision to follow a
monastic path is almost always a period of real struggle, of doubts, fears
and temptations. A lot of the monastics I know, when the thought first came
to them, wanted nothing to do with it and were quite shocked by the idea.
The Holy Fathers emphasize that there is nothing that the evil one hates as
much as monasticism and he will do everything possible to turn someone away
from this path. If one is at all spiritually alert you can practically see
and hear him at work at this point. I've known people to get incredible job
offers, receive huge amounts of money, marriage proposals from tall, dark,
handsome and rich men. An older nun I knew had her husband, missing for 20
years, turn up on her doorstep the day before she left. Another one had her
son threaten to shoot himself, someone else's mother starved herself for 6
weeks. If you speak to monastics you truly will find that fact is stranger
than fiction! In spite of the trials, there's a growing conviction that
there is nothing else that you can do, that no matter what, the monastic
life is the only viable alternative. And this nags at you until there's
just no other way out.
Once a monk escapes from the world he begins to try to finally think
clearly and to concentrate on the things that will determine his eternal
fate. He begins to really understand and to feel that we, wretched sinners,
really are perishing, that we desperately need a Redeemer and Someone to
heal our souls, and that in Him alone is life, that everything besides is
empty and senseless. He begins to really feel and experience this, not just
to say the words. Only when a person stops listening to the noise and
clatter of the world, turns his eyes away from its wild, psychedelic
colors, and when he gets over the hangover that the world leaves you with
does he begin to see himself clearly and to discern the meaning and aim of
life on this earth and to struggle against his enemy, the evil one. St.
John of the Ladder tells us, "All who enter upon the good fight, the
monastic life, which is tough and painful, but also easy, must realize that
they must leap into the fire, if they...expect the heavenly fire to dwell
within them...let everyone test himself, and then eat the bread of the
monastic life with its bitter herbs.. .and drink the cup of it with its
tears... Yes, it's true. The monastic life is not "fun". Most of us,
especially those that had to go through a severe trial to leave the world,
experience a "honeymoon" period, when you finally take the plunge, make the
break with the world and get to a monastery. It's such a relief to have all
that behind you and to have finally started out on the way. Everything and
everyone seems wonderful, you're full of zeal, and you can practically see
the grace, it's so abundant. For some monastics this stage can go on for
years. But sooner or later reality strikes and you see that everything
that's been written about the hardships of monastic life is not just fancy
words or symbolic phrases or allegory. It's not the physical side that's
hard. With some effort and discipline anyone can learn to get up early and
to stand through long church services, to make prostrations and to work and
work hard at jobs that you don't necessarily like. A lot of people in the
world have a much more difficult life in that sense. It's the encounter
with yourself and who you really are and the struggle to change that, that
is the slow but painful, day by day, minute by minute work of the monk. The
work is done largely through our contacts and conflicts with other people.
St. John of the Ladder is very blunt about this: "...Derided, mocked,
jeered, you must accept the denial of your will. You must patiently endure
opposition, suffer neglect without complaint, put up with violent
arrogance. You must be ready for injustice, and not grieve when you are
slandered; you must not be angered by contempt and you must show humility
when you have been condemned." For most of us the most difficult element in
all this is giving up your own will. In one of the most quoted monastic
sayings Abba Dorotheus, another great teacher of the monastic life says: "I
know of no fall that happens to a monk that does not come from trusting his
own will and his own judgement... Do you know someone who has fallen? Be
sure that he directed himself... nothing is more grievous... nothing is
more pernicious."
When I was a young novice I would get really annoyed at the writings of the
Holy Fathers and the constant repetition that in the latter days monks will
not be able to perform any podvigs, or great ascetic feats, but will work
out their salvation through patience and long-suffering. "How boring!" I
would think, "Surely if we set our minds and spirits to it, we can do it,
too? How come all we're allowed is to sit around and be patient?" The
secret here is that this is truly a great mercy of the Lord. Today we are
not only unchristian in our approach to life, in our thoughts, words and
actions, we are outright anti- Christian. Were the Lord to grant us the
grace and give us the strength to perform even just 1/10 of the ascetic
feats of previous times, we would not only not profit, but the resulting
pride and vain-glory would lead us straight to perdition. This is
especially true in monasticism, where, for the inexperienced, the intense
work on one's self is very easy to confuse with the self-analysis that so
many self-help/'feel-good-about-yourself" guides teach today.
Take, for example, the concept of "moods". This is not an Orthodox concept;
we do not have moods, we are inflicted by passions and we strive to acquire
virtues. "Being in a bad mood" can never excuse your behavior in a
monastery. This can be very hard for a novice to accept. Likewise, we do
not have any "rights"; we have obligations and obediences, and we owe it to
the Lord Himself to fulfill them, but no one owes us anything. Similarly,
we cannot expect to be "happy" and "fulfilled"; we come to a monastery to
weep for our sins. Today just about everything is "boring". We've tried
everything, we're stubborn and very self-assured. To cure the boredom, some
people decide to try monasticism. Young people especially want nothing more
than to make an impression, cause a sensation. What could be more
sensational than to suddenly have all your friends see you 30 pounds
thinner, draped in black, clutching a prayer rope, expounding spiritual
wisdom? Worst of all, in our times people are prouder than ever before. We
take pride in our imaginary virtues, we even take pride in our sins. And
most of all, we are proud of our minds. We see ourselves as great thinkers,
understanding psychologists, brilliant philosophers, who of course can
understand all the finer, most profound monastic truths much more deeply
than those that came before us.
The notions of humility, obedience, self-condemnation, meekness and
renunciation of one's will used to "go without saying" for Orthodox
Christians, but today they have to be learned. One of the Russian new
martyrs, Vladyka Varnava Beliaev, wrote that it takes 30 years for someone
to start being a monk. That was said 80 years ago; today it probably takes
40 or 50!
So why bother? Is it really worth it? I remember Metropolitan Philaret,
paraphrasing St. John of the Ladder, saying, "If everyone knew how hard it
was in monasteries, no one would ever go. But if they knew the joys and
rewards of monastic life, they would all come running. And it's true, the
rewards and the blessings really are there. One of the Optina Elders, St.
Barsanuphius, taught, "True blessedness can only be acquired in a
monastery. You can be saved in the world, but it is impossible to be
completely purified.. .or to rise up and live like the angels and live a
creative spiritual life in the world. All the ways of the world, .... laws
destroy or at least slow down the development of the soul. And that's why
people can attain the angelic life only in monasteries... Monasticism is
blessedness; the most blessed state that is possible for a person on this
earth. There is nothing higher than this blessedness, because monasticism
hands you the key spiritual life."
In what do we find this blessedness? There is the knowledge that every day
of your life and every minute of your day are sanctified and significant
before God. Even your "bad" days and your really low days having meaning
before Him. As long as you live the life consciously there is no wasted
time. There is the solemnity and beauty of the Divine Services of our
Church, which is truly the beginning of the life of Heaven still here on
earth. In the world our attendance in Church is always time stolen away
from the world's affairs, a welcome respite, a sort of spiritual treat. In
the monastery the services determine the very patterns of life, and they
are the real life; everything else is time stolen away from them. They
nourish us, instruct us, and in a certain sense even entertain us. When I
was entering the monastery one of my greatest fears was that eventually I
would find the services boring-the same thing, year in, year out, forever.
Instead I find that they contain such vast wealth and so many levels, each
more profound than the one before it, that a lifetime is nowhere near
enough to begin to appreciate them. The saints have become my close friends
and mentors, I experience the feasts differently each year, every Great
Lent and every Pascha are a completely new revelation. Above all, in
monasticism there is what St. Theophan the Recluse called "being sure that
God keeps you as His own". If you accept the ways of the Lord as your life
your conscience will soon be lit up with the knowledge that He, too has
accepted you as His own. I remember the night I spent in church after my
tonsure, after making my monastic vows. I had such a vivid sense that the
Lord was with me, it seemed that Heaven was literally just around the
corner, that if I opened the door of the church it would be right there.
This wasn't a feeling; I knew this.
There is nothing more beautiful than the way monastics die. Most of our
sisters die having received Holy Communion, surrounded by the community,
with prayers and chanting and tears. Not the desperate tears of the world,
but tears at parting with a friend and sister, even if just for a while.
The funeral service of a monk, which is quite different than that of a lay
person, is a lesson on the monastic life and the solidly grounded hope of
eternal life that it represents rather than a meditation on death. For
those that spend their life on the threshold of the Age to Come death is
merely stepping into the next room.
We do give up a lot in monastic life. My arms have ached after holding my
friends' children, knowing that I would never hold my own. But the Lord has
given me many children of the spirit amongst the young novices that I work
with in the monastery. A monastic will never know the special intimacy and
closeness that is the blessing of an Orthodox marriage. And a married
person will never know the spiritual kinship of a monastic community. There
are no vacations from monasticism, no sick days, no time off. But every day
is a feast.
"Monasticism", one of the Optina elders said, "supports the entire world.
And when there will be no more monasticism the Dread Judgement will be upon
us.
And for those of us that are drawn to this way of life there simply is no
other way to live. One writer described it like this: "Some people are very
single- minded by nature. And there are ideas that permeate the lives of
such people down to the very last detail. Everything beautiful, joyous and
of consolation in this life is overshadowed for them by the memory of one
thing, by a single thought: that of Christ Crucified. No matter how bright
the sun might be, how beautiful nature, God's creation is, how tempting
faraway places might seem, they remember that Christ was Crucified, and
everything is dim in comparison. We might hear the most beautiful music,
the most inspired speeches, but these souls hear one thing: Christ was
Crucified, and what can ever drown out the sound of the nails being
hammered into His flesh? Describe to them the happiness of a family life,
of a beloved husband or wife, of children, but Christ was Crucified, and
how can we not show the Lord that He isn't alone, we haven't deserted Him.
There are those that are willing to forget everything in the world so as to
stand by His Cross, suffer His suffering and wonder at His Sacrifice. For
them the world is empty, and only Christ Crucified speaks to their hearts.
And only they know what sweetness they taste still on this earth by sharing
in the eternal mystery of the Cross and only they hear what He says to them
when they come to Him after a life full of incomprehensible hardships and
inexplicable joy.
Lesna Monastery, Provemont, 5/18 December 2000.
St. Sabbas the Sanctified
Ken McRae
14-02-2005, 06:56 PM
From 'The Living Witness of the Holy Mountain' (http://www.eighthdaybooks.com/cgi-bin/virtualcatalog/CatalogMgr.pl?cartID=b-8360&SearchField=partnumber&SearchFor=0178&template=Htx/item.htx):-
The Role of a Spiritual Father in an Orthodox Monastery
by the Abbot of Simonos Petras (Mount Athos)
01 ) A monastery is not a human society, rather it is the continuous assembly of the fraternity of the Church: in the refectory, and throughout the day. It is an assembly that identifies itself with the path of the Church herself throughout the course of her history, one that reproduces the model of that fraternity consituted by Christ and His Apostles. Such a gathering is not composed only of its visible members, but as well as those who, in their turn, come to her to comprise the Church of the past and of the future. A monastery is thus a type of the Church in her entirety. It is the gathering of the Church herself, concentrated in a particular space. Consequently the spiritual father ( gerontas ), the abbot, is an image of God: he stands in the place of Christ while the other monks constitute the choir of the saints, living and dead.
02 ) The monastery is a mystery, a sacrament, and the spiritual father is the visible element of this mystery, behind whom hides the invisible: God, and everything that escapes the senses, which can only be sensed by the spirit.
03 ) This place, so important, of the spiritual father situated at the very heart of the mystery signifies thus that he is the guide, the one who takes and shapes men in order to gather them and incorporate them into the life of the Church, and of Christ. The superior thus does not concern himself only with food, with the daily life and material needs of the community. Before all, he is the guide of souls, the one who initiates them into the mysteries, who reveals to them the way to perfect mystical union with God.
04 ) One must understand that the monastery is a special kind of society. It is in fact the society of Paradise, the society of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is the society of all the saints in which each believer - in this cae, each monk - possesses an absolute right to the life of Christ, but where as well Christ Himself possesses the same rights over the life of each. The monastery comprises thus a most important reality because it preserves the rights man had before the Fall - the possibility of possessing God wholly as one's own. It is this reality that the abbot must, each day, make present and manifest to his monks, which is to say, to the disciples of the Lord Himself.
05 ) He is therefore the master who transmitts to them his own knowledge, and who, in particular, must reveal to them by his own life the knowledge of the true God, by the fire that he kindles in their hearts, by the awareness that he gives them in order that they themselves become sensitive to Christ as present, and also Christ as One Whom they await. Because, whatever his daily obedience, the monk's life is nothing other than the burning and impatient attendance upon God.
06 ) And, little by little, the father takes the monk in order to raise him up to the heights, to give him the grace of God. In the mystical life, it is grace that accomplishes all in such manner that Christ becomes not only the One to come, but the One with Whom we hold converse now. Thus the monk learns to devote himself to his master, the Lord, to have with Christ exactly the same intimacy as has the choir of the Apostles. And, finally, by grace of his daily effort and careful attention to the Holy Trinity, the abbot will be able to achieve another result: the monks will perceive God as living, as a contemporary, accompanying them on arising from sleep, at their regular tasks, and in the least detail. At that point the communion between God and man is complete.
07 ) The spiritual father is therefore, in fact, the same who takes his disciple, the monk, by the hand in order to introduce him to the Lord. He is the same who brings Christ down, who reunites that which was seperated - the realities of heaven and of earth - in order to transform them into the one, unique, and genuine dance.
08 ) Such is the real role of the spiritual father and such is the manner in which the monks perceive him. This is why this discipline exists, this obedience, this charity, this gift of self and this confidence that addresses itself not so much to the superior - who is only a man - but to Christ Whom he represents.
09 ) All the monks partake of this sense of the mystery and of the mystical reality that manifests itself among them: because the Elder is not merely someone who has appeared today for the sake of the monastery, rather he proceeds from the stream of the Orthodox tradition, he springs from the living current of the Holy Spirit.
10 ) Of course he [the Elder] is a man, but the sense of his humanity gives way within the community of the monastery. Certainly he lives as a normal man, just as any other living man, but he is as well the one whom God has taken and set apart, and who in consequence no longer lives quite the life of the present world. While indeed he walks the earth, he senses in some manner that his head is in the sky, that he sees Heaven, that he sees God. This, here, is the most important thing a monastery can offer. This, indeed, is what contemporary man and his society most lack: the spiritual father who makes God so tangible, so powerful, so living, so intense, and so true.
11 ) The monastic community gathered around its spiritual father is thus the type of ... the universal Church. Daily life is very simple there. But in the silence, the quiet, by grace of the unity and mutual charity, one is put on the lookout to listen for the rustling of the steps of Christ Who draws nigh. [The End]
From St. Silouan the Athonite (http://www.eighthdaybooks.com/cgi-bin/virtualcatalog/CatalogMgr.pl?cartID=b-8360&SearchField=partnumber&SearchFor=SP-11957&template=Htx/item.htx), p. 292 :-
12 ) Prayer preserves a man from sin, for the prayerful mind stays intent on God, and in humbleness of spirit stands before the Face of the Lord, Whom the soul of him who prays knoweth. But the novice naturally needs a guide, for until the advent of the grace of the Holy Spirit the soul is involved in fierce struggle against her foes, and is unable to disentangle herself if the enemy offer her his delights. Only the man with experience of the grace of the Holy Spirit can understand this. He who has savoured the Holy Spirit recognizes the taste of grace.
13 ) The man who sets out without guidance to engage in prayer (imagining in his arrogance that he can learn to pray from books,) and will not go to a spiritual director, is already half beguiled. But the Lord succours the man who is humble, and if there be no experienced guide and he turns to any confessor he finds, the Lord will watch over him for his humility. Think in this wise: the Holy Spirit dwells in your confessor, and he will tell you what is right. But if you say to yourself that your confessor lives a careless life, how can the Holy Spirit dwell in him, you will suffer mightily for such thoughts, and the Lord will bring you low, and you are sure to fall into delusion.
Related Online Articles :-
14 ) The Place and Importance of Spiritual Direction (http://www.roca.org/OA/142/142p.htm)
by Priest Alexey Young
15 ) Excerpts from Paternal Counsels, Vol. I and II (http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/paternalcounsels.aspx)
by St. Philotheos Zervakos
16 ) The Spiritual Father in Orthodox Christianity (http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/spiritualfather.aspx)
by Bishop Kallistos Ware
17 ) On Being a Spiritual Father in Our Times (http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/spiritual_father.aspx)
by Archpriest Valery Lukianov
18 ) Obedience and the Layman (http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/layobedience.aspx)
by Father Alexey [now Hieromonk Ambrose] Young
19 ) Cults Within & Without (http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/cultswithinwithout.aspx)
by Archpriest Alexey Young
20 ) Cultism Revisited (http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/monasticism_cultism.aspx)
by Archimandrite Akakios
21 ) Cultism Within (http://www.romanitas.ru/eng/CULTISM%20WITHIN.htm)
by Vladimir Moss
22 ) Cultism Revisited (http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/cultismrevisited.aspx)
by Bishop Auxentios and Hieromonk Gregory
23 ) Cults and Cultism in American Religion (http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/cultism.aspx)
by Dr. [now Father] Joseph Miller
(Message edited by theophilus on 15 February, 2005)
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