In With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man, Elder Paisios says, “You must know that a hard-working man will prosper no matter what he does. A hard-working family man would also make a good monk, and a hard-working monk would also make a good family man.” The Elder says this in the context of a conversation he is having with his nuns toward the end of his life. He is speaking about men and women who want to join a monastery because they “are too lazy to get married.”
Marriage and the married life is a lot of work. Monasticism and the monastic life is also a lot of work. Whether in marriage or monasticism, the Christian life is work. Certainly the specific work in marriage and in monasticism is somewhat different, but not nearly as different as most people think. Monks have to wash dishes and clothes, vacuum rugs and do something to earn their daily bread. Married people have to go to church services, say their prayers, fast and strive for holiness. In both marriage and monasticism you have to get along with the people you live with, even as they change and grow in ways you did not expect. You have to obey, you have to compromise, and you have to change and grow in ways you did not expect. You never get everything you want (and sometimes none of what you want), and you can’t just be left alone.
Both marriage and monasticism are a life-long commitment to a relationship, or set of relationships, that is designed by God Himself to change you. Both marriage and monasticism will make you like Jesus, if you are a “hard-working” person. Yes, each has it’s advantages and disadvantages. Yes, it is easier to focus on different kinds of work in one calling versus another. A monk has more time to pray. A layman has more opportunity to give alms. Etc. etc. But to find salvation in either, one must give him or herself completely. It is just as possible to be a selfish, ego-driven, addicted monk as it is to suffer such maladies as a married person. Laziness leads to decay no matter where one finds oneself. Similarly, there are many married people who are becoming saints (even if their names seldom make it into the synaxarion). Many saintly monastics credit their spiritual life to the foundation laid by their saintly parents.
The grass is always greener somewhere else.
I find encouragement in Elder Paisios’ words. As a married person, I sometimes imagine how I might be different if I were a monk. Probably those differences would be minor and mostly external. The effort I put into my relationships (with God and others) as a married person is probably about the same as it would be if I were a monastic. The willingness with which I repent and acknowledge my mistakes, and the peace and trust in God I manifest when I don’t get my way: these too would be the same whether I were a monk or a married person. It seems to me that God is not limited by our circumstances. We are the ones who limit what God can do in our lives.
Whether married or single, in the world or in the cloister, God’s arm is not too short to save (as it says in Isaiah), but it is our sins that have made a separation. The answer is usually not a change of venue, it is a change of heart, but that takes a lot of work.
Considering what they have done to their lives, if people lived eternally in this life, there would be no greater hell.
Elder Paisios
Back in the mid 70s, when I was a teenager, I had a foster brother who listened to a punk rock group called The Tubes. I never liked loud music, so didn't much know about contemporary pop music. However, my foster brother made me listen to The Tube's album over and over again. Soon I began to understand the words, and the words of two songs have stayed with me.
One song is entitled, "We're White Punks on Dope".
We're white punks on dope
Mom and Dad live in Hollywood
Hang myself when I get enough rope
Can't clean up though I know I should...
It was a song of despair, about having all the stuff, yet being so bored and lonely that the only apparent escape was drug induced highs followed eventually by suicide. Although this was not my experience as a teenager, I observed it all around me. It is exactly as Elder Paisios says, "Worldly stress is the result of worldly happiness."
The other song, the one that most comes to my mind even today is entitled, "What Do You Want From Life." The refrain is repeated several times as the song proposes increasingly real desires. In the penultimate verse, we get to perhaps the deepest, most real, desire of the lyricist:
What do you want from life
Someone to love
and somebody that you can trust
What do you want from life
To try and be happy
while you do the nasty things you must
Then the very next line says, "Well, you can't have that; but if you're an American Citizen, you are entitled to..." which is followed by an amazingly long list of consumer goods and pop culture trifle.
What do I want from life?
I often ask myself that question. It is so easy to be captivated by stuff. My spiritual father says that the Garden of Eden is not so much about something that happened in the past as it is the story of every human heart. Adam, Eve, the Garden, the serpent and God are all in the human heart. Every day we are reaching out for the forbidden fruit, ashamed of past failures, hiding from God, repenting and walking with God in the cool of the evening. What do I want from life? The serpent whispers constantly in my ear. Stuff looks so alluring. What everyone is talking about must be what is worthwhile, right? Yesterday I took the fruit and repented of it, yet today the fruit still has a pull on me. What do I want from life?
Courage is called for. "Wide is the path and easy is the way that leads to destruction." It takes courage to say no to the Stuff. It takes courage to say no to ourselves.
Heaven and hell begin for us in time and move into eternity. We choose heaven or hell, not in a moment, but throughout our lives. We repent. We learn. We grow. We even walk a little with God in the cool of the evening--if that is what we want, if that is what we long for.
What do you want from life?
I'm reading With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man, volume one of the five volume "Spiritual Counsels" of Elder Paisios of Mount Athos (it is a collection of his sayings recorded by his spiritual children). I'm finding myself blessed reading it. There is much, however, that doesn't directly apply to a Canadian context--his counsels on curses and the evil eye, for example do not directly apply to the contemporary Canadian context. I'm not saying that these things don't exist in contemporary Canada, but we generally understand such phenomena in a different paradigm--not necessarily a better or more accurate paradigm, just a different paradigm.
Still, as I am reading I experience a certain joy, an imparting of Life, Insight and Truth. I felt this way reading Father Arseny: 1893-1973 Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father; Mother Gavrila: Ascetic of Love; and Saint Nektarios: The Saint of our Century by Sotos Chondropoulos. However, this is not what I experience when I read many other contemporary elders. With some I experience a kind of heaviness. I read some of these books with the sense that I should be getting life from the book: others say they have, but I don't. I push myself, but seldom get more than halfway through. It's not that I disagree with anything particular that the elder says, nor that I don't see the truth of what he or she is saying. It's just that the book does not overflow with Life for me.
Recently, I spoke with and older priest in a neighbouring parish, an archimandrite (celibate priest), about this. He said that this is exactly the reason why we need to be guided in what we read. There are all sorts of Orthodox literature out there--especially on the internet. And those on the margins seem to shout the loudest. And even the material of unquestioned quality may be written for an audience very different from the typical western-educated Canadian. Literature written to speak to the spiritual needs of peasants in the Balkans a hundred ago, or written for highly educated monks in the fifteenth century may be exactly the wrong literature to bring Life to a Protestant convert mom struggling to raise three children in suburban Vancouver. And it may also be that the book or article is just not very full of Grace. There may be nothing particularly wrong with it, with the facts or the statements. It just doesn't overflow with Life.
Even as a priest sometimes I struggle, wondering if it's "just me," or if there is something not quite right with the material I am reading or it's fit for my life. As I was discussing this with my archimandrite friend, I mentioned that I was reading With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man, and what a feeling of Life I am getting from the book. My friend told me that he had not read the book, but he had known Elder Paisios himself.
My friend had visited Elder Paisios twice on Mount Athos about thirty years ago. The second time he waited several hours outside his cell (the elder had gone for a walk) for Elder Paisios to return so that he could hear his confession. As soon as my friend began speaking about Elder Paisios, his face lit up--really lit up. He said that you can always tell a holy elder by the way he deals with confession: "Does he make you heavy or make a way for you to go forward? "
"The thing about Elder Paisios," my friend said, "was that he lived it. He did not write about how to live or go about telling others how to live, he just lived the life with God himself. That makes all of the difference."
Yes, that does make all of the difference.
