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The Wondrous and Paradoxical Ethos of Monasticism
To become an image of Pentecost, the monk must be a worker of repentance, a man of ardent desire, and persevere in the earthquake of repentance that renews his soul. Then he will bear witness to the humble ethos of Christ which has overcome his nature. This ethos reveals the supernatural transformation he has undergone: from a divided and distorted being into a living image of the Lord Jesus.
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The Ineffable Folly of Divine Love
The angels are always mindful of their createdness: they cover their faces and their feet with four wings to preserve their humility before the Lord Who brought them from non-being into being. Although they are immortal and incorporeal beings, they never forget that they are creatures, that they are not without beginning. Therefore, it is with restrained boldness – with only two wings – that they fly around ‘the throne of the Majesty in the heavens’. Humility gives them the strength to abide in everlasting doxology before God.
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This was used to gift my wife a book from the bookshop. It is possibly the most beautiful and lovingly wrapped gift I’ve ever seen. The contents inside are truly precious and are treated as such with the articulately prepared packaging. Flowers from the church, a beautiful seal, and a work of art in its own right. Thank you so much for making a special gift even more special.
I gave this book as a Christmas gift to my wife. We both attend the monastery talks online and we both enjoy Father Zacharias’ insights. It is beautifully bound and is something to be treasured. This book will be a great tool in our journey along the way.
The order and book arrived in good condition and in good timing to go way over to Alaska, USA, from Essex. Thank you so much for such edifying words to help us on our life’s way to Christ.
I always get a couple of Orthodox Calendars from different sources. But this one is my favorite. I hope one day to visit the monastery. Meanwhile, I have these beautiful pictures to view! And I also appreciate the details regarding the feast days and the notes area at the bottom of the page. I’m learning Greek and enjoy the words written on the calendar picture pages in both Greek and English.
Very beautiful calendar, like the images of Saint Sophrony’s church. Have read the book “The House of Our Father” a few months ago, which I highly recommend for the explanations on how the new church came into being. It’s very nice to look at the calendar and remember the Monastery with love every time I glance at it. Thank you :).
It seems a little strange to comment on a book which I have not yet finished but I have learned such a strong lesson from it that I wanted to describe it – and I know that your prayers are with your readers.
At first the book frightened me. I would read a little, put it down and even wonder if I was wise to resume the next day. But I was carried along… The intensity and depth of the experiences described awoke buried experiences of my own. I compare a grain of sand to a mountain but I also explored other religions and have been granted passing moments of falling into an unspeakable black void.
I had attributed these moments to psychological disturbance and who knows that there could have been an element of this. Now I see their great value in placing before me in the clearest terms the choice of this, or Christ.
“These invisible paths are suspended across an abyss. No other power, no other wisdom – only unshakeable belief in Christ-God can save us from being storm-tossed and hurled into the black depths.” pp. 122-123.
It strikes me with awe that these depths were sustained in the saint for years on end. By his pain, which is Christ’s, I have found healing Light.
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Continuing the Christian teaching legacy of Saints Silouan and Sophrony through our publications. ---- We share posts with our books on Instagram if you are there. But if you're not? There's no need to join, you can see all our posts here.
When Saint Parthenios, the ascetic of Kiev, sought to know the true meaning of the monastic culture, the Mother of God answered him: ‘The monk who wears the schema is a man who prays for the whole world.’ The Fathers therefore define the monk as an intercessor for the world. How does the monk become an intercessor for the world? By assuming the descent of Christ. He humbles himself to the end, even to the bottom of hell, where he meets Christ. There he unites with Him and receives His state: the very desire for the salvation for the whole word.
Indeed, a monk fulfils his vocation when he obtains perfect likeness to Christ; when he becomes another Adam, and acquires the universal enlargement of the New Adam-Christ, whereby he intercedes for the salvation of the world.
A monk once asked in his prayer, ‘Lord, what is a monk?’ In exhaustion he looked at an icon of the crucified Christ, and a strong thought sounded in his heart: ‘I am the Monk!’ The crucified Lord of glory replied as the true Monk. Thus, the monk becomes an imitation of the crucified Lord when his life of voluntary crucifixion leads him to the enlargement of love for God.
— Excerpt from: The Otherness of Love (p. 303-304) • Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou)
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By His incarnation, the Lord overturned the fallen hierarchy of cosmic being, which Sant Sophrony depicted as a pyramid. He inverted it and placed Himself at its lowest point. As the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world, He took upon Himself the inconceivable weight of the sins and tragedies of all men.
This inverted pyramid became the way of humility leading to eternal salvation — the way by which man delights for ever in the gift of eternal union with God. Having first walked this way Himself in utter self-emptying, the Lord filled it with His life-giving presence, with His companionship, and then offered it to man as a gift.
The Lord declares that He Himself is this way: first, downwards, from the bosom of the Father to the earth, and even further, to the nethermost regions of hell; and then, upwards, far above the heavens.
The monk follows this same path first by going downwards in the voluntary humility of self-abasement, in the strong crying with tears of repentance, and in the labour of keeping the commandments. Then, he is lifted upwards when his outstretched hand meets the Lord’s incorruptible hand of grace that pulls him out of the bottomless pit of corruption.
Therefore, the way of the Lord not only represents a way of self-denial and struggle, but above all a place where man can meet the Lord, find union with Him, and experience the dynamic increase in God, divine visitations and the universal enlargement of his being.
The mission of the monk is to learn the humility of Christ’s descent, that he may meet the Lord at the summit of the inverted pyramid. There, through union with Him, the monk inherits the universality of Christ — that ontological enlargement of the heart which is the very portion of those who are born of the Spirit and are citizens of the heavenly Kingdom.
— Excerpt from: The Wondrous and Paradoxical Ethos of Monasticism (p. 39-40) • Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou)
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Keep your mind firmly fixed on God, and the moment will come when the Immortal Spirit touches the heart. Oh, this touch of the Holy of holies! There is naught on earth to compare with it — it sweeps the spirit into the realm of uncreated Being. It pierces the heart with a love unlike that which is generally understood by the word. Its light streams down on all creation, on the whole human world in its millenary manifestation. Though this love is sensed by the physical heart, by its nature it is spiritual, metaphysical.
The life-giving Divine Spirit visits us when we continue humbly open to Him. He does not violate our freedom. He envelops us with His tender warmth. He approaches us so softly that at first we may not notice Him. We must not expect God to force His way in without our consent. Far from it. He respects man, submits to Him. His love is humble — He loves us not condescendingly but tenderly, as a mother aches over her sick baby. When we open our heart to Him we have an irresistible feeling that He is our ‘kin’, and the soul melts in worship.
Divine love, which is the intrinsic essence of eternity, in this world cannot avoid suffering. Mellowed through ascetic striving and the visitation of grace, the heart is allowed to behold — obscurely, perhaps — Christ’s love embracing the whole of creation in infinite compassion for all that exists. Now I am God’s, Christ’s prisoner.
— Excerpt from: On Prayer • Prayer - An ever-new Creation (p. 14) • Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov)
🖼️ Icons of St. Sophrony and Christ from the book ‘Catalogue Raisonné vol.1: Drawing & Painting A. Sophrony (Sergei Sakharov)’ (p. 91, 79) by Sister Gabriela
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The disposition of soul in people who have come to know God’s visitation may seem incomprehensible, in that they really think and feel that they are worthy of hell and eternal torment. Yet at the same time it is not despair that possesses them — their whole being is filled with a feeling of greatness of the holiness of God, forever blessed.
The vision of the infinite holiness of the humble God-Christ brings the consciousness and feeling of the sin that lives and works in us, to such an extent that a person really feels ‘compressed’, and in a great impulsion of his whole being towards God, and a strong aversion to his evil, he plunges into weeping. The soul’s desire to become like God in holy humility then becomes like a fatal thirst. A particular spiritual sorrow from awareness of one’s abomination mightily torments the soul. In this wearisome languishing after holiness there is already a rudiment of holiness itself, and therefore the Fathers call it holy sorrow, and having come to love it for its holiness, they cherish it and safeguard it.
— Excerpt from: Born From On High • Chapter 9: Repentance (p. 94) • Saint Sophrony the Athonite
🖼️ Fresco of St. Silouan in the book ‘Thirst For God’ (p. 34) by Community of St John the Baptist (Essex, England)
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Listening to Father Stratonicos the day before, Silouan had noticed that he ‘spoke from his own mind’, and that what he said about the meeting of man’s will with God’s will, and about obedience, had been obscure.
He began by asking Father Stratonicos the answers to three questions. ‘How do the perfect speak?’ ‘What does surrender to the will of God mean?’ ‘What is the essence of obedience?’
In all probability the spiritual atmosphere in which Father Silouan dwelt at once affected Father Stratonicos. He sensed the deep significance of the questions and became thoughtful. After a silence he said, ‘I don’t know... You tell me.’
‘The perfect never say anything of themselves. They only say what the Spirit inspires them to say?’
At this point Father Stratonicos evidently entered into the state of which Father Silouan was speaking. A new mystery of the spiritual life, unknown to him till then, was disclosed to him. He saw his shortcomings in the past. He realised how far he still was from perfection - that perfection which he had sometimes thought to possess because of his obvious superiority over other monks (and he had been in contact with many remarkable ascetics). He cast Father Silouan a grateful look.
Once the first question had been resolved in the depths of his soul by his actually experiencing what Father Silouan meant, thanks to the latter’s prayer, it was easy enough for him to master the other two.
— Excerpt from: Saint Silouan the Athonite (p. 57) • Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov)
🖼️ Quote & Fresco of St. Silouan & Fr. Stratonicos in the book ‘Thirst For God’ (p. 54-55) by Community of St John the Baptist (Essex, England)
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1. Neither intellectual theology without prayer of repentance, nor prayer, even fervent prayer, without mental theological vision, makes for perfection. The only knowledge which approaches fulness includes both the aspects described, united as one life.
2. The dwelling in us of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit who is inseparable from Them, gives us the only trustworthy knowledge about God in actual living reality. We, as dwelling-places of Divinity, become, in a natural way, bearers of the fulness of divine Eternity.
3. The ascetic purification of our mind is necessary, so that we do not introduce elements of imagination (working upwards from the earth) into the dogmatic teaching of the Church about God, which is founded on the Revelation about the form of Divine Being.
4. Neither a philosophical nor a mathematical approach are applicable in resolving questions about knowledge of God. We begin with faith in the Truth of the revelation through Jesus Christ.
And the results of this faith confirm it and transform it into hope.
5. The dogmatic and ascetic teaching of the Orthodox Church is not some compilation of human conjectures or ‘cunningly devised fables’. What characterises her teaching is that it is not subject to any systematisation, and it presents to its hearers the experience of life.
6. The teaching of the Church is an expression in human words of what was really seen and known by the holy Apostles, the Fathers of the Church and the generations of ascetics who succeeded them.
7. We can only know God by the Holy Spirit, and the proud man who aspires to know the Creator with his intelligence is blind and foolish.
— Excerpt from: Born From On High • Chapter 1: Theological and Ascetical Paths (p. 20-29) • Saint Sophrony the Athonite
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