I got to read at trapeza (meal time in the monastery) again the other day. I always mean to share what we read there, but it’s usually too rich to summarize in this smartass little blog. It’s too rich because it’s simple. I still make things too complex.
Here’s an amalgamated Cliff’s Notes version of many stories: St. Unpronouncios the Ascetic heard the Call at a very young age. He decided to seek out a monastery at his earliest opportunity, and when he told his rich, noble, pagan father of his plans, his dad immediately set about finding him a good pagan wife. On their wedding day, St. Unpronouncios wept bitterly and fled, where a burning eagle eventually guided him to a remote monastery where he became world-renowned for his severe ascetic practices. He lived in a cave for decades, and ate only one crust of bread every ten years or so. When an earthquake diverted the river right into the monastery, he prayed and, as Yoda moving Luke’s X-Wing from the swamp, dropped a mountain in the way of the onrushing flood.
(You can still visit the geologically inexplicable mountain-in-the-river to this day.)
The emperor heard of his exploits and called him to court, where he was found guilty and tortured in increasingly gruesome ways. He was always found to be whole and unharmed the next day, (reassembled and skin glued back on), always singing praises to the Lord, until the emperor, finally exasperated at all the conversions his holiness wrought among his people, had the holy witness beheaded, which is evidently the only way to kill such a saint.
Yeah, that’s a little flippant, but these are all recurring themes. (Imagine listening to detailed stories of saints being flayed alive during meal time. It’s bracing.) I’m not making light of it—quite the opposite, actually.
My wife once got into a little snit about why more miracles aren’t wrought in our time. Not the usual things we praise God for—found keys and found spouses, etc.—but the big ones like bringing people back from the dead. I always had far more “important” things to worry about, like building marketing systems that ensured job leads during the slow season. I’d evade grappling with it. “Something something ‘Age of Grace’ or something.”
I mean, we’re not Apostles. We’re normal people who have normal people obligations and problems and responsibilities. I ain’t moving to no cave to eat croutons! I have a payroll to meet!
And also, No fair! You can’t expect people like us to do the same things that people who literally walked with Jesus did. Or, people who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew Jesus. I mean, surely when a grace-bomb like Him drops into the universe, there will be grace fallout for a couple of generations, sure. But this is the 21st century. We have vaccines. And creams.
Or something. When I draw the grotesque sightless creatures up from the well of my subconscious, I can see how stupid all these presumptions sound.
Bottom line: I didn’t have an answer for my wife’s question, nor my own wonderings about that stuff.
After reading about St. Unpronouncios and his friends, though, I’m starting to. It corresponds with the carpet-bombing of other realizations in this winter of change.
The one constant among these miracle-workers is subtraction. What did they all do? They shed everything, literally everything but the rags on their backs which they kept, presumably to be able to walk in public without giving scandal. Inheritances, possessions, titles, even just about all of the things we would consider vital for living. You know, things like food.
But that was just the start. Removing all of their distractions and placing their entire lives, LITERALLY the care and upkeep of their bodies, into the hands of God, that freed them to begin the real work of subtraction: Shedding vice and harmful thoughts.
It’s easy to imagine that the ascetic who prays unceasingly on his knees in a frigid cave, pretty much naked and starving, for decades, is either insane or a man of miraculously iron will. Perhaps, but I think it has more to do with removing all obstacles and impediments to this insane, but probably holy, end.
I’ve shared the quote I burned into an old pallet board and keep on my wall:
“The Father uttered one word, that word is his Son and He utters Him for ever in everlasting silence, and in silence the soul has to hear it.”
-St. John of the Cross
I’m not a big fan of that silence thing. I have some concerns right now. I could use a lot more VERBAL direction. To be completely honest, the silence has contributed to a temporary collapse of faith, or if not faith, a collapse of any and all hope of doing anything on my own, faith-wise. (So…good?)
But I do see the wisdom of it. We hear God, and our Purpose, in the silence. We turn down the static emanating from our STUFF and our stupid ideas, and a new world emerges.
This is where I’d say something about relying wholly on God. Just be silent, still, etc. Say the Jesus Prayer. I can’t do it, though. I just can’t. Not right now.
Why not? I have a lot more subtraction to do. I’ve had some pretty significant subtractions and divisions in my life this year—things that you’d think would open fissures big enough for that bubbling crude to effluviate out, or for the light to get in and cleanse. No. Apparently that was just the beginning.
In my ongoing effort to keep these things under 1,000 words, I’m going to cut it short here, but the takeaway (if indeed you’re taking anything away from these), is something I’m thinking quite a bit about these days: reducing, removing, and subtracting. The answer for so many of us (men or women) always seems to be to learn new things and add them to our routines. That might be the precisely wrong thing to do.
In this time of change and challenge, I think the most enlightening thing we can do is cut 95 percent of the crap and work with what’s left. If you can elect do that before it becomes necessary for survival, all the better.
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This is something Andrew has been saying to me. I'll add and add and add and then get upset with myself because I can't do everything. It's a hard shift, but a necessary one - to make space.
Oh, gosh, St. Unpronouncios! *L* I remember reading a short biography of St. Seraphim of Sarov, I think, and the story included that he was such an ascetic even as a baby that he refused to nurse on Wednesdays and Fridays! I'm not saying it's not true or that it couldn't be true, but those types of stories set up the saints as being people who are wholly separate from us sinners.
As I became Orthodox many years ago, I started really getting called by the story of Alexander Schmorell. Yes, now he's been glorified as an Orthodox saint, but back in 2002, he was almost unknown outside of his former parish in Munich. One of his friends, a woman by the name of Lilo, was still alive when the glorification happened in 2014, and the BBC or something has her on record as saying something to the effect of, "No, he was no saint!" He was a young man of some means, and he enjoyed what life had to offer. He certainly had his faults and failings, but in the end, when he was called by God to pursue the good, he did. He spent the last five months of his life in a Nazi prison in Munich and in his letters to his family, he's adamant that that is where he needed to be in order to undergo the spiritual transformation God was requiring of him, and as terrible as the situation is, he's got an unshakable hope looking toward to the life that is to come. I *suspect*, and there's no way to be sure, but I suspect that God may have allowed him a glimpse of that while he was still on earth with us.
I identify so much more with St. Alexander here! In some ways, when it is demonstrated that God can take one of us "normal" people and make us saints, it's much more of a comfort!