To many people today the sayings of the fathers and the writings of the early monks may look like a strange and distant world. It is not always simple to feel our way into this language, so different from ours. But once we have discovered the wisdom that inhabits the words of the monastic fathers, we will not easily let them go. They are a treasure trove not just for the spiritual life, but also for psychology, which finds here the expression in a different vocabulary of what it has laboriously worked out only in this century. The difference between monastic and modern psychology is that the monks have tested what they say through their experience; they aren’t developing theoretical models, but “merely” reflecting on their own experience.
A friend of mine, who as a psychologist takes continuing education courses, in which he studies fascinating new models of the mind, once told me: “We’re constantly finding out about new psychological methods and explanatory models, but nobody thinks of really living them. There’s no time for it. That’s why your life interests me. What happens when one lives for decades according to this sort of model?”
The monks wished to introduce readers to a path that was to be followed concretely and consistently. They always give a rather chilly reception when people come to them wanting to be edified by their wisdom, but unwilling to live it too. Thus Father Theodoros refused to say a word to a brother who had come to him. When a disciple reproached him for this, he replied: “Really, I didn’t want to talk to him. He’s a pompous individual who likes to boast with strange words.”
Words are useless if they aren’t lived. That’s what father Jacob says in yet another passage: “One needs to do more than talk. For there is a great deal of talking among people these days. What’s needed is action. That is what one looks for, not speeches that bear no fruit.”
What we can learn from the monks is the longing for God, the longing that goads us to go off into the wilderness, to struggle consistently with our passions, to faithfully persevere with our ascetical practice. The monks yearn to experience God, to become one with God. For the sake of God they leave the world; for the sake of God they take the struggle upon themselves. They have obviously tasted God, and so they don’t slacken until they have found God. One elder compares the monk to a dog that has the taste of the hare in his mouth and won’t give up until he has caught it: “A monk should observe the dogs on the hunt for hares. Only the one that has seen the hare chases it, while the others that have seen that dog run after him, but only so long as they don’t get tired, and then suddenly they turn back. And only the first one, who actually saw the hare, continues the chase until he has caught it and will not be held back in his chase (while the others have abandoned theirs), neither by chasms, forests, nor thickets, neither by scratching thorns or wounds. He will not give up until he seizes the hare. And so the monk who seeks Christ the Lord should unceasingly look upon the cross and ignore all the troubles that come his way until he has reached the Crucified.”
The goal of the struggle, the hunt, the way, is God. The monks do not give up until they have found God, until they can pray without distraction, until with all their thoughts and emotions they are directed to God and find in God the fulfillment of all their longing. If we, like the dog hunting the hare, have the taste of God in our mouth, then we won’t let ourselves be discouraged on our spiritual path, neither by the continual conflicts within the church, nor by the widespread depressiveness that marks our society, nor by the secularization of our time, in which there are often so few traces of God. It is not the achiever’s mentality that spurs us on the way to God, but God himself, whom we have once tasted and whose taste won’t leave us until we have found him.
~Anselm Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers
