Becoming like the dead doesn’t mean becoming insensible, but what happens in baptism: dying to the world, that is, human beings with their expectations and demands, their standards and judgments, have no more influence on us. We no longer identify with the world. We live beyond the threshold. We live in a spiritual reality, over which the world has no power. That makes us free. When we are constantly aiming to be praised, we will always remain discontented, because we are insatiable in our addiction to praise.
Makarios doesn’t advise us to give up our need’ for praise completely. We can’t do that. But we shouldn’t identify ourselves with the praise or blame of others. We should sense that there is another reality in us, that we have a divine dignity, which is there whether people praise us or blame us. Only the experience of this divine dignity makes us free vis-a-vis praise and blame. So this is no renunciation we force upon ourselves, but the expression of our inner experience.
We are to be dead above all to those closest to us. “Father Poimen told this story: A brother asked Father Moses how a person could deaden himself toward his neighbor. The old man replied: ‘Unless a person in his heart makes himself into someone who has been lying in the grave for three days, he will never acquire a spiritual attitude.'”
And from Father Moses we have the saying: “A person must be dead to his companion, so that he doesn’t judge him on any matter.” Therefore to be dead to those who are closest to us means above all to renounce judging them. I have no right to pass judgment on others. But being dead to our neighbor can also mean being independent of the problems of others, not identifying with their difficulties. Of course, this mustn’t become inhuman, as if we had no interest in others. From the many sayings of the fathers where an elder becomes involved heart and soul with the questioner, comforts him, and straightens him out, we can see that the monks weren’t aiming at harshness and insensibility, but at inner distance. So we read in one of the sayings: “Paesios, the brother of Father Poimen, once had a disagreement with someone outside his kellion. Father Poimen thought this wasn’t right, so he arose and fled to Father Ammonas. He told him: ‘Paesios, my brother, had enmity with someone, and it leaves me no peace.’ Father Ammonas answered him: ‘Poimen, are you still alive? Get up, sit yourself down in your kellion, and tell your heart: You have already been in the grave for a year.'”
Poimen identifies himself so closely with his brother that the latter’s animosity toward another robs him of his peace. There are enough sayings by the fathers in which an elder mediates disputes. But here it’s his own brother who is involved, and Poimen can’t be unbiased. Hence Father Ammonas advises him to imagine that he has already been lying in the grave for a year. This thought gives him distance he needs from his brother. His brother is responsible for himself. Poimen should not make his brother’s problems his own.
~Anselm Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers
