There is a second key mistake that we often make in our assumptions about the essential nature of life in the world, which mistake makes monastic literature difficult to approach. We often conceive of worldly life as merely a kind of default existence that anyone who is not specially called to monasticism or ordination simply ends up leading. We assume that it is only the monk, nun or priest who has a special call, while the married woman, for instance, has merely been passed by. It is easy to see why this feels natural to most of us. We all grow up as lay people. None of our parents are monks and nuns, and those few who grow up in the families of clergy are not, in youth at least, clergy themselves. We begin as lay people, and so we see this as our natural existence, disrupted for only a few select individuals who become monastics or priests, and continued fur the rest of us. But, as natural as it is to think of lay life in this way, we must not allow ourselves to approach it merely in these terms. Instead, every one of us should, indeed must, treat lay life as a calling just the way we think of monasticism and ordination. We must sit down with ourselves and with God in prayer to discern if life in the world really is what we are meant for, and if we discover that it is, we must treat this call with the same seriousness with which we would treat a call to a hermit’s life in the desert. We are not lay people simply because we happen not to be monks or priests. We are lay people because God wills that we lead a life seeking our salvation through the world. If we do not accept lay life as a holy calling, then we will gain nothing by reading the writings of people who believed that every single moment of their lives was meant to be devoted to God.
Reading monastic literature without a sense that lay life is a holy calling, and without recognizing that it is a calling that involves seeking salvation through struggle in the arena of life in the world, makes this literature very hard for us to comprehend and apply. So, why do we bother to read it at all? Perhaps it is better merely to leave it aside in order to avoid confusion and possible despair. I have, in fact, encountered people in the Church who recommend this approach explicitly. Yet, I myself have never been quite comfortable with it. Throughout the history of the Church, people in the world have been guided by the lives and wisdom of monks and nuns whose prayers, words, and especially writings have brought countless souls closer to God. This bears witness to an important fact. While the life of a lay person is a special calling in which salvation is sought in a fundamentally different arena from that of the monk, nun, or the priest, it is not one in which salvation is sought through fundamentally different means. Our spiritual armor, while worn in two different battles, is made of the same metal-indeed. we have put on the same Christ in our baptism. Salvation itself is one and the same for all Christians, regardless of where they strive for it. Gabriel Bunge expresses this well.
“Lay people and monks do not each have their own “spirituality,” and the Holy Spirit, whom they all receive at baptism, is one. The enemies and adversaries of the Christian are the same at all times no matter how well they disguise themselves. Victory will be gained also in one and the same manner, even when at first sight lay people and monks do not always put the same means into action.” [1]
For this reason, all Orthodox Christians can and should seek the wisdom of monks and nuns, including through their writings, because it is they who reflect most deeply and most often on the means for gaining the victory we seek. While they may, understandably, not write very much about the arena in which we lay people struggle, their insight into the nature of the Christian armor used in that struggle is absolutely indispensable for all of us.
~ Daniel G. Opperwall, A Layman in the Desert
1 Gabriel Bunge, Despondency: The Spiritual Teaching of Evagrius Pontus (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary, 2012), 33.
