Fr. Schmemann: Thoughts on a New Monasticism

I hope to write some reflections to this in the future, but for now, here is Fr. Schmemann in all his controversial frankness.

More and more often it seems to me that reviving the monasticism that everybody so ecstatically talks about—or at least trying to revive it—can be done only by liquidating first of all the monastic institution itself, i.e. the whole vaudeville of klobuks, cowls, stylization, etc. If I were a staretz—an elder—I would tell a candidate for monasticism roughly the following:

—get a job, if possible the simplest one, without creativity (for example as a cashier in a bank);

—while working, pray and seek inner peace; do no get angry; do not think of yourself (rights, fairness, etc.). Accept everyone (coworkers, clients) as someone sent to you; pray for them;

—after paying for a modest apartment and groceries, give your money to the poor; to individuals rather than foundations;

—always go to the same church and there try to be a real helper, not by lecturing about spiritual life or icons, not by teaching but with a “dust rag” (cf. St Seraphim of Sarov). Keep at that kind of service and be—in church matters—totally obedient to the parish priest.

—do not thrust yourself and your service on anyone; do not be sad that your talents are not being used; be helpful; serve where needed and not where you think you are needed;

—read and learn as much as you can; do not read only monastic literature, but broadly (this point needs more precise definition);

—if friends and acquaintances invite you because they are close to you–go; but not too often, and within reason. Never stay more than one and a half or two hours. After that the friendliest atmosphere becomes harmful;

—dress like everybody else, but modestly, and without visible signs of a special spiritual life;

—be always simple, light, joyous. Do not teach. Avoid like the plague any “spiritual” conversations and any religious or churchly idle talk. If you act that way, everything will be to your benefit;

—do not seek a spiritual elder or guide. If he is needed, God will send him, and will send him when needed;

—having worked and served this way for ten years–no less–ask God whether you should continue to live this way, or whether change is needed. And wait for an answer: it will come; the signs will be “joy and peace in the Holy Spirit.”

Entry for Tuesday, January 20, 1981 in his Journals

The Church as the Locus of Healing

Christian churches are not, as a rule, model communities of good behavior. They are, rather, places where human misbehavior is brought out into the open, faced, and dealt with.

Eugene Peterson, Introduction to James in The Message

What Peterson describes, I think, is the ideal: our churches should be places where sin is exposed, confessed and healed in the celebration of the Mysteries. But how many among us play the church game, in which the aim is not so much to bring our sin into the open, face it and deal with it, as it is to bury it under some semblance of holiness–or rather, respectability? For many Christians, I think, the believing community is precisely the place where one cannot afford to fall or speak of one’s wounds, sins or doubts, lest these render the course of one’s discipleship suspect.

One of the most interesting canonical phenomena, in my view, is the preservation of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. It reads like a laundry list of the mess-ups of the local church in Corinth: everything ranging from squabbles over personalities in the Church (imagine that!) to incest to prostitution to liturgical chaos to doubts about the resurrection. Not that Paul’s letter resolved everything and cleaned up the mess there either: his Second Letter is just about as charged as a first (since some in Corinth apparently put down his apostleship and called him a wimpy, money-driven evangelist). And then, enjoying an important but non-canonical status, there’s Pope Clement’s letter to the same local church written later in the 1st century, which seems to suggest that they hadn’t moved very far along the path of theosis since Paul ministered among them.

What strikes me is the fact that Paul’s letters made it into the canon of Scripture and Clement’s was preserved. Somehow, they were regarded as sources of edification for the rest of the Church at the expense of humiliation and probably lasting embarrassment for the Corinthian disciples. It seems, then, that what Peterson says about Christian churches was at least true in the early Church. The ekklesia was a place where sins were brought into the open, faced, and dealt with.

From my experience, at least, Christians often justify the air of holiness that they try so hard to create in their own lives and in their churches because they think this veneer will somehow impress non-believers and make them want to follow Jesus Christ. But does the power lie in the Gospel to save, or does it lie in the facades (lies?) we generate? And what when the world discovers that we are not so perfect after all, despite our cries against its “godless secularism” and “moral atrocities”? Instead of being hospitals for sinners, have our churches become gossip houses where sick people get together to talk about how worse off everyone else is?

The letters in the New Testament say very little about those outside the Church, but are primarily aimed at dealing with the problems of those inside. No coincidence, since I believe the Lord said something once about pulling out planks from one’s own eye. If the Church is not a safe place to confess and struggle so that we can be healed, then what is? If the very thing that is called “the light of the world” has become darkness, then how great is that darkness! But the counsel of God’s Word is: “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5.16).

The Failures of the Forerunner

Today, the day after Great Theophany, the Byzantine calendar commemorates John, the Prophet, Forerunner and Baptizer of the Lord.

The Gospel of Mark tells us that he was “clothed with camel’s hair, and had a leather girdle around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey” (Mark 1.6). When one weighs this description, together with the starkness of the landscape which he called his home, what emerges, I think, is a “raw” personality indeed (if we take him in his unsanitized form!), full of the kind of unpredictable energy that, according to Jesus, characterizes the work of the Spirit (John 3.8)

It occurred to me today how strange his career was, and I wondered whether it would have seemed so to him or the disciples who followed him. While the Byzantine tradition tends to emphasize more his role in pointing to Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah of Israel, the Bible tells us that, even on the banks of the Jordan, he was baffled by Jesus’ desire to be baptized by him in the Jordan (Matt 3.14). In modern terms, this would have amounted to a sizeable vocational crisis: here is a prophet who had come to prepare Israel to receive her Messiah, and yet at this crucial juncture he seems confused about the very nature of the “baptism of repentance” to which he had been calling the multitudes. Did John have to revise his own understanding of his ministry and role as baptizer in light of the emergence of Jesus? Did he have to recalibrate his mission to Jesus’ words, mysterious though they be? (What, after all, does it mean for he and Jesus to “fulfill all righteousness” [Matt 3.15]?) It seems to me that that was the case.

The Gospels are not at all sheepish about the fact that, in the middle of dark time of his prophetic career, when he had been thrown into the dungeons, John found himself revisiting–possibly even questioning–Jesus’ identity and claims to Messiahship (Matt 11.1-2; Luke 7.18-19). If God’s Messiah had truly come in Jesus, then where were the signs that he thought would accompany the restoration of the Kingdom? Where was that baptism of the Holy Spirit and the separation of the true Israel from the false and the burning of the chaff which God had once disclosed to him in the silence of the wilderness? And what Kingdom is this, whose herald is not so much consigned to oblivion but genuine humiliation in prison?

By what the eye can see, John’s career as a prophet of the Kingdom was a pathetic failure that ended in his abrupt death in that same prison. And the circumstances of his death? Not so much a courageous contest ending in martyrdom–no open defiance of Caesar, no wild beasts, no stacked pyre with a mad crowd calling for his death–, but only the haphazard decree of a drunken ruler who had promised too much. In the silence and obscurity of that dark, wet prison, John’s head was chopped off and case as an exhibit on a silver platter.

And yet, the Church commemorates the Forerunner as the greatest of the prophets of the Kingdom of God, for it was he who set in motion the manifestation of Jesus as the Son of God in the streams of the Jordan–a theophany which revealed not only the Messiah but also the Father and the Spirit promised in the eschatological time, the Age to Come. But can we say that John role as a prophet transcended what happened at the Jordan?

I think we have to, lest we begin and end his career with what happened at the Jordan. His “wildness”–the desert, the locusts, the hairshirt, the wild honey–all pointed to the raw power of the Spirit of God, who so often surprises us and explodes the little theological houses we’ve built for Him. In his imprisonment and sudden death as an almost accidental victim of the power brokers of his day, he died as a forerunner still, foreshadowing the kind of death that would soon come to Jesus, Himself caught in the tumultuous politics between Israel and Rome.

In short, I think John’s whole life is best summed up in the title we so favor in the Byzantine tradition: Forerunner. His whole person, his whole life–right down to his diet and clothing–was a sacrament of the unstoppable Kingdom of God which has broken into our world. John reminds us that that Kingdom is a world greater than anything we’ve ever imagined, and that the categories and criteria of this world, helpful though they be at times, cannot be used to assess its real magnitude or force. He himself struggled to accommodate the surprising turn that Jesus inaugurated when He ushered in the Kingdom. But perhaps in doing so, he says something, too, about what it is that the living God asks from us when He reveals Himself: not the intellectual comprehension of the staggering immensity of that revelation, but a life open to being shaped and reshaped by the Spirit, oriented and re-oriented toward the Sun of Righteousness.