My Brother Was Right
A couple years after converting to Orthodoxy, I was gushing about Orthodox monasticism to my brother and declared something like; "Monasticism is a higher calling than marriage." He strongly disagreed. He's an intuitive guy and wasn't able to forcefully "argue" his point - he just knew there was something "fishy" in what I was saying. You have to understand...just prior to my conversion to Orthodoxy, my wife left me after 20+ years. I eventually remarried, a little over a year after my baptism in the Orthodox Church, and was finding that the same old problems (in me) were still there. I think my glorification of monasticism was an attempt to justify my struggle to have an actual, real, loving relationship with a woman. My brother wasn't buying it (or my "Orthodox wife" for that matter)...and they were right.
The following rather long quote from The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann sheds a little light on this disturbing subject for me. I hope the publisher doesn't mind me quoting a long passage like this...but I don't think I'm the only convert out there who's made this mistake. Fanaticism and cheap maximalism is dangerous. One only has to look around at the Muslim world to see a contemporary example of how it plays out when coupled with power. Christianity is not immune to these distortions - Orthodox or otherwise.
Friday, April 2, 1982
Father Tom told me about a certain N., a Protestant who converted to Orthodoxy and was a deacon in T. where I met him two or three years ago. It seems that he left his wife and children and lives in some Synodal skete and writes little brochures (among other things) about Kallistos Ware, accusing him of not being sufficiently Orthodox. I ask myself: why and how could it happen? Why is it that the closer he came into contact with Orthodoxy, the stronger was his longing for this dark, strange fanaticism, for accusations and cursing? If only he was the only one, but it happens with so many converts and also with so many cradle Orthodox people who fall into "acute churchliness." Is it a reaction against the minimalism of the Church, of the parishes? At some point they begin to hate the light and the joy of that faith, and it is so frightening.
Some priests only accuse, only frighten, only threaten, and nothing else. Why? All right -- we live in a frightening world. But isn't it just as bad as it was when it crucified Christ? What can be added to that horror, that fear? Didn't Christ give Himself to be crucified so that we could walk in a New Life? -- life, and not religion. The Savior freed us from the fear, legalism, power of religion. What did people do between the fulfillment of the Church attending Christ's banquet and in His Kingdom? They lived -- each lived the life and the duty that God gave to him. Yes, N. will say, but Christ said that if we want to be perfect, we must leave everything and follow Him, so "I left my family and followed Him." Does that mean nowadays to become a priest, a monk, a theologian? Does it require institutional change? I think that in the context of the Gospel, it means just the opposite because the One we follow is not leaving but coming. He is coming so that we would have life and life in abundance. What needs to be abandoned in order to follow Christ is identified by Christ with property and family. And truly, in the fallen world, these are the two burdens which bind man, which are obstacles to his following Christ because they become "idols." That is why Christ talks about them, because these two essential coordinates of life have been distorted, and in this distortion is revealed the whole depth of the fall of man and of the world, of their falling away from God. In reality, property and family are from God. When God created the world He gave it to man to possess, so that it would become man's possession "...to till it and to keep it..." And when He created man, He created a wife because "it is not good that the man should be alone..." But then, here is the fall (the original sin): Man wanted the world as a possession for himself and not for God, not for life in Him; and man made his wife an object of love torn away from God's love, again for himself. And then Christ Himself gives away, leaves His life in order to resurrect it, to free it from death, so that life would cease being the source of death, so that life would reign and death would be trampled down. Does it mean that God calls us to kill ourselves? "Leave" the world, give away one's possessions, leave the family -- all of these do not mean that they (possessions, family) are identified with evil, in which case they should be thrown away, but that they mean their liberation and their transfiguration into what God had created them to be. The one who gives away his property in reality becomes richer because he makes the world again (given away, dispensed) divine. "Leaving" one's family is its resurrection, its cleansing, its transfiguration, but not its annihilation. How could the Church perform the sacrament of marriage if marriage was evil? Marriage is a sacrament because through it is accomplished its gift to God, to Christ, to the Holy Spirit -- where everything is light, as it is in Christ's call: distribute, leave, all is positive, all is light and not darkness and destruction.
