The Shepherd, February 2008
POINTS FROM CORRESPONDENCE
OUR CORRESPONDENT wrote some brief thoughts about various jurisdictional problems in Britain, but then went on to speak of personal difficulties, being drawn into to “doing” things or even being ordained when he is something of a neophyte, having only been Orthodox for a few years, and thus not being given time or space to absorb Orthodoxy. We have not given his initials or place of residence, and have not quoted these thoughts in full because they are personal, but our reply in part was as follows:-
…. WELL, our thoughts about the Russian jurisdictions and the Œcumenical Patriarchate are akin to yours, but on a much more important subject I think that you have hit upon a very important ‘weakness’ in convert Orthodoxy in this country. Everyone is either expected to do something, be something, or they themselves want to. There seems almost to be a tendency among male converts to believe that they have not yet completed their conversion process unless they attain the “position” (wrong already!) of a reader, or a deacon or a priest!
There are two very beautiful things in Orthodox worship that we need to pay heed to. First of all, most people in an Orthodox Church do nothing! They are silent. And that is not without reason. To become fully Orthodox we have first not to do or to speak, but to listen.
And that brings me onto the second thing. In the Russian Church the first stage of the monastic life - and, as St John of the Ladder says “Angels are a light for monks, and the monastic life is a light for all men,” - is being a novice which in their language is a poslushnik, an obedient, or one who listens. In so much of the convert world in Orthodoxy today, there seems to be very little listening. If people do not become members of the clergy (often without proper training) within a short space of time, they become spokesmen for Orthodoxy, or internet warriors or publicists, or judges of Orthodoxy and its adherents. But unless one listens first, and listens well, and listens to good sources of teaching, one cannot learn. We need again to learn, and I include myself in this, what it means to cultivate the heart.
I remember years ago, the old Russian Archbishop in London sent me to the seminary in Jordanville, and while I was there he wrote to me, encouraging me to become a priest. I did not want to be ordained, and when I decided to take up the monastic life, I felt in some way I might have let him down. A monastic father then told me that what the Church needed before priests was monks. At the time I did not understand what he was saying - after all, the priests are essential to the Church, there is a shortage of them, they are needed. What did monks do? Now, 35 years later I begin to understand.
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