To suffer and be despised.
Those filthy monks.
At the company where I once worked, my vice-president happened to be Greek as well as a devout and active member of the Greek Orthodox Church. At lunch one day we were talking about Greece and I asked enthusiastically if he had ever been to Mt. Athos. He said, “Heavens no!” and went on to describe the monks he’d seen from there. He described them as filthy, foul smelling parasites. He said they were always greasy and untidy. His wife agreed and said they should stay on the mountain and not come into the city.
Though I was surprised, I considered how complimentary their descriptions might be to the likes of a John of the Cross, or Francis of Assisi. St. Francis would probably have included such an attitude in his description of ‘perfect joy’.
It also ties in well with the day’s Gospel, when the people of the synagogue took such offense at Jesus, “they rose up, drove him out of the town… and led him to the brow of the hill, to hurl him down headlong.” - Luke 4. Some of Jesus’ contemporaries also thought he was out of his mind.
Yet we can often become quite offended and defensive whenever we meet with the least opposition, contradiction, or criticism.
“Jesus walked in peace through the midst of them.” - Luke 4.
September 4th, 2007 at 7:41 am
Terry,
This reminds me of the brilliant response letter RL Stevenson wrote to “Reverend Hyde” after Hyde wrote a nasty letter to the Honolulu paper after Father Damien, the “Saint of the Lepers” died, calling him, among other things “coarse and dirty.” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote:
“Damien was COARSE.”
It is very possible. You make us sorry for the lepers, who had
only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father. But you, who were so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the lights of culture? Or may I remind you that we have some reason to doubt if John the Baptist were genteel; and in the case of Peter, on whose career your doubtless dwell approvingly in the pulpit, no doubt at all he was a “coarse, headstrong” fisherman! Yet even in our Protestant Bibles Peter is called Saint.
“Damien was DIRTY.”
He was. Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade!
But the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.
September 4th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Kyriacos Markides, a sociologist presumably not used to coarseness, was comfortable enough at Mount Athos to venerate it in Mountain of Silence.
In the preface to this book, he talks about the disdain people in the modern world can have for Christian monks (less for Buddhist or Hindu monks).
In my experience, people revere and despise monks, sometimes at the same time. One monk’s misdeeds tend to be projected onto all, perhaps because people have so much higher standards for them. At the same time, the monk is seen as a holy ideal to be aspired to. At the same time, people tend to envy what they perceive as monks’ holiness and delight in anything that shows the monks as anything less than holy. So human!