What Kind of Asceticism for Philip

I have been intrigued by monasticism throughout most of my life. Probably my first encounter with it was as a child in the movieThe Sound of Music. Before I become an Orthodox Christian, I had taken several retreats at Roman Catholic monasteries. The longest one was a week-long retreat was at a Trappist monastery in Taiwan in 2009. That was a very interesting experience, and I wrote about it in my former blog: A Retreat In Taiwan and The Essence of Trappist Monasticism. The photos are here. Although I was happy that these monasteries existed so that I could utilize them as retreat centers, because of reservations that I had and have toward Roman Catholicism, I could never really seriously consider that as a viable path. This left me sad since from my perspective, monasticism was just one more baby that had been thrown out at the Protestant Reformation.

But that all changed on January 6, 2012, the night I was received into the Orthodox Church. Right after my life confession, it dawned on me that I was about to become part of a church that did not disdain monasticism, and I could re-open my investigation. Of course, I was living in mainland China at the time, where Orthodoxy is not even legal, much less has monasteries. And it took me two whole years to get up the courage to repatriate so that I could be in physical proximity to them. Then it took another three years for me to save enough money that I could peacefully take time off work to investigate.

It has been a challenge to talk about my interest in monasticism these five years. It sometimes has been impossible to communicate how far off the possibility of my becoming a monk was: The application process to become a monk is protracted lasting sometimes four years and I was just at the initial stage of even investigating the remote possibility of checking out a couple monasteries. For some reason, the concept of monasticism is so threatening to some people that my even mentioning monasticism was equivalent in their mind to my becoming a monk the next day. It is hard to have rational conversations in the presence of this level of fear.

Sometimes I just wished that people would take a look at my life and see whether I really was the impetuous person that their fear implied I was. I wished that they would give the benefit of the doubt to a person who had already spent five years prayerfully investigating the theory and history of monasticism on paper before even daring to investigate in person. I found it especially painful when people would say, "We don't think you would like it." I experienced those words as people trying to control me instead of honoring the freedom of will with which I am endowed as an image bearer of the Holy Trinity.

In the end, on January 31, 2017, after three months of preparing my clients for my disappearing, I finally quit my job and began to plan my trip. In order to minimize the drama and fear, to my friends and family, I billed it as a "pilgrimage" with stops at monasteries and national parks. I made a first pass at six different monasteries and then returned to drill down at the one with which I had felt the most affinity. My experience at each one was very different; as I said in my previous post, every monastery has a different flavor. In the end, I would say that pilgrimage was a very apropos word choice--and not just a marketing term--because I learned so much about myself and about the faith I have chosen.

What follows are the insights that I gained or were poignantly reinforced during my pilgrimage.

My Beauty Language Is The Desert

There is this concept called love languages, but I have realized that we also have beauty languages. That is a truth behind the adage: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Some expressions of beauty speak more deeply to our hearts than others. In the realm of landscape, mine is definitely desert. The first monastery, St. Antony's Coptic Monastery (photos), was so beautiful to me. Situated in the midst of the Mojave Desert, the sheer beauty of the monastery facilitated my tears. I wept for three days in repentance while I prayerfully walked the monastery grounds over and over.

The importance of the desert to me came into stark contrast when I went to the other monasteries, and at each one, monks would give tours of their grounds, enthusiastically praising its beauty while in my heart I was thinking, "But everything is green. There are no sand and shrubs and barren rocks. How can I thrive here?" And my tears dried up at 4 of the remaining 5 monasteries.

St Paesia the Harlot

At St. Antony's I was arrested by an icon that I saw:

My Coptic is pretty weak, and so after puzzling over the inscription for some time, I finally took a photo and ran up to a monk and asked, "Father, please tell me who this icon is of?" He said "St. John the Dwarf and Paesia". That was enough for me to find the story online, and what a story! Please read it here. I will quote just one sentence about St. Paesia that I pray that I will keep with me for the rest of my life: "One single hour of repentance has brought her more than the penance of many who continue without showing such fervor in repentance."

What Did You Go Out Into The Wilderness To See?

The first Orthodox monastery I ever stepped into was back in January 2014. I had just got off the boat from China in December 2013, so I was fresh and clueless. I observed to the abbot how disappointed I was with the music, and he said that music at monasteries is hit and miss. If you want beautiful music, you should go to cathedrals, not monasteries. I did not understand then. But I kept the word in my heart.

On this pilgrimage, my expectation of finding beautiful music at monasteries persisted. One day during yet another musically unsatisfying office of prayer, a verse suddenly came into my mind: "What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses." (Matthew 11:7-8 ESV) And then the verse came again modified: "What then did you go out to the wilderness to hear? Beautiful music? Behold, those who hear beautiful music are in cathedrals."

This is not to say that beautiful music is unimportant to monasteries. It is just that they have very limited resources. If none of the already extreme minority of people who are called to live in a specific monastery have musical ability, then there is no musical ability there. A lot more people attend cathedrals, and so the talent pool is bigger. Also, there is the time constraint. Since monastics are maximizing how many prayer services they can have a day and chanting takes less time than singing, most of the hymns get plain chanted.

Spiritual Impoverished But Oblivious To This Fact

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3 ESV). I started to ask myself, "What does it mean to be spiritually poor? Does my behavior demonstrate that I actually believe that I am spiritually poor? And how would it change if I did actually believe this was true?" I felt that I got some answers on my pilgrimage.

The answer might be surprising to non-Orthodox Christians, so let me try to trace the thought process back to its beginning. I was reading Dorotheos Of Gaza: Discourses and Sayings. Dorotheos was the abbot of a monastery in Palestine who died around 565 AD, and he said some really insightful things likes these:

So it is with our evil desires: insofar as they are small to start with, we can if we want to, cut them off with ease. If we neglect them as mere trifles, they harden, and the more they harden, the more labor is needed to get rid of them. But if they grow to any degree of maturity inside us, we shall no longer be able to remove them from ourselves no matter how hard we labor unless we have the help of the saints interceding for us with God.

It is one thing to uproot a blade of grass and another to uproot a great tree. 

For there is great danger for the man who falls into the habit of indulging his evil inclinations, because as we said, such a man even if he desires it, is not able alone to cast off his evil inclinations unless he has help from some of the saints.

There is a lot going on in these sentences. Let me just highlight a few things that spoke to me:

• As image-bearers of the Holy Trinity, we have this tremendous gift called freedom of will. And it is strong enough to resist temptations before they turn into hardened evil desires (popularly called addictions, but in Orthodoxy commonly called passions).
• One manifestation of spiritual poverty is a heart littered with these passions, that is, a freedom of will that is compromised.
• Being an member of the interconnected body of Christ, the intercessions of other members make it possible over even passions.

Another author brought out the fact that another way of identifying the spiritually rich from the spiritually poor is by the effectiveness of their prayers, and if I am spiritually poor and I do not fervently enlist the intercessions of others, I squander a great resource:

God's saints are great merchants, who have enriched themselves with all spiritual treasures, with all virtues: meekness, humility, abstinence, patience, great faith, hope, and love. This is why we ask their holy prayers, as poor men of rich, that they may help us in our spiritual poverty; that they may teach us how to pray and to progress in all Christian virtues; that they, having boldness before God, may pray for the remission of our past sins and protect us from fresh ones. We go to earthly merchants in their shops to buy their merchandise: shall we not have recourse to the heavenly merchants with fervent prayer, as though with silver and gold? Shall we not purchase of them their intercession for us before God for the forgiveness of sins and the bestowal of various Christian virtues? It seems very natural to do so. (St. John of Kronstadt in My Life in Christ, or Moments of Spiritual Serenity and Contemplation, of Reverent Feeling, of Earnest Self-Amendment, and of Peace in God)

Of course, as Orthodox Christians, we know that we have at our disposal not only the intercessions of our brothers and sisters on the earth who are still struggling against their own passions, but also those of saints who have already reposed and who can undistractedly intercede for us before the very throne of God. See another article I wrote on the practice of invoking the prayers of saints for more details.

So putting these thoughts all together, my indifference toward asking the saints for their intercessions betrays that I do not really consider myself to be spiritually impoverished. And conversely, if I really grasped the desperateness of my spiritual condition, I would fervidly implore the intercessions of the saints, even as a starving man would beg food.

I Dream To Use Mandarin In Ministry

As I was visiting monasteries, I kept asking myself two questions: 1) Would I have to learn another language and risk it pushing Mandarin out of my mind, just like learning Mandarin pushed French out of my mind? (apparently, I have very limited neural space). 2) Is it likely that I would be able to have interactions with Mandarin-speaking people?

The services at St. Anthony's Greek Monastery were 100% in Greek as was even the meal devotional readings. The services at St. Antony's Coptic Monastery were a mixture of Arabic, Coptic, and English. I knew that my Mandarin would be doomed at either of those.

Holy Cross Monastery effectively functions as a parish on Sunday mornings and is situated in Silicon Valley, where many Mandarin-speaking people come to work for high-tech companies. And the abbot even mentioned baptizing Chinese-speaking people. That seemed hopeful.

At St. Silouan's Monastery, the deputy abbot had spent much time in China, and a novice there had gone through intensive Mandarin training while being in the military. He said that he had counted 11 Chinese restaurants in the city of 5,000 people. I also saw a road sign that said "Chinese Camp 4 miles" nearby the monastery (this turned out to be a ghost town built when Chinese immigrants came to work in the mines). This also seemed hopeful.

It was actually in China that I had met the abbot at St. Herman's Monastery. He takes regular trips there. And there was a Chinese novice at this monastery, whom unfortunately I did not have the chance to meet. This also seemed hopeful.

But as I was reading over my 2015 2nd Quarter Personal Growth Plan, I stumbled across this line in my vision statement, and it gave me pause:

To serve as a deacon (as did the Holy Martyr and Archdeacon St. Lawrence) in a Mandarin-speaking context (as did the Holy Hierarch St. John of Shanghai).

The fact is that I invested a lot of time studying Mandarin. As my roommate knows, I have antipathy toward the word fun, but when I have an opportunity to converse in Mandarin, I will even use the word fun to describe it. And frankly I would feel sadness if I could not find a way to use it in an Orthodox ministry context before I die. I guess you could say that this is a priority for me. And at this point, the dream of using Mandarin in Orthodox ministry does not have an obvious intersection with monasticism in the US, nor have I yet discovered Chinese Orthodox parishes in anywhere in the world, much less Chinese Orthodox monasteries. So becoming a monk has begun to lose its appeal.

I Have Lived A Soft Life

I am not an outdoorsman or survivalist. I have no experience gardening or doing carpentry. I'm overweight. I can do a single pushup with just the greatest effort. The frequency with which I take off and put on clothing suggests that I have a very narrow range of comfort for body temperature. I hate sweating. I hate being cold. I cannot sleep if there is any noise or light around me. Until I found hiking, there was no form of physical exercise that I could even endure. I complain about standing for an 1.5 hour church service. I don't cook, my roommate says I cannot clean. I have the habit of checking my email every 5 minutes. And I have spent my whole adult life pushing electrons on a computer.

The fact is that while it would be possible for a person like me to adapt to the life of a monastic, the transition would be excruciating. Humanly speaking, it would be better to try to toughen up before undertaking the life of a monk. Army bootcamp lasts for 10 weeks; the monastic novitiate (the monastic bootcamp) lasts 3 years because it is so demanding. It is not a realistic proposition that in my current state I attempt a monastic life. One abbot suggested that I go home and ask my spiritual father to give me toughening obediences first.

Conclusion

In addition to all the above, I miss my friends and family terribly, and I am accustomed to the freedom to spontaneously travel. I wrote this paragraph in 2014:

I cut my catechumenal teeth on the Lives of the Saints. Their stories have captivated my imagination. I recognize that I need to be disabused of romanticized notions of monasticism. But I cannot do this in isolation. I cannot discern a monastic vacation in a vacuum. I have to experience it firsthand in order to set this longing at rest. Right now the monastic life is the greener grass on the other side of the fence. Until I taste it, I will continue pining away in fantasy.

I have tasted and seen, and I stand disabused. I am not yet ready for monasticism.

But what will I do with my life now that I quit my job and the thing that I spent five years prepping for is not a realistic option? I think it is time to get serious about Mandarin. I don't know what that will look like long-term, but I plan to spend at least the next month studying it full-time and see if I get any ideas. I have only been able to squeeze in 9 months of full-time study over the course of the last fourteen years. And now I have the time to study full-time again.