"To the reader, it will hardly sound surprising that the evil one is far from thrilled to hear that a man or woman wishes to profess monastic vows. If we imagine the whole body of the Church as an army of the faithful here on earth regarding the spiritual life, monks and nuns are like …
Category: Monastic Writings
The Fertility of Zero
WE HAVE THE PRIVILEGE of living in an age in which stone piled upon stone no longer remains. The last consequence of the values and and ideals exalted by Western society has been the disintegration of society. I consider it a quite positive and challenging fact to live in a culture in ruins. Those values …
Monks
"Holiness is not something that is just about the saints, whose icons we venerate and whose lives we read about. Holiness is better understood as wholeness, made whole, or healed..." by Abbot Tryphon, The Morning Offering, February 12, 2016, All-Merciful Saviour Monastery on Vashon Island, Washington: The monastic vocation is a special calling from God that …
What is a ‘Thebaid’?
What is a “thebaid”? Per the Catholic Encyclopaedia, The valley of the Nile, under Roman domination, was divided into four provinces: Lower and Upper Egypt, Lower and Upper Thebaid. The last two comprised the upper part of the valley. During the fourth to fifth centuries it was the chosen land of the monks, who by their sanctity and by the form they impressed on the monastic system greatly influenced …
Am I Called to the Monastic Life?
Here we have a very profound and important message from St John Climacus, conveyed to us by Archimandrite Irenei (Steenberg), Abbot of the Monastery of St Silouan in Sonora, California. In it he reminds us that "the Christian calling involves finding a suitable place, and suitable exercises, for living out the transformative life in the …
The North American Thebaid 