Journey Back to Eden.pdf - St Mark Coptic Orthodox Church Chicago

A TIME OF CELEBRATION 101ists because an ageless faith remains the common life amongst itsmembers. He said that, in reality, monasteries, despite all the fabulousprotestations and appearances to the contrary, are creatures ofthe moment. That is, what they are now, they may not be at all inthe future.He reminded me that, of course, the desert is strewn with theruins of monasteries that no longer exist. Those that remain andthose that have long histories may be the ones that are more dramaticand the ones that catch our attention. They create the sensethat there is a permanence about them. But the ones that no longerexist, the ones that have disintegrated, are the ones that shouldlikewise teach us something important. Unless there is an ongoinglife of faith and the mysterious impulse of grace, nothing abides,not even monasteries of great age and size and duration.All things are provisional, this priest told me. The compositionof a monastery and its discipline, its economy and its organization—allthese things change, and are changeable, in relationshipto the outside world around it. Even though the monasteriesin the desert do not seem to respond to the changing outsideworld, he believes that the desert, especially, creates a raw kind offorce which acts on the monastery. Though the monastery seemsto be buffered and insulated by the desert, the fact is, he said, thatthe desert really subjects it to the effects of the Church’s life andthe life and the welfare of the people who live in the villages andthe cities far away.The great secret reality of the monastery is that it endures. Althoughit apparently repudiates the world far away, it nonethelessremains finely attuned to those aspects of the world of which it isthe desert counterpoint. Were it not to do so, it would cease todraw vocations and would cease to have value for the Church. Theway it becomes counterpoint to certain elements in the world is theway in which it addresses the heart of the Church, and the way inwhich the heart of the Church addresses the monastery.If the monastery hasn’t seemed to change, this young priesttold me, it’s because certain aspects of the world never change:human ambition, human selfishness, violence, and greed. Thesethings remain common to all times and all places, to all secularpeoples. These things remain the marks of their interrelations andtheir organizations and institutions. Monasteries seem to be change-