Monakhos

The church I used to attend has a sign out in front that reads “Easter, it’s not just about the eggs.” This is true, but its funny that right beside it, there is another poster advertising the church’s “Easter Eggstravaganza.” It seems a little bit hypocritical if you ask me.

Religious holidays (specifically in this post Christmas and Easter) always annoy me, mostly because Christian family always try to get me to go to the church services for them. I don’t know about churches elsewhere, but it seems to be that the lamest services of the year are around Christmas and Easter. They’re always the same, lack any innovation, and all about capitalizing on the larger than usual crowds that attend around the holidays. Why would I, of all Sundays, want to go to a worse than usual service just because it was around Easter?! At least they could try to be original. At my old church, the children’s pastor did the same incredibly lame “Christmas story as told by candy bars” gimmick a few years in a row. Even though the sermons have different words (usually) every year, they are all the same thing too:

1. Easter isn’t what most people think
2. Easter is about Jesus
3. You should worship Jesus
4. Get saved (and give us money!)

Of course the points above are occasionally spoken creatively, but they are always the same at the core.

So to anyone who may ask, no I am not going to church this Sunday. And while you’re at it, stop telling me I need to find a church I like. They don’t exist. Especially on Christmas and Easter.

I just watched it. It’s pretty disgusting. We might watch it again on Halloween as a good horror flick.

so god went away
i’m not sure where but he’s gone
and i don’t miss him

Maybe its time to expand the horizons a little bit more.

What is it about the Way that is hard for religious people to understand? Why is it that the greatest force against the mystical path seems to come from those seemingly steeped in religion?

The film Остров (The Island in English) made me think a bit about these topics. It takes place in an Russian Orthodox monastery on an island in the 1970s. The main character Antoli lives at the monastery as a hermit and works shoveling coal in the boiler room. While he is not an official monk (though he lives in the same way), the people from the surrounding villages always come to see him first when there is a problem. He is rumored to be able to heal the sick and cast out demons. He has visions and prophetic answers to people’s questions. Father Antoli is also quite the rebel. He doesn’t always pray in the right direction during ceremonies he is invited to attend and *gasp* drinks tea with sugar! Despite all this, he is the most spiritually connected person on the island.

I don’t want to describe too much of the movie, because I don’t want to give much of it away. But it really made me think. How many times do I ignore people because they looks or act strange. How much wisdom could I be missing out on? And am I compromising by being too normal?

So check out the movie and let me know what you think. You’ll have to go to an artsy type rental store to find it probably, but it will be well worth it!

The only drawback in my mind to The Philokalia is that a large portion of it is targeted to those living the ascetic, solitary life of a monk. There is still, however, a lot of wisdom that can be drawn from the writings. There are several works from Evagrios the Solitary in The Philokalia, so I am breaking his writing into sections. One section from the first work, On Asceticism and Stillness stuck out at me:

Be like an astute business man: make stillness your criterion for testing the value of everything, and choose always what contributes to it.

When I think about this I realize how my life would be different if I followed this wisdom every day of my life. Of course I don’t follow this wisdom always, and I am not even sure it is possible to do this 100% of the time, but it is still a good maxim.

That’s all for today. What do you think? More to come tomorrow.