May 2003 Christian Spirituality      Continued from previous issue By George A Lane SJ

Continue from ...... Introduction Protest and Renunciation in the East In the history of Christian Spirituality the Eastern monastic movement is one of the most difficult for us to understand. We feel so far removed from these people; and what they did seems at times so bizarre as to be hardly imitable, although it inspires us in an abstract sort of way. It is rather difficult today to appreciate the man fleeing from the world into the quiet sandy desert to come into contact with God. But in order to approach the Eastern monastic movement as well as the whole of spirituality, we have to recognize a certain basic yearning for self-surrender that is present in every individual person. This yearning rises at times to a passion; it is something of an instinct which we cannot fully explain. It is a drive that leads many people, almost in spite of themselves, to moments of heroic decision to give their lives to others. There are few people to whom there does not sometime occur a vision of a nobler life and a better existence. There are many ways of explaining this instinct, an escape from a restrictive and repressive conscience, a yearning for the infinite, a search for meaning, the desire for God. This yearning for self-surrender is something we take as a given with the human situation. It is the basic presupposition to which Christ appeals in the Gospels. For the person who accepts Christ as the Lord and commits himself entirely to Him, this self-surrender is not a counsel, it is an imperative call of the Master. "Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me . . . And he who does not take up his cross and come follow me is not worthy of me." Now passages like this in the New Testament are very hard to interpret from an a priori standpoint, but it is very easy to understand them if we see them in the light of the Church and in the history of the people who have done this sort of thing. This is what was underneath the Eastern monastic response. The form of this surrender has changed through the years; but its starting point has always been the same, an acceptance of and a commitment to the Risen Lord. These people believed wholeheartedly as they read the Gospel that the only way to respond authentically to Christ as to get away from the din of the world and to go out to the desert to find Him there. One had to flee the city of sin in order to find God, the pure God who was wholly other, wholly apart, and wholly transcendant to this city of sinful men.

- To Be Continued -