In the late nineteen-sixties, a Christian man in Egypt comes home from an exhausting day at his factory job. He lives in a room in his brother's house in a mid-size city in Lower Egypt. When he arrives at the house, his brother is waiting for him. His brother tells him: "You have to move out. My wife doesn't like you living here." That night the man slept barely at all. In the morning, he got up, put all his belongings in a duffle bag and left before dawn, without having had anything to eat, walking to the train station to catch the train into Cairo. He had only enough money in his wallet for the fare. After he had purchased his ticket, he made his way through the crowd to go to his platform. Suddenly, he saw lying on the pavement in front of him a small amount of paper money, not much, but enough that he took the money and went to a nearby vendor and purchased some typical Egyptian fare, fava beans and falafel. Then, the man got on his train and traveled into Cairo.
Once he arrived in Cairo, since he didn't have anywhere to go, and his workplace would not be open for some hours, he went to the patriarchal cathedral in the Old City. There, the Patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril VI, who was widely respected as a wonderworking saint even in his own lifetime, was presiding at Matins and the Divine Liturgy as he did every morning, and the man settled into the back of the church and prayed in a spirit of great dejection. When the services ended a little after dawn, all the people present approached the patriarch to receive his blessing along with the antidor, the blessed bread from the day's Liturgy. When he received the blessing of the patriarch, he took the opportunity to say to him, "Please pray for me, Your Holiness, because God has abandoned me." Cyril VI looked at him with great love and said, "Don't be stupid. He just fed you with beans and falafel, didn't He? Now go home. Everything is taken care of." When the man returned to his brother's house that evening, his brother told him how worried he had been when he found that he was gone. The brother's wife had relented. He would be able to remain in his brother's house.
In the same country, but many centuries earlier, and a short distance further up the Nile, a very short young man named John has decided that he wants to give his whole life to God. He has heard about the men, who have gone into the desert to dedicate themselves to prayer, since Saint Anthony's time, about a hundred years earlier. John needs to find a man, who is experienced in the life, so that he can learn the necessary lessons of consecrated life. Finally, John feels so privileged and blessed to have found a very old, experienced, but peevish, monk. The old man has no intention of having any disciples, but here is this young man, who is intent on being his disciple. John's teacher, Diomed, comes up with a plan to get rid of his annoying visitor. He decides that he will make John run away from discouragement. He takes his staff and thrusts it into the sand of the desert. Then, turning to John, he commands him, "Water it until it bears fruit!" John takes up the challenge. In addition to many other duties, over the space of four years, John walks the two and a half miles to the river up to four times a day to bring water to water the staff. At the end of those four years, the staff put forth leaves and bore an abundance of almonds. Diomed was amazed at what had happened. He spent the rest of his years on earth traveling around to all his fellow monks in the whole region, bringing to them the almonds of the tree, telling them the story and saying, "Here! Taste the fruit of obedience."
All of us, who read the lives of the saints are used to miraculous happenings and extraordinary abilities illustrated in those lives. These two stories are examples of just such things. In the first case, we saw Patriarch Cyril VI, who was in church since before midnight, but who somehow knew that God had provided a sufficient breakfast of fava beans and falafel to the dejected man in the church that morning, and that, even further, God had provided a change of heart on the part of the man's brother and his wife. Similarly, in the case of St. John the Dwarf, we see that the saint's obedience so moves the heart of God that He raises the dead wood of the staff to life, endowing it with an extraordinary fecundity. The message is not lost on Diomed: the fruit of loving obedience is greater than anything else.
Unfortunately, when we read this kind of story, we very often get it wrong. We are tempted to think to ourselves, "these were saints, and so they showed forth miraculous abilities and deeds." But this is backwards. What we see in the saints is what is truly natural. They decided to cooperate with God in the restoration of their human nature. They allowed their souls and bodies to be filled by Divine Grace, and that Divine Grace, the Life of God being carried within them, brought forth the works of grace, things that we consider miraculous, because our human nature is so withered, emaciated and weak. Ironically, we live in a world that is obsessed with the idea of human beings living up to their full potential. We are bombarded by advertising many, many times a day that pushes products that claim to aid in our self-actualization. Yet, with none of these things will we ever get there, because the human being was designed to be filled with God, to do astounding things in communion with Him. Every human being has that potential in Christ, and we have to see it in everyone we meet. This is the reason why, in the presence of the saints, we often see the restoration of conditions that we recognize as paradisal. The dead staff coming back to life to become an almond tree is an example of this. Another example is the way we often see wild animals behave in the presence of the saints. They are tame and docile, eager to help the saints in accomplishing the will of God, as when we see the lions come out of the desert and dig the grave of St. Paul of Thebes.
No comments:
Post a Comment