“What do you mean by ‘things of this world,’ Father?” Maria asked.
“Material possessions, career, success, ideological fixations, everything that steals the heart. The result is one: our passion for God is transformed into the passion for created things of no ultimate and eternal value, be they power, fame, politics, smoking, sex, money, and so on.”
“This is the meaning of idolatry,” I added. “We worship our own creations.”
“Yes, precisely.”
“Is fasting a way to overcome idolatry?” Maria asked.
“The objective of fasting and all other rules instituted by the Ecclesia is to help us liberate our hearts and minds so that we may be refocused once again on God. There is nothing inherently bad about drinking milk or eating meat or olive oil for that matter [almost half the days of the year at various intervals Orthodox Christians are asked to refrain not only from meat or meat products but also from all kinds of oils, including olive oil].”
“Yet people often turned these practices into absolute rules,” Teresa pointed out. “They turned them into ends in themselves.”
“This is tragic,” Fr. Maximos said. “People are often more obsessed about fasting in itself than about the purpose of fasting, which is to master our desires, overcome our egotism, and open our hearts toward God. For those of us who are serious about the spiritual life, such practices simply help reorient our minds toward that which is ultimately real. They are not ends in themselves.
“Very much like the lover who cannot think of anything other than the beloved,” Fr. Maximos continued, “is the person who is flooded by the love and memory of God. This is what we truly crave. If our minds are totally absorbed by our work or by our cars or by our hobbies or by the relentless pursuit of worldly pleasures or whatever else, there will be no room for the love of God.”
“So then,” I pointed out, “whatever distracts us from the memory of God is a form of idolatry, of sin.”
“That is exactly what sin is,” Fr. Maximos emphasized. “The practice of temperance is to free us from the tendency to sin, to be distracted from our ultimate objective. Temperance encompasses the entire spectrum of our actions.”
“But how can we live then in this world of created things that we find ourselves in?” Teresa asked.
“Use the things of this world, but don’t let them use you. Don’t become possessed by them.”
“We fill up our emptiness with all sorts of obsessions,” I interjected, “be it power, fame, politics, smoking, gambling, sports, food, sex, television, moneymaking, and so on.”
Fr. Maximos laughed as he remembered something. “Someone once asked me, ‘How come you monks don’t smoke?’ I replied that we don’t have a need to smoke and suggested that she should phrase the question differently. Why do people smoke in the first place? It means something is lacking in their lives and they become captives to this destructive habit.
“Elder Paisios used to say,” Fr. Maximos continued, “that those who take narcotics can be liberated from their addiction when they taste a more powerful narcotic, and by that he meant Christ. When you discover what you truly desire, then you have no need for substitutes. Then you become truly liberated. You become master of things rather than their slave.”
“Sometimes, in their attempt to exercise temperance, certain people behave in a way that is incomprehensible to those of us who live in the world,” I said, alluding to the extremes that some hermits resort to in order to free themselves from “the world.”
“Yes. Their ways are incomprehensible to us who live ordinary lives. There is, for example, a hermit who spent a lifetime in a cave overlooking a beautiful gorge,” Fr. Maximos added. “He never allowed himself to gaze at the beauty around him because he did not wish to have his heart and mind get distracted from his focus on God.”
“This is really bizarre,” Michael, the young seminarian, complained.
“Well, from our point of view, it is. The reason I am telling you this is to emphasize the lengths that some hermits would go to in order to maintain their exclusive focus on God. I certainly do not recommend it.”
Fr. Maximos laughed in his characteristic way as he thought of something else. “When I was abbot at the Panagia monastery, a very nice woman brought us freshly baked cookies. ‘I made these for all of you here,’ she said, ‘so that when you sit on your balconies and are overtaken by melancholy you can have some with your coffee.’ ‘But, my dear,’ I replied, ‘we don’t have time to drink coffee on our balconies. We have other important things that we must do. We don’t have time to be taken over by melancholy!'”
Fr. Nikodemos, who had been mostly quiet, added that he remembered that incident; he had been a monk at the Panagia monastery at the time. Then Fr. Maximos, in a more serious tone, went on to say that the ways of hermits, and monastic life in general, may be extreme, but they highlight for us certain axioms of the spiritual life. “We must not allow anything of temporal value to steal our hearts. Every time we direct our hopes toward earthly things we make a step backward on our journey toward God.”
~Adapted from Kyriacos C. Markides, Inner River: A Pilgrimage to the Heart of Christian Spirituality
