Author: OCPMS Comms

Summer certainly is a-coming in.  Here at the Monastery of St. John we aren’t singing cuckoo, but we are seeing many new faces in church, the kitchen, the candle factory, the soap factory, the garden, and the living quarters.  Springs the wood anew at this time of year, and springs the brotherhood anew as well, […]

Several men have asked me to be their spiritual father.  Wow!—you might say—what an honor!  Slow down—I would reply—I had to say no.  I had to tell them that I do not have a blessing to serve as anyone’s spiritual father. I think in some cases this answer disappointed them. * Permit me a digression.  […]

I love hearing about the experiences others have had in the monastic life.  When I visit another monastery or when other monastics visit us, I look forward to what they have to say.  It helps me understand our own life here. One such occasion came quite some time back when a couple of nuns we […]

We have some wonderful advice in the formula “Do not resent, do not react, keep inner stillness.”  It works great if I stop myself in time.  But what if I find myself already trapped in resentment?  What then?  Well, I will share with you what I know.  As an old man of my acquaintance often […]

You might consider me a leading authority on the topic of resentments.  No, I’m not bragging.  I’ve gained my knowledge the hard way—by struggling against them, sometimes with success and sometimes not.  This battle represents a big part of my spiritual life. I have the benefit, though, of living in a place where I have […]

Not long ago I spoke with a transformed man.  Yes, you’re right.  I’m overstating the case.  Let me back off and rephrase the proposition less extravagantly and more accurately.  Not long ago I met a man, newly baptized and chrismated, in the process of transformation.  This revised statement, while less flamboyant, points to a state […]

What do you do with obnoxious people?  You know who I mean—difficult people, insolent people, nasty, mean, irritating, drive you out of your mind and push your crazy buttons people.  Maybe we’re talking about friends, acquaintances, or total strangers.  Then again, maybe we’re talking about family members.  For us monastics, we might be talking about […]

Discussions about the relationship between parish life and monastic life often get way off track.  It becomes all too easy to go off on a tangent with abstractions, quotations from this Holy Father and that, accounts of various monasteries in other countries and other centuries, and spiritual-sounding concepts that have little to do with real-life […]