On Detachment

If you truly love God and long to reach the kingdom that is to come, if you are truly pained by your failings and are mindful of punishment and of the eternal judgment, if you are truly afraid to die, then it will not be possible to have an attachment, or anxiety, or concern for money, for possessions, for family relationships, for worldly glory, for love and brotherhood, indeed for anything of earth. All worry about one’s condition, even for one’s body, will be pushed aside as hateful. Stripped of all thought of these, caring nothing about them, one will turn freely to Christ. One will look to heaven and to the help coming from there, as in the scriptural sayings: “I will cling close to you” (Ps. 62:9) and “I have not grown tired of following you nor have I longed for the day or the rest that man gives” ( Jer. 17:16).

It would be a very great disgrace to leave everything after we have been called - and called by God, not man - and then to be worried about something that can do us no good in the hour of our need, that is, of our death. This is what the Lord meant when He told us not to turn back and not to be found useless for the kingdom of heaven. He knew how weak we could be at the start of our religious life, how easily we can turn back to the world when we associate with worldly people or happen to meet them. That is why it happened that when someone said to Him, “Let me go away to bury my father,” He answered, “Let the dead bury the dead” (Matt. 8:22). There are demons to assail us after our renunciation of the world. They make us envy those who remain on the outside and who are merciful and compassionate. They make us regret that we seem deprived of these virtues. Their hostile aim is to bring us by way of false humility either to turn back to the world or, if we remain monks, to plunge down the cliffs of despair.

Conceit may lead us to disparage the secular life or secretly to despise those on the outside. We may act in this way in order to escape despair or to obtain hope. We should therefore heed the Lord when speaking to the young man who kept almost all the commandments: “You need one thing, to sell what you have and to give it to the poor” (Mark 10:21), for by making himself a pauper the young man would learn to accept the charity of others.

If we really wish to enter the contest of religious life, we should pay careful heed to the sense in which the Lord described those remaining in the world as living corpses (Matt. 8:22). What he said was, in effect, “Let the living dead who are in the world bury those dead in the body.” Riches did not prevent the young man from coming to receive baptism, and it is quite wrong to say, as some do, that the Lord told him to dispose of his wealth so that he could be baptized.

Let us be sure of this, and let us be satisfied with the promise of very great glory that goes with our vocation. We should investigate why those who have lived in the world, and have endured nightlong vigils, fasting, labors, and suffering, and then have withdrawn from their fellowmen to the monastic life, as if to a place of trial or an arena, no longer practice their former fake and spurious asceticism. I have seen many different plants of the virtues planted by them in the world, watered by vanity as if from an underground cesspool, made to shoot up by love of show, manured by praise, and yet they quickly withered when transplanted to desert soil, to where the world did not walk, that is, to where they were not manured with the foul-smelling water of vanity. The things that grow in water cannot bear fruit in dry and arid places.

If someone has hated the world, he has run away from its misery; but if he has an attachment to visible things, then he is not yet cleansed of grief. For how can he avoid grief when he is deprived of something he loves? We need great vigilance in all things, but especially in regard to what we have left behind.

I have observed many men in the world assailed by anxiety, by worry, by the need to talk, by all-night watching, and I have seen them run away from the madness of their bodies. They turned to the monastic life with totally free hearts, and still were pitiably corrupted by the stirrings of the body.

We should be careful in case it should happen to us that while talking of journeying along the narrow and hard road we may actually wander onto the broad and wide highway.

Mortification of the appetite, nightlong toil, a ration of water, a short measure of bread, the bitter cup of dishonor - these will show you the narrow way. Derided, mocked, jeered, you must accept the denial of your will. You must patiently endure opposition, suffer neglect without complaint, put up with violent arrogance. You must be ready for injustice, and not grieve when you are slandered; you must not be angered by contempt and you must show humility when you have been condemned. Happy are those who follow this road and avoid other highways. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

No one can enter crowned into the heavenly bridechamber without first making the three renunciations. He has to turn away from worldly concerns, from men, from family; he must cut selfishness away; and thirdly, he must rebuff the vanity that follows obedience. “Go out from among them,” says the Lord. “Go apart from them. Do not touch the uncleanness of the age” (2 Cor. 6:17).

Who in the outside world has worked wonders, raised the dead, expelled demons? No one. Such deeds are done by monks. It is their reward. People in secular life cannot do these things, for, if they could, what then would be the point of ascetic practice and the solitary life?

Whenever our feelings grow warm after our renunciation with the memories of parents and of brothers, that is all the work of demons, and we must take up the weapons of prayer against them. Inflamed by the thought of eternal fire, we must drive them out and quench that untimely glow in our hearts. If a man thinks himself immune to the allurement of something and yet grieves over its loss, he is only fooling himself. Young men who still feel strongly the urge for physical love and pleasure and yet who also want to take on the regime of a monastery must discipline themselves with every form of vigilance and prayer, avoiding all dangerous comfort, so that their last state may not be worse than their first. For those sailing the tides of spirituality know only too well that the religious life can be a harbor of salvation or a haven of destruction, and a pitiable sight indeed is the shipwreck in port of someone who had safely mastered the ocean.

This is the second step, and if you take it, then do as Lot did, not his wife, and flee.

SOURCE : John Climacus The Ladder of Divine Ascent