In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Human beings are pretty much the same. The way human beings are – the more you have – the more you want. The more you care about the things you have – the more still that you want. The more you have – the more you think about yourself – the less you think about other people. This is just how it progresses in human history. Human beings are not different ever, anywhere – we are pretty much the same. Somehow we can’t manage to learn. We have more and more things, and when we have more and more things, we are preoccupied with all those things, and we forget about everyone else. That is exactly the case with the rich man that the Lord is talking about today in the Gospel. This rich man had all these crops, and he said: “What am I going to do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?” So all he did was build bigger and bigger storage, and prepared to enjoy himself. He was turned in on himself, and didn’t think about sharing all of that wealth. And so, the Lord says: “Foolish man, your soul is required of you tonight; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” That was it.
We have to be very careful ourselves about how we are living our lives. The Christian way is never about tight-fistedness, and holding on to everything. The Christian way is always about open-handedness, and about sharing. St John Chrysostom talks over and over again about the need to care about the poor, and the needs of other people. The Gospel reminds us over and over again that the way of the followers of Jesus Christ, the way of love, is to care about what happens to all the people around us, and creation, too. What happens to creation around us? In living out the love of Jesus Christ, we have our responsibility to people, to animals, to trees, water, to everything around us.
The way of Gandhi was to make as small a negative impact as possible on the environment around us. In that way, he was right. For Christians, our responsibility, being where we are in our environment (and that includes people, animals, water, everything), is to be co-creating with God, to be life-giving with God in this environment, working, living in the love of Jesus Christ. To do this we have to be, as the Saviour said, rich towards God. If He is blessing us with many things, it is important for us to give thanks to Him for his gifts (and not to think that we do it all ourselves), and to share what He gives us with people around us. The more we are ready to share what He has given us, the more He gives us to share. The more we hold on tightly to what we have, the less we have. If we hold on tightly to what we have, it’s because we think it’s ours: I got it myself, and no-one is going to take it from me. When we hold on so tightly to things, we kill everything.
I remember from my childhood (and from seeing other children, too): children who pick dandelions or other kinds of little flowers for their Mummy, and they bring them home to their Mummy, and they’re holding on to those flowers really tightly so as not to lose them – by the time those flowers get to their Mummy, they are all strangled. It’s an offering of love from the child, and the Mummy is going to take the strangled offering with love anyway. We are like that with our holding on to things. We do not approach the Lord like the child towards his mother with the strangled dandelions, but we are holding on tightly to whatever we have, not even thinking about offering to anyone else. This is just plain death. It’s important for us today to remember that the Christian way is always about openness; it’s about remembering the Lord; it’s about giving. Giving.
Now a few words about the past week which I spent in Greece. I had the blessing, finally, for the first time, to be able to go with a group of people to Mount Athos. The Lord really gives us object lesson after object lesson. We thought that we had planned according to the rules (and there are many rules about how to get to Mount Athos). Even if we did plan, and try to do everything correctly – everything always changed. When we finally came to be prepared to go to spend our three days (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) on Mount Athos, we thought things would just happen as normal.
Nevertheless, on Monday, when we had arrived in Ouranopolis, getting ready to go to Mount Athos, we didn’t go to Mount Athos because it was windy, and there were no boats. We finally made it very early Tuesday morning. We thought we would find a monk-taxi for rent, but we ended up with a little mini-bus driven by a monk from Karakallou. We ended up seeing half a dozen monasteries, including Vatopedi (which is where Father Pierre’s home monastery is), and finally getting to Iveron late in the afternoon. By then we were running short of time, and we thought that we might get to Panteleimon. The winds were just favourable enough; the boat came, and we managed to get to Panteleimon. We were only allowed to stay on the Holy Mountain for three nights and four days. We were simply going to be obedient to that (and anyway there was no time for any other possibility). We said therefore, that we have to resign ourselves to one night at Panteleimon.
However, we had two nights at Panteleimon because the winds didn’t let us leave. In the end, we thought that this would be it, and we would go back to Thessalonika, and maybe go to a church shop or two, and then come home. However, we stopped at two monasteries on the way to Thessalonika. Then we stopped at four churches in Thessalonika, and finally got back to the hotel. The hotel people were not like North American hotel people, because they were obviously used to such things. We had missed a day in our hotel arrangements, and they said: Ah so, you finally made it back! They were quite peaceful about it.
What happened was that we proposed a way to approach the Holy Mountain, and make this pilgrimage, and we thought that this was the possible, and right way to go about it. But the Lord said: No. It is not good enough. You are going to do this, and you are going to see much more. You think you will get this much blessing, but I have more blessings to give you, and I am going to show you. We venerated so many more saints than we had ever imagined. When you go to the Holy Mountain, you don't go as a tourist just to look at these ancient buildings (although, of course, you do see them). By the way, for women who can't set foot on the Holy Mountain, you actually can take a boat (as long as the winds are favourable - in summertime it's a much more predictable thing), and go all the way around the Holy Mountain. The monks come out of the monasteries, the boat comes quite close, and the monks bring the relics out for you to venerate. They pray with you, and you have a connexion, anyway. It is possible to come close to the Holy Mountain. There are women's monasteries nearby the Holy Mountain also, that are dependent on the men's monasteries. However, the point still is, we are not simply going around, and looking as gawkers. It's the personal encounter with the saint whose relics are there that matters; it's the personal encounter with the monks that are living there, and praying daily that matters. They are not just playing around in their prayers.
All the monasteries have about the same starting time. Either they start at 1 AM Greek time, or they start at 2 AM Greek time. Why do I say "Greek time"? The Holy Mountain is on a different clock - they are on the biblical clock which used to be the clock of the old Roman Empire. The day starts at sunset. The first hour of the night is the first hour after sunset. The clock is all different, and, in fact, it puts us another seven hours ahead. We were living on the Holy Mountain fourteen hours different from the time here - not just seven hours. It's like being in China, I suppose, according to the clock. They start then at 1 AM in Panteleimon, and they finish at around 8 or 9 in the morning. Then they start at 2 in the afternoon with Vespers, and they serve Vespers, after which is a Molieben (or a Paraklesis) to the Mother of God (which is not so short). Then they have supper, and after supper they go back to church for Small Compline in which there is an Akathist to the Mother of God because the Mother of God is Abbess of the whole Holy Mountain.
The monks always say: No women can come here nowadays,but a woman is the Abess of the whole place. The Mother of God is the living Abbess of the whole Holy Mountain, and the Mother of God actually regulates what's going on - we experienced it. The daily life she does regulate. Compline, which you would expect to last for twenty-five minutes, lasts for more than an hour. They are praying, on an average, or ordinary day for six to eight hours a day, because that is the work of monks - to praise God. That is their first work. After that they do manual labour for four hours. Their days are not so short, and they're not so empty.
When you are standing there in the churches in these services, you are facing the Lord, and you are facing one another. More than one of the pilgrims said that he had really come to understand himself, and his relationship towards the Lord much more clearly just by standing in the services (not necessarily understanding all the Greek or all the Slavonic). Nevertheless, he was there; he knew the order of the services. In the presence of the Lord, in the presence of all those people who are really praying, there was so much focus, and all that focus brings Grace,blessing and healing to the heart.
That is what a pilgrimage is all about. It is remembering that we are in the hands of the Lord, and the Lord is directing our lives, to whom be glory: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.