Embracing Suffering - St. Nilus and the Rewards of Asceticism

by Rev. STEPHEN MUSE

The advice of the Desert Fathers, who lived in the Egyptian wilderness in the fourth and fifth centuries, doesn’t always translate well for laypeople. Their writings are full of stories about living for weeks on little food or water, going without clothing, and shuttering themselves in remote caves. But some of their sayings do resonate for 21st-century Americans as much as they would have resonated for their contemporaries. One example is Abba Nilus, a spiritual son of St. John Chrysostom, who left Constantinople for Mount Sinai around the year 400 and lived out the rest of his life as a monk. “Do not be always wanting everything to turn out as you think it should,” Abba Nilus said, “but rather as God pleases, then you will be undisturbed and thankful in your prayer.” [1]

“Undisturbed and thankful” are qualities we usually associate with enjoying the blessings of life—good food, good reputation, good health, financial resources, and the successful pursuit of worldly happiness. But these aren’t the kinds of blessings to which our Abba points.

Take the survivors of gulags and concentration camps—including Fr. George Calciu, Fr. Arseny, Fr. Roman Braga, Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl, Corrie Ten Boom and others—who endured years of torture and solitary confinement to emerge not defeated, but rather enlivened and even sanctified in the midst of conditions that proved destructive for others. They discovered what St. Paul learned from the Holy Spirit, Who revealed to him in his affliction, “My Grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in your weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).

Jacques Lusseyran, a blind survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, observed that “the self-centered life has no place in the world of the deported. You must go beyond it, lay hold of something outside yourself…how does one account for the fact that Dietrich, the German criminal, arrested seven years before for strangling his mother and his wife, had turned brave and generous? Why was he sharing his bread with others with the risk of dying sooner?” [2] There is a great mystery hidden in this paradox.

Among the hardest lessons to learn in life is that my will is not God’s will and my human presumption of righteousness is maintained only without having reference to God’s. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” reveals a different path; one that involves lifelong repentance, prayer, and conscious struggle based on faith in Christ, Whose life reveals the presence of God most clearly at the point of His greatest weakness and when He seems most absent—on the Cross.

Suffering provides an opportunity to go deeper into the mystery of the Cross, which is planted at the intersection of human justice and divine love and mercy. It’s situated between self-love and temporary, worldly satisfaction on the one hand; and on the other, as a peace that comes “not as the world gives,” but in Christ, Who has conquered the world by His free embrace of involuntary suffering for love. In the midst of all the injustice and unfairness unleashed against Him as the events of His Passion unfolded, Jesus showed us the path that leads to life. “No one takes My life away from Me, I give it” (Deut. 30:19).

Humility, joy, love, gratefulness, and patience, in good circumstances and bad, are signs of true faith and hope in Christ, and they are never paraded about as something to get credit for. Suffice to say that apart from our relationship with Christ, a host of passions will assail us in our suffering, multiplying like swarming bacteria, as we try to have our own way and justify ourselves—rather than entering the way of the Cross He sets before us as the path to resurrection.

Involuntary suffering is not a reaction. It is a conscious act of freedom that offers an opportunity to discover a peace that is deeper than worldly satisfaction and human achievement. When disasters and injustices befall us, we face two kinds of temptations in our protest against injustice. We may become crusaders fueled by passions of pride, self-righteousness, resentment, and even vindictiveness, becoming servants of the very evils we are seeking to condemn and correct in others. One dog cannot stop another dog from barking by barking louder. At the other extreme, we can slide into passivity and resignation with the justification of our response being “spiritual.”

Jesus counseled us to be as gentle as doves, but also to be as shrewd as serpents, to recognize the deception around us and within us. He Himself did the same. When a mob wanted to throw Jesus over a cliff, He avoided it (Lk 4:29). When His brothers encouraged Him to reveal Himself openly in Jerusalem during the feast before His time, which would have proved dangerous to Him, He declined and approached the same situation ”secretly” ( Jn 7:10). Where there was cruelty justified by correctness, He showed mercy leading to repentance to be the greater virtue, protecting the guilty ( Jn 8:7). He took steps to ease human suffering wherever He found it, even when it meant violating lesser aspects of the law, such as healing on the Sabbath ( Jn. 5:10; Lk 14:4).

After taking whatever practical measures we can to correct injustice, we embrace as “necessary suffering” the involuntary pain and obstacles we cannot change by human means alone. This ascetical forbearance becomes an opportunity for a deeper relationship and trust in God arising through repentance. In patience, we contribute our forbearance and wait expectantly for a transformation of our deepest selves, as in the bread and wine which become the Body and Blood of Christ while remaining bread and wine. This cannot be accomplished by our own actions alone, nor does God transform us without our participation. We are drawn by Grace toward a “peace that passes human understanding” according to the mysterious loving providence of God and in a manner we cannot fully discern, but for which we are immensely grateful.

The narrow Way that leads beyond slavery to worldly human satisfactions to the freely embraced gift of eternal life in communion with Christ is that which St. Nilus points toward. It takes great patience and willingness to trust God’s love for us in all things; to willingly share the Cross of suffering while we continue to live with vigor, interest, hope, and joy, praying “Glory to God” in all circumstances.

Consciously choosing to endure involuntary suffering as a mercy of God, in response to Grace, is an essential ingredient to the process by which pride and vainglorious trust in our own selfimportance are slowly rooted out. But more than this, when we endure affliction in faith, it is not merely for our own sakes, but for Christ who has done this for us. St. Mark the Ascetic even goes as far as to say, “To accept an affliction for God’s sake is a genuine act of holiness; for true love is tested by adversities.” [3] In this way we are ushered into the Way of love and mercy that is True and leads to Life eternal.

1. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta WardSLG (Liturgical Press, 1975), 154.

2. Lusseyran, J. And There Was Light, (MorningLight Press, revised. 2006), 300-301

3. The Philokalia: The Complete Text (Vol. 1), trans.G. E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware,(Faber & Faber, 1983) 114.

The Reverend Stephen Muse is a therapist and pastoral counselor and a deacon at Holy Trinity Orthodox Church in Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of numerous books and has a blog at http://orthodoxcolumbus.com/blog.

This article originally appeared on the website www.orthodoxcolumbus.org.