“Elder
Aimilianos never told anyone what to do. Never gave orders. He told us many
times when the community was all together: “I can’t really tell you what to do,
all I can do is strive to be an example.” He used to say, “In the Christian
life, there is no ‘must’. If you tell people they ‘must do this and must do
that’, something in their spirit rebels. It’s unnatural for us to be enslaved
in that way, to have orders and commands imposed upon us. …
… When
a certain novice arrived at Simonopetra, the cells were under construction so
he was put in a guest room. It all looked normal: shelf, books, bed. He was
working in the library, and one of the monks got up and said, “Ooh my back, my
back: it’s killing me. I have back troubles.” “Is your bed too soft?” the
novice asked. “You sleep in a bed?” “Yeah: don’t you?” “No, nobody here sleeps
in a bed,” and laughed with the other monks saying, “Hey, come here. He sleeps
in a bed!” When the novice was with the Abbot a couple days later, the Abbot
asked, “You have a bed in your room? At some point, we’ll have to get that out
of there.” The novice was terrified: he had a long history of chronic lower
back problems. He had the idea: “If they take my bed away, I’ll be a cripple
the rest of my life!” Every time he heard a knock on the door, he feared they
were coming for it. Yet no one ever came for the bed. One day the Novice saw
the cell of the Abbot. The Abbot didn’t have a bed! “This man carries the
weight of the whole monastery on his shoulders, works so hard for everybody
here, deals with all our nonsense, our infantile behaviour prays for us, and he
doesn’t sleep in a bed. And I’m going to have a bed? I can’t do that.” He went
back to his room and got rid of the bed. Had they taken it, and he had back
problems, he would have cursed them forever! The Abbot taught by example.”
Source:
A priest of the Orthodox Church
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