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Ladder of Heavenly Unity: St Catherine’s Monastery of Sinai
Posted by: Greek American Girl in It's your Saint's
Day November 2, 2015
The Ladder of Heavenly Unity
Moses removing his sandals
Moses approached the divine fire of the Burning Bush
with the footsteps of his mind bare, completely free from any human trains of
thought, wrote Saint Maximos the Confessor.
Continuing Orthodox monasticism’s oldest unbroken
tradition, Sinai monks still liturgize, shoeless, over the roots of the Burning
Bush. On the holy ground where Moses was commanded to remove his sandals –
together with all earthly logic – monks turn diversity’s polarizing forces to
unity – some of the ways St. Catherine’s Monastery of Sinai brings Byzantium’s
patristic spirit into the modern era as living tradition.
One need look no further than the Monastery’s name for
evidence of its universal relevance: no one really knows how or when the
“Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-trodden Mountain of Sinai” became
popularly known as St. Catherine’s – just that the change took hold as the
Saint’s renown escalated throughout Europe and Russia. This transpired after
her miracle-working relics were brought to Rouen by monks in the 11th century.
As magnet to pilgrims from every corner of the globe,
the Greek Orthodox monastery embodies a past steeped not in its own reflection,
but in the purity of Christ’s message. In the words of Sinai elder Father
Pavlos, “Authentic love is to preserve the truth as we received it, so we may
hand it on, unblemished, to those who come after us.”
At the heart of this discipline beats the Sinaite love
for simplicity of soul. With freedom from sin as its object, simplicity accepts
nothing man-made in place of the freedom granted humankind in Genesis – freedom
not to choose between right and wrong, but from the constant necessity of doing
so. Before shedding the divine likeness by failing to return God’s love, the
simplicity of human nature was afflicted by none of subsequent humanity’s drift
toward sin.
And the heart of simplicity of soul? The elder’s
answer again betrays the clarity of an ascetic lifetime devoted to prayer:
“Love God first, above all else.”
The altar of the “Holy of Holies” of St. Catherine’s
Monastery is placed directly over the roots of the Burning Bush, which still
thrives outside the chapel. (Bruce M. White Photography)
The altar of the “Holy of Holies” of St. Catherine’s
Monastery is placed directly over the roots of the Burning Bush, which still
thrives outside the chapel.
Monks at the Burning Bush devoted their first chapel
to the Annunciation, the announcement to the Theotokos that she was selected by
God to bestow human nature upon His Son. He who was begotten before all ages
without a mother, would now be born without a father – if the Virgin agreed.
Without her free consent the Incarnation could not take place – but what human
logic could process such tidings? The Holy Virgin did not stop even to
contemplate the censure, and worse, that greeted unwedded motherhood in her
society. Loving God before herself, she loves others not for the return of
their good opinion, but with the boundless love of God for their soul. With her
heartfelt “yes,” the living “ark of the covenant” is overlaid with gold, not by
human hands to contain the words of the Law given to Moses on Sinai – but by
the Holy Spirit, to contain the uncontainable Word Himself. It is due to the
purity of her love for God that a simple Maiden becomes the inexhaustible
Treasury of life for mankind, and in the shadow of Mount Sinai, the First
commandment does not just precede the Second, it renders it possible. Only by
loving God above all else can we hope to love others, according to Father
Pavlos:
“Love begins in God. First we love God above
everything and everybody. Then ourselves, for Christ said to love your neighbor
as yourself. Love then goes out from us to other people, and finally, to all of
Creation. (Saints have exceeded this by loving others more than themselves, but
Christ does not ask this.)”
Rays from the Holy Summit engulf all ages in the
limitless love of the Crucified Christ during services preceding Holy Pascha
(Photo Credit: Bruce M. White Photography)
Saint Paul notes that Christ died for us while we were
yet sinners. Lacking the simplicity of the divine likeness, our own love does
not so generously tolerate our neighbor’s foibles.. But in loving God first,
beyond all else, we surpass our limits through union with the Source of love.
When God comes to abide, to energize within us according to His perfect will,
empowering our human energies with His divine ones, the inexhaustible stores of
that love become our own. In the nuanced idiom of Saint Isaac the Syrian:
Love incited by something external is like a small
lamp whose flame is fed with oil, or like a stream fed by rains where flow
stops when the rains cease. But love whose object is God, is like a fountain
gushing forth from the earth.Its flow never ceases, for He Himself is the
source of this love and also its food which never grows scarce.
Consistent with the imagery of the Burning Bush, whose
flaming branches are illumined, but never consumed, by the divine fire set
alight in the soul by the Word of God, the ascetic theology of the Sinai school
burns with a fire that unifies in an incorruptible way, for it neither supports
the characterization of peoples, nor their homogenization. Both monks and their
Bedouin neighbors attest to bonds of cooperation that go back 15 centuries.
Unhindered by different faiths, each group reaches out to the need of the
other. And when the Sinai was administered by the Israeli government from
1967-79, things were very much the same. It is through our brother after all,
that Christ wishes to reach us. As a result, without condescension to the sin
of “people-pleasing” (cultivating others’ good opinion), a Sinai monastic soon
learns to protect the inner peace of others, in order to enjoy his own.
The earliest literature attests to the operation of an
infirmary by the Monastery for the benefit of its desert neighbors, a custom
modernized by today’s monks with donated, state-of-the-art equipment, and
assistance with medicines and basic provisions. But the currents of mutual
peace in this environment run much deeper than the superficialities of economic
philanthropy: The Sinai tradition is rooted in profound respect for the freedom
of others – the philanthropy of the Holy Trinity.
The granite wilderness is a soft and beautiful one, of
many hues. But the lack of greenery starves the soul for the consolation of
foliage. One turns inward for shade, to the only refuge available, the shelter
of the will of God, for as the mountains suspended all about gently confide,
there is no other.
The two-headed eagle of the Byzantine empire
symbolizes unity in diversity, the continuity of empire from West to East,
union of past and future in fidelity to the Word of God.
Accepting and accepted by all, without sensing any
need to blur the distinctions that characterize its own confession of faith, it
is a question how the Sinai community retained its Greek identity under the
successive political pressures of so extended a timeline, in a far flung
outpost of the empire, indeed, so many centuries after its fall. Or, more to
the point, how did the community’s Greek identity absorb successive influences
into a “unity of diversity,” rather than the opposite – the diverse “unity”
that eats away from within at the civilizations of the so-called
“Enlightenment?” Having never bowed to demands that replaced the glorification
of God with that of man, the eternal present of Mount Sinai spans untold ages
as night yet hands its glory to day, and day to night, in the incandescent
liturgies of the Burning Bush chapel. Illumined only by the flicker of
candlelight on golden mosaic, enigmatic mysteries locked within early
antiquity’s sacred masterworks emerge into relief with each approaching dawn,
only to recede once more into the shadows of midnight vigils, as subdued tones
of ancient Byzantine chant suggest that the sixth century simply never ended in
Sinai.
Of course, the Byzantine identity that yet typifies
the community has always extended beyond the Greek one, in the modern sense at
least, if it reflected the collective consciousness of what was then considered
the civilized world. Does it suffice then, to note that Byzantium’s culture
always transcended provincial limits, in that, following Roman precedent, the
empire united the plethora of cultures surrounding the Mediterranean under a
commonality of shared values?
Shared values however are not moribund ones. The
momentum of classical philosophy’s relentless search for truth fueled the
tension between Greek Christianity and Platonist schools that innervated the
intellectual life of late antiquity well into the Byzantine era. Tracing the
influence of Hellenistic and Judaic thought upon one another through the
evolution of classical concepts like divine energeia, as the first monastics
sought union with God in the Uncreated Light of the Burning Bush, it quickly
emerges how dynamic were the prevailing forces that preserved the Sinaite
worldview from the idiosyncrasies of self-absorption. The visions that shaped
it were too disparate; their sources too deep in the ancient world.
Despite the Monastery’s location on the remote
frontier of the empire, the literature proves Sinai’s early monks to have been
surprisingly tuned in to the currents of their times. Anastasios of Sinai for
one, is noted for his prolific writings on the monothelite controversies of the
seventh century; before him, John Klimakos demonstrates fluency with
theological concerns throughout his Ladder of Divine Ascent, remarking at the
outset that following Christ is contingent upon accurate belief in the Holy
Trinity. Reading Monastery history by the light of its own legacy, Sinai
Librarian Father Justin cites the complexity of Sinai’s vast manuscript
collections as evidence of a world “more interconnected than scholars have
often been willing to grant.”
It is said that a society disgorges both its least and
most innovative personalities to distant shores. If so, those who landed on the
Sinai’s presumably populated the creative end of the spectrum; unable to
assimilate and adapt, who could have survived such a harsh environment? More to
the point, who could have met the challenge of its granite silence? “Unless a
man’s heart has first been filled with the presence of God,” says Father
Pavlos, “he cannot endure stillness.”
Anyone who has tried it knows that solitude is not for
the faint-hearted, for as manifested by the immaterial fire of the Burning Bush,
God is beyond everything we know. In order to find Him, one must be willing to
eclipse the limits of his own understanding, for God is describable only by
what He is not – unlimited, inconceivable, ineffable, boundless. Orthodox
theology thus looks beyond intellectual contemplation to experiential knowledge
of God, the personal experience of His divine energies. Outside human logic,
this is the essence of the life of the monk – indeed of all Christian life –
and where unity exists, it can only start here. …
“Like a vision of heaven in the wilderness of Moses,”
the desert monastics of the Sinai continue to enjoy the peace of mutual respect
with the Bedouin tribes with whom they have lived and worked since before the
dawn of Islam, in the shadow of the Holy Summit where Moses received the
tablets inscribed by the finger of God with the Judaic Law.
In recent years however, due to the humanitarian
crises of the Middle East and the crippled Greek economy, the Holy Monastery
has lost the financial support elemental to sustaining its role as guardian of
this sacred legacy. True to an ethic that says it is better to give than
receive, however, the monks maintain their desert tradition of not seeking
charity.
Given this situation, Friends of Mount Sinai Monastery
(FMSM) was launched in January, 2015 to assist the monks’ efforts to keep the
holy tradition of the ancient Monastery alive. An independent 501(c)(3)
charity, FMSM is the only IRS-approved nonprofit dedicated to the general
support of St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai.
His Eminence Archbishop Damianos of Sinai, Pharan, and
Raitho has said:
“The great
and difficult journey into the desert is something desired by all who value
inner peace. Hence, the monks consider the continued operation of the monastery
a duty not just to themselves, but to the visitors who reach this wilderness
from all corners of the world, hoping to experience the stillness that exists
between the soul and God amidst such beauty sanctified by the divine Presence –
where the voice of God may still be heard.
“While the Sinai monks have no wish to
burden others, even very modest contributions go far in Egypt. Together with
the prayers of the faithful, these will sustain the Monastery in the spiritual
goals which have rendered it a global symbol of multiculturalism.”
