Puppies Wagging Their Tales

Some thoughts about the lack of vocational fidelity

...when we lack something, instead of struggling courageously against our difficulties, we come fawning to the rich, like puppies wagging their tails in the hope of being tossed a bare bone or some crumbs. 

St. Neilos the Ascetic, “Ascetic Discourse,” Philakolia, vol. 1, p. 259.  

We have lost the fathers’ pastoral use of sarcasm and irony. This is not to say that we abstain from ironic or sarcastic rhetoric. We use it all the time but as a blunt weapon; a cudgel rather than a rapier or scalpel. Today, we are often not just humorless, we are mean. 

Christians especially are too literally minded. There is nothing playful about what we do. As a result—or who knows, maybe it’s the cause—we mock and heap scorn on each other. Again and again, the temptation to reduce others—and so ourselves—to one or maybe two, easily grasped characteristics seems all but irresistible.  

I’m prone to this myself. I want to live in a world of heroes and villains. This is so much easier than wrapping my head around villains with admirable qualities and heroes whose clay feet peak out from under their capes. 

From the distance of several centuries, it’s hard to say but the fathers (or so it seems to me) lived in a more playful age than our own. Maybe it was the poverty, war and disease of their time that inspired the fathers to take life more lightly. When failure is universal, it’s less shameful 

Take, for example, the criticism of St. Neilos for those who are monks in name only. 

...as for us, when we lack something, instead of struggling courageously against our difficulties, we come fawning to the rich, like puppies wagging their tails in the hope of being tossed a bare bone or some crumbs. 

He goes on to say that “to get what we want” we look to the sleek and the strong in this world. To win their favor “we call them benefactors and protectors of Christians, attributing every virtue to them, even though they may be utterly wicked.” 

The cause of all this is two-fold the saint says. 

First, because I do not “investigate how the saints lived” even though “supposedly” at least it is my “aim to imitate their holiness.” But, as Chesterton says of the Gospel more broadly, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”¹

Second, what in the lives of the saints do I see and leave untired? What do I praise in their life and yet do not imitate in my own? 

“These holy men,” he says, achieved through holiness things no king could do “because they had resolved to live for the soul alone, turning away from the body and its want.” They were superior to all because they needed “nothing.” Instead, “they chose to forsake the body and to free themselves from life in the flesh, rather than to betray the cause of holiness.” Finding this difficult, I leave it untried, and so instead “flatter the wealthy” and the powerful of this world. 

Here, as we often must do when reading the Philokalia, we need to pause and reflect on the anthropological implications of the saint’s words. If many leave the example of fathers’ example untried, there are others who imitate them unwisely. In their lack of discernment about their ability to fast or bear witness to the Gospel, they reveal themselves to those who would rather “snatch at grace like a greedy greyhound suffering from starvation” (Cloud of Unknowing, chapter 46) than be obedient to God. 

Obedience in this context doesn’t mean merely a formal adherence to the ascetical or practice of the Church. When St. Neilos criticizes his fellow monastics (and himself) it isn’t for not fasting. Their failure is that they are not faithful to the demands of their vocation. They vow poverty but chase wealth. Having committed themselves to be the least of all, they flatter the powerful in hopes of securing some advantage for themselves. 

So, once again, we return to the saint’s words 

...when we lack something, instead of struggling courageously against our difficulties, we come fawning to the rich, like puppies wagging their tails in the hope of being tossed a bare bone or some crumbs. 

He goes on to say 

To get what we want, we call them benefactors and protectors of Christians, attributing every virtue to them, even though they may be utterly wicked. We do not investigate how the saints lived, although supposedly it is our aim to imitate their holiness. 

Ironically, there are some Orthodox Christians who fail in their spiritual lives precisely because they imitate the saints. Or rather, because they imitate the wrong saints. 

For those who are not monks, monastic saints can be a source of inspiration. Their wholehearted commitment to Christ should inspire a like commitment in me. But I’m not a monk and trying to live as if I were, is a betrayal of my vocation as a married priest. 

The really problem, however, is that I am not so much tempted to imitate monastic life, as I am inclined to fawn over monks. Like those monks St. Neilos criticizes, when I do this I am simply following my own will. Even when well-meaning, my imitation of monastic life allows me to avoid  “struggling courageously” against the difficulties inherent in my vocation. Rather than being a courageous husband and priest, I simply fawn over monks like a puppy wagging its tail “in the hope of being tossed a bare bone or some crumbs” tossed to me by a monk who is as unfaithful to his vocation as I am in mine. 

What is for the monk “distractions” are for me—and all of us who live in the world—the very stuff of the life to which I have been called. My daily struggles and yours are a kind of natural, spontaneous asceticism. Unlike the Church’s formal ascetical disciplines, the asceticism of everyday life comes unbidden and unwelcome. 

It is this that makes my daily struggles a true ascetical death to self.

Concealed within these daily challenges, setbacks, and failures, is an invitation to lay aside my own will so that I can do the “will of Him Who sent me” (John 6:39).  The daily and even hourly bumps and bruises to my ego are meant to help me surrender my own will. They call me to surrender what the Apostle James calls my “desires for pleasure.” After all, what is more pleasurable to me than my own will? 

When I pursue my own will rather than be faithful to my vocation, when I spend my life on pleasures as St. James says and so I make war against my neighbor (see James 4:1-4). In ways subtle and crude, my pleasure-seeking causes me to wish evils on my neighbor. And while I may take a frisson of pleasure at his suffering, soon I realize that there is no joy to be found living in a world of human failure. The more I judge my neighbor, the further I am from God; the more I wish for your failure, the more I see the world as filled with danger and threats.  

The way back is to abandon myself to God. This means keeping the commandments and restraining myself from doing what I know is evil. It also means accepting the demands of my vocation for what they are; not distractions but as the ascetical struggle unique to my life.  

St. Porphyrios is helpful here. The saint says that 

A person can become a saint anywhere. He can become a saint in Omonia Square [in Athens, synonymous with vice and corruption], if he wants. At your work, whatever it may be, you can become saints—through meekness, patience and love. Make a new start every day, with new resolution, with enthusiasm and love, prayer and silence—not with anxiety so that you get a pain in the chest. … Look on all things as opportunities to be sanctified. 

As I come to realize that this place and time, are the place and time of my sanctification, that the demands of my vocation are the concrete means of my salvation, once I understand that to love my neighbor means to do what is good for you, the more I am freed from sin. 

There is nothing praiseworthy about monks “fawning to the rich, like puppies wagging their tails in the hope of being tossed a bare bone or some crumbs.” Likewise, there is nothing admirable about laypeople pretending to be monks or nuns or parish priests acting like abbots. 

Yes, this is hard work which—especially in the beginning—I will fail more often than succeed. This is where the temptation to cosplay monastic life, or life as a 19^th-century peasant, or 8^th-century Byzantine noble, gets its power. Dress it up any way I want but this retreat into fantasy is just that—a retreat from reality into a world of my creation. It is nothing more than pride. 

There is nothing praiseworthy about monks “fawning to the rich, like puppies wagging their tails in the hope of being tossed a bare bone or some crumbs.” Likewise, there is nothing admirable about laypeople pretending to be monastics or parish priests acting like abbots.  

What all this is, is a betrayal of Christ and ourselves. It is to say to God, “Nope, nope, nope. You got it wrong. Let me show You the life You SHOULD have given me.” 

I can’t speak for you, but this doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. 

1. G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World. Kiribati, Cassell, 1912, p. 48.