Good Influences
I've ended up with a pretty consistent group of friends from the monastery these past few months, and i've been seeing them a lot more recently, they're probably the first people around my age who have managed to make me feel like i'm not taking my faith seriously enough, which is a strange change considering i'm usually the person who has to decide whether i've mentioned Church too many times in one conversation, with them that isn't really possible. We can spend an entire afternoon together and somehow most things eventually come back to God, the saints, something one of us read, confession, prayer or whatever we're trying to give up at the moment, they're also genuinely fun to be around, which i think is part of why i've been seeing them so much.
They are much stricter with themselves than anybody i've known personally, One of them sleeps on the floor sometimes, they keep periods of silence, some of them get up really early to pray, meals can be extremely plain or skipped and they give up entertainment for much longer than i ever have, they talk about mortification and detachment as ordinary things instead of words from old books about saints, and they're much less interested in immediately fixing every discomfort, If something is cold, boring, inconvenient or unpleasant, the first response isn't always to make it comfortable again. Sometimes they deliberately choose the thing they like less because they noticed themselves becoming too particular about having things their own way. i look up to them a lot, There is something embarrassing about realizing how quickly i call something difficult when somebody beside me has quietly decided to do without much more. i complain when i'm tired and then find out somebody else got up hours earlier to pray. They never make a competition out of it. They seem much closer to God than i am, and i want to try whatever made them capable of living that way too.
One of them said that the body gets used to being obeyed. If you're hungry you eat, if you're tired you sleep, if you're uncomfortable you move, if you're bored you find something to entertain yourself with, and eventually every small desire starts presenting itself like an instruction. Obviously the body has real needs and i'm not stupid enough to pretend otherwise, especially after everything that's happened with mine, but i understood what he meant. They've actually told me several times not to copy everything they do, especially not fasting or anything that could interfere with what i'm supposed to be doing medically, wanting to prove that i can tolerate something is already a bad reason for doing it. Still, i've started paying attention to smaller things. How quickly i reach for entertainment when there's silence, how irritated i become when the day isn't what i wanted, how automatically i choose whatever is most comfortable, how many times in a day i think i deserve some little thing simply because i want it.
Mortification makes much more sense to me now than it used to. It isn't supposed to mean that suffering is automatically good or that hurting yourself makes you holy, and i've already been corrected enough about both of those ideas, but it's much more ordinary than that. Sometimes you can have something and choose not to. Sometimes you can make yourself wait. sometimes you can be uncomfortable without treating the discomfort like an emergency. You can miss something without immediately returning to it. The point isn't the unpleasant thing itself, it's finding out whether you are still capable of saying no to yourself.
I think they're freer than most people i know because there are fewer things you could threaten to remove from them. That's probably what i admire most. Comfort has less leverage when you already know you can live without it, and an attachment has less leverage once you've willingly put it down before
They ask different questions. Does this bring you closer to God, does it make you more attached to something temporary, could you still be content without it, would you give it up if God asked you to. The questions are much shorter than most of the ones i've spent years trying to answer, but they're harder to get around. I don't think i want to spend the rest of my life collecting things i can't bear to lose. That includes more than possessions. There are ways i need people to see me, plans i become protective of, comforts i expect, versions of myself i still feel obligated to preserve. Some of those things may be perfectly good, but good things can still become things you hold too tightly. Abraham wasn't asked to sacrifice something evil. Maybe eventually there will be less difference between losing something and giving it away. i think that would make a person very difficult for the world to control, because there wouldn't be much left that could be held over them. There would also be less to negotiate about with God.