Monasticism
Taken from the Maronite Patriarchal Synod, Bkerke 2008:
“The monasticism has accompanied the birth of the Maronite Church, which flourished in its climate, without which she would not have been herself.” [Text 8, para. 1]
“Since the dawn of Christianity, the features of consecrated life appeared springing from the way of life of Christ the Lord and His teachings. Some people in the East vied to renounce this world and to clutch on to the Gospel, living it in its radicalism as they understood it, following a solitary or familial or communal pattern of living, vowing to a life of chastity and celibacy.” [Text 8, para. 2]
“Christian presence in the Middle East and the world is a presence that aims first and foremost at proclaiming the Gospel and testifying to Christ with a ‘Maronite flavor’. This ‘Maronite flavor’ is characterized by monasticism, prayer, asceticism, and spiritual effort. Thus, the Church can delve into her history of monasticism and ascetic spirituality to stand against sweeping materialism.” [Text 15, para. 21]
Taken from Pope Saint John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter, Orientale Lumen, May 2, 1995:
“In the East, monasticism was not seen merely as a separate condition, proper to a precise category of Christians, but rather as a reference point for all the baptized, according to the gifts offered to each by the Lord; it was presented as a symbolic synthesis of Christianity.
When God’s call is total, as it is in the monastic life, then the person can reach the highest point that sensitivity, culture and spirituality are able to express. This is even more true for the Eastern Churches, for which monasticism was an essential experience and still today is seen to flourish in them, once persecution is over and hearts can be freely raised to heaven. The monastery is the prophetic place where creation becomes praise of God and the precept of concretely lived charity becomes the ideal of human coexistence; it is where the human being seeks God without limitation or impediment, becoming a reference point for all people, bearing them in his heart and helping them to seek God.
I would also like to mention the splendid witness of nuns in the Christian East. This witness has offered an example of giving full value in the Church to what is specifically feminine, even breaking through the mentality of the time. During recent persecutions, especially in Eastern European countries, when many male monasteries were forcibly closed, female monasticism kept the torch of the monastic life burning. The nun’s charism, with its own specific characteristics, is a visible sign of that motherhood of God to which Sacred Scripture often refers.
Therefore I will look to monasticism in order to identify those values which I feel are very important today for expressing the contribution of the Christian East to the journey of Christ’s Church towards the Kingdom. While these aspects are at times neither exclusive to monasticism nor to the Eastern heritage, they have frequently acquired a particular connotation in themselves. Besides, we are not seeking to make the most of exclusivity, but of the mutual enrichment in what the one Spirit has inspired in the one Church of Christ.
Monasticism has always been the very soul of the Eastern Churches: the first Christian monks were born in the East and the monastic life was an integral part of the Eastern lumen passed on to the West by the great Fathers of the undivided Church.
The strong common traits uniting the monastic experience of the East and the West make it a wonderful bridge of fellowship, where unity as it is lived shines even more brightly than may appear in the dialogue between the Churches.”