People have always felt, and still feel, a profound shock when someone decides to enter a monastery. Society reacts to this either with fear, or with resistance, or with a hidden respect mingled with bewilderment: “What is this, then?”

Neither parents, nor relatives, nor acquaintances can ever understand what power draws this young woman or young man toward the monastery. For most often this power seizes the most courageous, the kindest, and the most beloved young people – precisely those on whom the greatest hopes were placed, from whom worldly success was expected. And in this lies the mystery! Everyone around resists, doing everything possible to keep the person from entering the monastery, so as not to allow them to “bury themselves” in black garments. Yet almost always the one who has resolved to become a monk does, in the end, become one! No one can tear him away from that strong embrace which draws him, for it is an invisible energy that comes from another world and enfolds the person.

When the call to monastic life sounds in the soul, it penetrates into its deepest recesses, and the soul finds the way to communion with God, to life in God. In this calling, which proceeds from God and from the Church of Christ, all the most secret longings of the human soul are fulfilled and realized. And when a person, in defiance of all who try to keep them in the world, comes to the monastery, they feel that their soul has found that which it was seeking.

In the history of the Church there are known cases when people who knew nothing of monasticism, who lived in sins or were immersed in worldly vanity, attached to all that is temporal, at a certain moment of life chose monastic life for themselves – and that in its most austere forms. They felt that it was precisely in this life that all their heart longed for was accomplished, that in monasticism there was something secret, whose existence their soul sensed but could find nowhere. Sensing this hidden mystery, the person believed deeply that one day they would surely encounter it.

I will call it “a passing over into another life.” Yet this “other life” is not the one into which the departed pass, nor some unattainable fantasy. It is the life that our soul knew and loved while still in paradise, the life for which it yearns and at which it marvels, wondering why it cannot find it around itself.

Monks speak more of the invisible than of the visible. They glorify God and confess Him as the true God. They also sing the praises of the saints, venerate their icons, and feel their living presence. The invisible world is revealed to the monks; it abides near them, as though accompanying them everywhere.

The monk looks upon this material world as a faint shadow of the spiritual world. Here a miracle takes place: we, who are spiritually dead, on coming to the monastery, touch true life and, in the end, become its partakers. Constantly strengthening and perfecting their spirit through ascetic struggles and virtues, the monks tear themselves away from the earthly and are raised up to the heavenly, finding joy and delight in the reality of the spiritual, invisible world.

The bond with the other, invisible world is especially strong in simple people. If you tell a simple person, who has no special learning, about the saints and the angels, they will believe it with childlike trust and receive these words with all their soul. The reality of the other world is close to them; it is their native home, which fills the heart and the consciousness.

Monastic life, as we have already said, is a tasting of the blessings of the other world, blessings invisible, yet known to our soul from the beginning. But can the monks themselves fully explain this mystery: why did they go to the monastery? A person enters the monastery by an inner call, without thinking too much about why they do so. If you ask them the reason, they will either say something vague, or, even if they name some concrete reason, it will still not be the true answer.

The truth is that the person has touched the invisible spiritual reality with their heart, has felt with all their soul how near it is – and this is precisely what led them to the monastery.

When we are asked why we became monks, we cannot answer. And when monks are interviewed, one says one thing, another says another, and in the end the journalists explain it all by an unhappy love affair.

Yet a person does not choose monastic life in order to acquire virtues, nor for the sake of obedience or celibacy, for marriage too is blessed by God. Monastic life is chosen precisely because it is that other life of which I have spoken more than once. Therefore we must remember: when we do something in the monastery, we do it for one purpose alone – to feel in our soul that other life.

Give your heart to the monastery without fear – and you will see that here everything leads you into the Kingdom of God. Here everything draws us nearer to heaven, even if we ourselves do not feel or notice it. “The depth and the height, the breadth and the length” (Eph. 3:18), sickness and health, falling and rising, prayer in the cell and the Divine Liturgy in the church, and even the very walls – everything, from the most spiritual to the most simple – here, in the monastery, raises us up to Heaven.

Recently I was deeply struck by the conduct of parents who did not want to let their son go to the monastery. They wept, cried out, and begged him to stay. They even summoned the priest from their village, who to this day writes me letters, urging me not to tonsure this novice into monkhood! But what astonished me? Despite the fact that the father wept and cried out, he nevertheless said to his son: “If you have already resolved to become a monk, then be a true monk. You will not write us letters, you will not call us to mind – you will become a true monk!”

And I can say that these parents may perhaps one day go to the monastery themselves. Their boundless love for their son may turn in another direction – toward God. And this will be entirely natural, for the very thing that draws their son to the monastery lives also in their own souls. Here is the mystery of the human soul!

My children, let us bow down before God with all our heart and all our thoughts! Each of us is an heir of the heavenly blessings, so let us not feel ourselves wretched and impoverished. How much God labored over our souls to bring us into the monastery! How much effort He had to expend to shatter the hardness of our hearts and to overcome the callousness of our spirit!

For our sake He walked through the deserts, He sought us in far-off Jericho. Had it been necessary, He would even have climbed the sycamore tree Himself.

He bent down to human nature, embraced it, and took it upon Himself. As on many icons the Most Holy Theotokos bends over the Divine Infant, so too Christ bent down over the human person with love.

Therefore let us also bow down before Him!

Archimandrite Aimilianos (Vafeidis). An excerpt from the book “The House of God is the Gate of Heaven”