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When there have been historic deformations, they have betrayed the magnificent type of monk, a man absolutely free in the service of his king.14.52 They have made him a being that has been broken by submission to harsh laws.
If since the Middle Ages we remark a divorce between mystic spirituality and theology, the world of today has need of saints who have genius, in order to find again the unity of prayer and dogma. For the Fathers of the Church: “A theologian is one who knows how to pray.” “For those who are not capable of receiving the burning rays of Christ, the saints are there to furnish them with a light; this latter is very inferior, but since they are scarcely capable of receiving it, it is sufficient to fill them.”167 He who builds his life on the three monastic vows does so also on the three replies of Christ. By these three vows a Christian does not bind himself; he frees himself. He can then turn to the world and tell what he has seen in God. If he has learned how to grow to the stature of “the new man”, of the adult in Christ, the world will listen to him.
The one who knows because his faith sees the invisible; the one who can raise the dead, if God wishes it, because he already lives “the little resurrection”; the one who can glimpse the meaning because he can put the true name on everything, having the name of Jesus “attached” as it were to his every breath--this one can inaugurate the latter times and announce the parousia.
The division of Christianity is not at all an obstacle, but a lack of the true freedom that has its origin in total truth. More than anyone else, monks can bring about this unity because they would do it liturgically. Their “orthodoxy” does not harden anything into interdicts; it lays all the pathways open. In their adoration and songs of praise, they exclude nobody; they invite each and every one to become “adult” in Christ. Such maturity places one in a position beyond distorted situations in the body of Christ on the level of the one and only.
According to the fine words of St. Symeon the New Theologian, the Holy Spirit fears no one and despises no one. As an image of the Holy Spirit, monasticism is a living ecumenical “epiklesis”. Unity can be found only in this dimension of universal monasticism, if the latter knows how to make itself as free as the breath of the Holy Spirit.