The Price We Pay

    As the great Queen Elizabeth II once said, “Grief is the price we pay for love,” and what a small price that is for the love of Christ. Grief is frequently viewed negatively as an unwanted emotion, but the Desert Fathers challenge readers to understand grief as the monks do–a means to come into greater contact with the Lord. The Desert Fathers, in their collection Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, discuss the importance and necessity of grief, and the grief they describe is, above all, whole-hearted, constant, and dual natured.

While grief is an uncomfortable emotion and experience for many, the monks take on the burden of grief with their whole hearts, for their entire lives, and for a dual purpose. To better understand their devoted acceptance of grief, one must first grasp that the grief they describe is not the grief and mourning over a lost loved one, as most readers might assume. The grief the monks submit their hearts to is more closely related to compunction and conviction; after all, their discussion of grief is under the section entitled “Compunction,” implying that grief has far more to do with a penitent and remorseful heart than with mourning a loss in the traditional sense.

The Desert Fathers devote their whole hearts to the cause of grief because their grief draws them nearer to God–the entire purpose of monastic life. In one story told by the monks, a brother laughed at a love feast he and his brothers held together, and John saw the actions of the brother, wept, and said, “What do you think that brother has in his heart, that he could laugh when he ought to weep because he is dining on charity” (13). John’s response to the story of the laughing brother attributes the problem to the heart, which tells readers that grief should be a heart issue. As “a monk's work is a fire that consumes whatever it touches” like “God is a consuming fire,” that consumption includes the monastic effort to live a devout life growing closer to God (15, 138). One willing to dedicate their lives to consumption by the work of God, then the monk's heart should be consumed by grief for that which grieves God.

Much like the Desert Fathers believe grief should be whole-hearted, they acknowledge that grief should also be unceasing. Grief and prayer are two key pillars to monastic life and sincere compunction. Prayer that does not cease, like Paul instructs the church in Thessalonica in I Thessalonians 5:17, is the toil of “the watchful monk” that brings them into communion with the Lord (15). However it is the monk who is brokenhearted with grief “that calls God down from Heaven to have mercy” (15). If the monk “pray[s] continually,” then the grief that brings forth God’s mercy should, like the prayer, go on unending (15). Not only is constant grief closely related to prayer, but also to the constant sin of humanity. Therefore, a monk “should always be weeping in his heart” because the cause for weeping is ever present–anything that separates man from God (14). Acknowledging the sins that keep one from a right relationship with the Lord is both a saddening and humbling experience, and, for a monk who devotes his life to God in every way, the experience should produce grief that can not end until the blood of Christ washes all sin away. 

Lastly, the twofold nature of grief gives hope. Because grief should be heart-consuming and constant, there may seem to be no glimmer of the abundant joy promised in John 15:11; how can a fully joyful life exist alongside such deep grief? As the monks say, “grief is twofold: it creates good and it keeps away evil” (14). Experiencing profound grief, according to the Desert Fathers, is an experience that brings about good by putting one in contact with the highest Good–God. By submitting the human will at the feet of God’s will through denying earthly sin and grieving it as God does, man unites himself with the one who provides full joy and all good things. Those who take on the initial weakness of grief must not forget that “God is a God who gives strength to [those] who devoutly turn to him” (50). A man should experience whole-hearted, constant grief that then allows the act of grieving to unite man and God, and that grief becomes the foundational undercurrent through which the overarching joy of God's goodness is made known. Knowing the gulf of damage done by sin and mourning over its toll allows one to better appreciate and enjoy the magnitude of the goodness Christ brought on the cross to reconcile God and man.

Not only does grief bring about greater contact with goodness, but the other aspect of twofold grief is that grief “keeps evil away” (14). Because grief brings closeness to the Good, it implicitly must move one further from evil. Moving closer to God will always move one away from evil, so a monk “ought to carry penitence and weeping with [him] everywhere [he goes]” to act as a shield from the evil that surrounds him (17). A monk who is constantly, completely devoted to God’s will mourns the sin-sickness of humanity so sincerely that they are kept from the evil deeds because he knows that evil breaks God’s heart and should break his as well.

The Desert Fathers commit their existence entirely to loving, serving, and connecting to the Lord; they reveal that grief is an integral part of that devotion. Sincere grief rooted in compunction is whole-hearted and unending, and it comes with the great reward of being closer to God and farther from anything that could separate man from Him. Grief may, indeed, be a high price, but love and favor from the strength-providing, joy-giving, and sin-washing God is a far better reward than any cost we pay. 

Works Cited:

ESV: Study Bible: English Standard Version. Crossway Bibles, 2016. 

Ward, Benedicta, translator. The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks. Penguin, 2003.