In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

At some point before Pascha of this year, I have asked you to send me a few questions which I could address in this new series of our podcasts, and since then I have received close to a hundred questions, if not more, via email, in comments on Facebook, in messages sent to our monastery Facebook page, and I want to thank all of you for those. I shall definitely not have time to answer all of those, and also I don’t feel that I am the right person to answer many of them. Many of them are too private to answer publicly; others have clearly to do with confession in the sense that only someone who knows you beforehand, only someone who has an awareness of who you are and an understanding of your past can address those questions in a way that would be useful to you; and others are simply not of interest to me personally. As you know, I’m not at all interested in the sense that I don’t feel any calling to answer theoretical questions, questions that deal with theology or differences between various faiths and approaches to Christianity. You have your parish priests for all of those questions. Use them and trust them.

That being said, there are a few questions among those I’ve received which have—I think the word I’m looking for should not be troubled me, but the reality is that they have troubled me and they have stayed with me and have developed in my mind for weeks or months. I take that as a sign that I am meant to address them and that there is something God has given me to say concerning those particular topics. I shall take them one by one, while in the meantime I do encourage you to send me more questions, more comments, and I shall answer them if I feel I have anything useful to say.

The first of the questions I do want to address has to do, in a very strange way, with married life. I have very often said that you should stop asking monks and nuns about the details of your married life. Not that a monastic priest would have nothing useful to say concerning married life, because of course he would. He would, because in the Holy Spirit we can advise even about things that we have not experienced. Not many of us have done all the things we hear in confession, and yet the Holy Spirit does give us something to say which is useful for the person approaching us in confession. The same applies with advice concerning married life. The priest in front of you may never have been married, and he may not know the details of married life and what it means in practice to have a spouse and the responsibility of children and the responsibility of a daily, tiring, repetitive, sometimes unfulfilling job, but that does not mean that God cannot give that priest in front of you the right word for you.

And yet I still think that the right person to approach, whenever you have a question concerning married life, is a married priest. That is simply out of humility. I think there should be a degree of humility on your side, the person who asks the question, and also on the side of the priest who has to address the question: the sort of humility that makes you aware that we do not have the relationship our ancestors had with Christ, the sort of humility that makes you aware and willing to admit that you do not have the Holy Spirit active and acting within your heart the way the holy Fathers did. For that reason, mistakes are always possible. If someone like St. Seraphim of Sarov, perhaps the greatest saint that Orthodox Russia has given the world, if someone like him said, “When I spoke of myself based on my mind and my experience, I made mistakes, and sometimes mistakes can be great,” then what can we expect? How can we hope never to make a mistake? How can we hope to always give an answer in the Holy Spirit? I think we should approach these questions with humility and hope, and God will answer.

After this introduction—which in my mind has its own use—I want to address the actual question which is whether or not one can think of monastic life, monasticism, as the ideal to which everyone—every Orthodox family, parish, parishioner—should strive. In other words: Is monastic life some sort of an ideal towards which even married people should strive? Is monasticism the ideal form of marriage? This question is important. It sounds theoretical, and it sounds somehow removed from the realities of our lives, but in fact it is one of those questions that goes deep to the root of many problems I, for instance, have seen in parishes everywhere in the world, because this sort of Orthodoxy, this sort of belief, will imply a certain practice, a certain impact and expectation on the practical life of married people.

One of these expectations which the person who asked the question very openly, bluntly, asks me is whether or not, when one reaches the point where procreation is no longer possible because the husband and the wife have become too old for that to happen, whether or not the ideal becomes a married celibacy, either living together as brother and sister, or even separately joining monasteries, which is something we do see in lives of certain saints, like, for instance, St. Seraphim of Vyritsa, who joined one monastery and then his wife joined another monastery. Or, to look at this from an even more practical and blunt perspective, the question is: What happens with the intimate physical relationships between the two spouses once procreation is no longer possible? Are those still allowed? Are those still a blessing, or should those be completely abandoned with the expectation that the two spouses will start living as monastics in their own home?

I see so many problems with this question. First of all, I see a sort of a structural problem, an underlying issue that goes through a way of thinking which is very common in Christianity and in Orthodoxy, definitely, which is profoundly unspiritual, a way of looking at one’s life by comparing it with the others, a way in which the one has to be the best, one has to excel, one has to always be better than those around him or her. There is no understanding that we are all different and that God has not created us the same. There is no understanding that there is a wealth of diversity and variation in our humanity and in what makes us persons: our abilities, our talents.

It’s as if no one has ever heard Christ addressing both the person with two talents and the one with five talents and congratulating both of them for what they have done and how they have used their respective talents. There was no difference in the way he addressed them. Both of them were loyal servants. Both of them were invited into the kingdom. Both of them were given even more than what they had received before. It is not about how much you have; it is about how you use it. It is not about where you start, because this is not a competition. My salvation does not mean that I occupy a place, and the salvation of my brother does not mean that there’s one less available place in heaven that would make me worry for my own salvation. This is not a competition. We are all different. We are all unique, and what we need to do is to find our own way towards Christ. We need to find our own path. We need to find and write our own stories.

Have a look at the lives of ten saints, and look beyond the fact that some of them were married and some of them were monastics. Look at the actual practicalities of their lives, and you see how diverse they are. The Church has always celebrated this diversity. The Church has always celebrated what makes us persons and unique before Christ and in front of the world. Even when Christ does distinguish in terms of numbers between the gifts that he offers us—30 versus 60 versus 100, or two talents versus five talents—that is not to say that the one with two talents is better than the one with five talents, because the one who only has two talents is not expected to generate as much as the one with five talents. If you were given two talents, and in your lifetime you’ve multiplied them, bringing forth two more talents, you are actually better than one who has received five talents and brought forth three talents, because you have doubled what God gave you, whereas the other one hasn’t, if you want to look at it in a numerical, sort of silly way, because it is a silly way to think of silly things.

Our worry should not be to compare lifestyles or spiritual choices that we have made. Our worry should be that spiritually we make the most of what life has given us, of what Christ has given us, of the choices and options we have made. Sometimes we’ve made bad choices. We’ve made bad choices before we found Christ, and sometimes we even make bad choices after we found Christ. But even so, you are where you are; the past does not exist any more. The only thing that is real is your future. Look at who you are in this moment and make the most of your future.

Apart from this more general sort of answer, going back to the practical question that I’ve just read to you, my absolute answer to that would be: No, there is no such thing as an ideal life. There is no such thing as an ideal Christian life in this world, because the ideal Christian life is that of Christ, and we have seen what happens when he lived the ideal Christian life. This fallen world cannot take that ideal, and we end up destroying it. That did not happen to Christ simply because he was Christ. It also happened—a contributing factor in that whole drama was also the fact that the world we live in is fallen, and a fallen world cannot sustain, cannot accept an ideal.

There is a saying of Fr. Sophrony Saharov, who said that in this world a Christian, a true Christian, can only die, not live. He says something along the lines of: I do not know how to live a Christian life; I only know how to die of a Christian death. The meaning of that is that an ideal life here is not possible. So it becomes an irrelevant anti-question: Which of the several life choices we can make is the ideal? Is it monastic life, is it single life, is it married life? All of those are possible ways for salvation. All of those can become tools for salvation. All of those can become paths towards Christ. Do not compare them. Simply embrace the one you find yourself into, and make the most of it.

As to the practical question about whether or not, after a certain age, spouses should have intimate relationships, I cannot believe I am in a position where I have to answer that, but I am a monk, and I’m telling you that I see no reason why you should not manifest your love towards your wife or your husband in a physical way. Marriage is a sacrament of the Church, and in the service of marriage we bless the bed of the two spouses, because the relationships between them are no longer the relationships between two separate people. You have become one in a sacrament, and as one there is no temptation between the two of you physically, as long as you have normal physical relations, they are nothing else except a manifestation of the love that has brought you together, love that has brought you before the altar, the love that God has blessed in this sacrament.

How can something that is a sacrament become sinful after a certain age? Is the sacrament of marriage limited by time? Is there a deadline to the sacramental nature of marriage? Can we say that marriage and physical relations between the two spouses are valid in a sacramental way only until the lady reaches menopause? I think this is a very low level of Christianity.

Of course the two spouses can choose to abstain from physical relations after a certain age. They can choose to abstain from the very beginning. There are couples, there are families in the history and the experience of the Church—and there are families I personally know—who have chosen to do this, but that is something they have decided together as a way to advance their spiritual fight. It is not something that is recommended. It is not something that one should be doing. It is one other example of how, within a marriage, the two can struggle together for their salvation and the salvation of those around them, but it does not mean that those who do not make this choice are living in sin or are doing anything less, because they are fulfilling the sacrament of marriage.

We are not angels, so therefore our love is not angelic. It is not purely spiritual. We are human beings. We are made of soul and body, and everything we do has a spiritual and a bodily aspect to it. Our prayer has as bodily, physical aspect to it. That is why we prostrate, that is why we bow down, that is why we use incense and images in our services, that is why we stand up and we force ourselves to involve our physicality in prayer and in the ritual of prayer. Similarly, there is a physical aspect of the love between two spouses, and that physical aspect has been blessed and it became a sacrament through marriage.

I will end, because this is becoming quite long, and I don’t want to create the expectation that all our podcasts will be this long, but I can’t finish without asking you: What would the world have looked like if Zacharias and Elizabeth had not had physical relations in their old age? We would not know St. John the Baptist. There would be no Forerunner; there would be no Baptist. And even more, what would the world look like if St. Joachim and St. Anna had not manifested their love in a physical way in their old age? The world would not have known the Mother of God, and then the world would not have known the incarnate Christ. How would have Christ taken our body, our flesh, our blood, and become incarnate for our salvation, without his Mother? And his Mother is the result of two old spouses manifesting their love in a physical way.

Even the Old Testament provides plenty of examples, from Sarah to Hannah and Rebecca and many others. Do not allow empty piety to replace spirituality. Look deep, and look through prayer, and prayer will teach you everything. A sacrament is a sacrament until the end of the world and into the kingdom. A sacrament does not have an expiry date to it. Marriage will always be sacramental, because God’s blessing does not expire.

I think that’s all for today. Please keep me and keep the monastery in your prayers. We always need your prayers, just as much as we need your support. May God bless all of us. Amen.