"You did not choose me, but I chose you" (Jn 15:16).

Last week's conversations at the Hermitage, I suppose it was more like a little seminar, included a discussion of pleroma theology following Sunday's Epistle lesson (Ephesians 4:7-13), which is the basis for this theology. There, St. Paul describes Christ drawing the outline of His outsized Self upon the Earth. We are to come to His full stature (pleroma means abundance). That is, following the incommensurable gift of the Incarnation, the Kingdom of Heaven ought to expand to the full extent of these drawn boundaries. And each of us, a microcosm of the Creation .... Each of us is a microcosm. Each of us was created anew. Each of us will have a last judgment when we close our eyes. Each of us will see events that also have an allegorical meaning. We will be guided by the Holy Spirit day by day. Each of our lives is a microcosm of the fullness of the earthly creation. Each of us ought to the same fullness of Christ. But it does not. And we have not.

So many have rejected God. The domain of this rebellion gathers strength apace. Its outline expands until it has virtually taken over every culture on earth with its vile images and films and music and with its promise of personal liberation. Sadly, it is all a sleight of hand: for this liberation has proved to be a captivity and this freedom has proved to be chains, and the life that was promised turned out to be eternal death.

This is known as the devil bargin. "Here," he says. "I offer you this." And we project upon it all of our wrong desires. But then we receive that. On reflection, he did not lie exactly, but we filled in the lines with our unwholesome wishes. He did not lie .... exactly. But he did deceive. Do you know why the evil one is called The Deuce? Because he is double. He is the counterfeit.

As for the stature of Christ, the geography is simple. The more the anti-kingdom expands on earth, the more the Kingdom of God contracts, at least geographically. The Kingdom of God is not vitiated, not less Divine, not less good, or not less, somehow, God's. No. It simply means that the vast expanse of Heavenly light expected to sweep over all things following the Nativity, the Ascension, Pentecost — a day-without-night (Ps 139:12) — did not come to pass. Certainly, the history of Christianity has included widespread periods of spiritual awakening and power. But you see, we must consent to it. We must make this light our life (as St. John tells us in his Prologue). This is up to us!

Today, even within the self-styled Christian churches, we might ask, Where is this Heavenly light? Where is this power? Where is the undoubted experience of holiness?

You know what I am saying, as I call to mind so-called "Holy Communion" ..... you shuffle forward down the "chow line": "Next! Next! Next!" Where is the experience of the holy?

You might bring a friend to one of the failed Western churches. You want them to be excited. But they see all this with new eyes. Their's is a clean slate. And they write a message on it for you: "Not holy."

Yes, the Kingdom of Heaven has contracted into a scattering, an archipelago, of little of islands all over the earth — little circles of light bounded off by a darkness that is becoming ever more vast and deep and evil.

What are these little circles of light called? Certainly, instances include faithful monasteries and convents and hermitages. For all a monastery is .... is the world turned aright receiving the light from above with gratitude and illuminating this little world, both in terms of the place and the monastics who live there. Can you see it from a distance? Surrounded by a foul-smelling fog, bathed in light descending and ascending from Heaven? This is what Jesus meant by a city on a hill (Mt 5:14), a place which inspires and reassures all.

"Don't hide your light under the bed!" he admonishes. "Set it out on a lampstand that it might fill the whole room" .... for others. For it says to the world, "God is not forgotten. He lives. And His Kingdom abides."

It is not monastics who choose the monastery. Monasteries do not occur by being added to the world. Rather, they are what is left in a process of subtraction. We picture a world of light that is subtracted and subtracted and subtraced until it has contracted to .... little gaps in the darkness. You see these lightbearers were the ones who did not "go along." They were not afraid to be "canceled." They spoke plainly. That is the cost of being a vessel of light.

We use a twisted logic that teaches an acceptance of the darkness. "Live and let live! That's Christian charity!" we say. Oh, really. You shall know that by its fruits .... as you see your neighbors' gardens and fields devoured by vines and weeds: "live and let live." It is hard work to push the darkness back and surely a very great burden to tear out all those weeds and keep them out.

St. Basil the Great, in his masterpiece On the Holy Spirit (c. 360), wrote that we might cover ourselves with mud, yet a tiny chink in this thick covering reveals that under it is a creature made from Divine light. The mud is mostly all we see (certainly we are preoccupied by it), yet it is not the thing. The light is the thing.

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St. Anthony was not the first ascetic. (In the Christian context, we suppose St. John the Baptist to be the Father of Asceticism.) But St. Anthony was an early and — thanks to The Life of Antony written by St. Anthanasius of Alexandria — influential exemplar of monastic life. He became a role model all over the world for those who thought of living holy life. Like St. John the Baptist, he retreated to the wilderness in his desire to elude God's enemies, to elude the darkness.

You know, may I scribe a circle on the ground and let it be God's, that there be nothing in it that offends God? May God have a place on the earth?

Let us consider this word wilderness for a moment. It is a place defined by subtraction. The word in the LXX specifying the place where YHWH led his people έρημος / erémos means "not cities, not settlements or buildings, nothing of the works of men." It is a space that has pushed back all of that debris.

It is not for nothing that the Hebrews were enslaved in the cause of city-building — the erection of enormous monuments to the human ego.

Our own culture continues to be obsessed with these monuments to the egos of influential and powerful Egyptians.

From here, being cleansed through the Red Sea, they arrive to the landscape which subtracts debris, where all that remains, when you have subtracted all the things of men, is God.

This is the landscape (again the word is erémos) sought by the Nazirite John the Baptist, a vegetarian eating a kind of manna, dressed in natural garb, having nothing of the city about him. The city smell was acrid in his pure nostrils. Its sounds bombarded his sensitive ears. Its sights rended his tender heart. (Have you ever been to New York City?) "Metanoiete!" he called out:

"Metanoiete!" "Come away from the crookedness of the city, and return with me through the strait gate to Eden!"

But such a journey will always mean struggle, even warfare. For the Kingdom of Heaven, in its rectitude, is strait (Mt 7:14) / straight (Lu 3:5). Anywhere else is not straight. Anywhere God's Kingdom descends upon a crooked earth, rebellion will ensue. Remember the words of St. Simeon, who held the Christ Child in the Temple, and said, "This Child will be the sign of contradiction and an occasion for great tumult" (Lu 2:34).

For this reason the wilderness is equated to an encounter with the evil one. Immediately after His Baptism, ".... Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil" (Mt 4:1l). He left immediately suggesting that baptism is the door into a vocation of temptation and spiritual warfare. Again, the word is erémos.

The Roman Catholic Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, wrote,

I recall walking into my bishop's office one afternoon when I was serving a Roman Catholic diocese. He had just completed his episcopal visit to a hermitage in our diocese. (There were two.) He had gone out to the Maine wilderness to visit an anchorite's one-room cabin, having no electricity or running water. It was lined with icons. The sounds at night were the forest primeval.

Believe me, when I say out into the wilderness, I mean true wilderness with nothing of the works of men remaining. How big is Maine? When I lived in the southwest corner of Maine and my brother lived in the southwest corner of Connecticut, we were three hours apart. When he moved to my own state, Maine, we were seven hours apart.

He went up into the wilderness to visit this anchorite. He told her, "Oh, how I long to spend a week or two in a setting like this, retreating from the intense pressures of the chancery, communing with nature."

"Oh no, Bishop!" she answered. "It's not like that. Here is where you meet the evil one. Here is the scene of spiritual warfare." And as he related all this to me, I could see a holy dread in his face. He knew the authenticity of her words.

There is something here we ought not miss. The evil one does not waste his time with those well in hand. He does not encounter the ones who have given demons the free run of the house. Why should he? Let sleeping dogs lie. And those who lie with them get fleas. It's a perfection! Such a man as this might very well go camping in Maine's Allagash Wilderness and encounter no demons .... until the hour of his death.

It will be anchorites and nuns and monks, and devout men and women who have not formalized their vocation of holiness who encounter the devil. The common Father of all of them is St. Anthony. He retreated into the erémos, during early third century Lower Egypt, south of Memphis, not far from the Nile.

At age twenty, following the death of this parents, he placed his unmarried sister in a community of Christian virgins (we would say "the convent"). He sold his possessions, gave the money to the poor, picked up his cross, and entered a hermitage, being acolyte to an older hermit at first. He went about his work with the heart of a warrior.

You see, God constantly scans the earth for one who is good. God alone is good (Mk 10:18). God is perfect, and His Son invites us to aspire to this perfection (Mt 5:48). Indeed, He commands us to strive for this:

If this should come to you as a little card in an envelope found in your mailbox, please do not regard it as an optional invitation. This is a Divine command. And here is th3 primary purpose for the Incarnation of Christ:

.... a community of goodness bound in godly love, which is, the Kingdom of Heaven.

Here is the "big picture" of Christianity. We are born perfectly good. Some of us retain this goodness from childhood until death. Read the lives of the saints, or better yet, go the Fourth World and meet them. As for the rest of us .... let us take a U-turn, back to our goodness, back to a tender-hearted love of God. We must. Else, we have forsaken God. As Jesus is so clear on this point: it is either "on," or it is "off"; you are either "in," or you are "out." There can be no secret life .... nothing going on "in the backcourt." There can be no mind that consents to a constant stream of wrong thoughts. You are either in, or you are out. Jesus has selected this word perfection not lightly. The Greek word He uses is τέλειοι / téleioi. It means (among other things) integrity: all the pieces fit together in a coherent picture — no inside different from the outside, no private life different from public life, but all the same. And it is a Divine command.

And if we believe we are being charitable by smiling on the failures of those around us, that is not charity; it is complicity. And forever is a long time.

The godly figure of the Forerunner John teaches an important principle: he points to God, who cannot abide the stench of evil. Yes, God will forgive us. Yes, He will stand by a roadside like the Prodigal Son's father desiring our return. Yes, we can be restored to our former state. But He will not dwell in us and we in Him until our hearts again become pleasing and hospitable. Who do you want to live inside of you? Angels or the alternative?

His Son cries out, "Metanoiete!" "Leave your foolish devotion to the world, the flesh, and the devil! Drop everything! Discard this polluted life!" The essence of a new life is to become more and more like Him. And you know what He is like: holy, good, perfect.

With a heavy heart, we behold an entire world, at least in the West, that has rejected God. Its messages, its art, its aspirations, its desires are writ large across our culture, our media, our schools, even our laws. This represents the vast majority. Equally fierce is the spiritual warfare around it. For the demons who have happily lived within us, steering our imaginations, thoughts, and actions, will not take eviction lightly.

I have ministered to people who were possessed by demons. This is not like The Exocist movie. They swear upon everything holy that they did not do what they most certainly did do, and they did not go where they certainly did go. They literally were not aware of what they were doing. They were steered by another power. What is the difference between willing to do something on the one hand or surrending your will, on the other .... to an evil influence.

Demon possession is more common than we like to think. Have you not met people who admit that they cannot stop living degraded life? They tell you: "I cannot stop! They are no longer in control. Who or what, then, is in control?

The word addiction is a contruct. It describes an aggregation of compulsive symptoms. Oh, yes, I know that brain imaging reveals certain spot on the brain "heating up" during the so-called addictive behavior. But that is not the thing itself: it is a display of the brain chemistry. Whatever I do can be seen in terms of brain activity. But this does not show you the what or the why. It merely reveals part of the how. It is not the thing itself.

To make matters worse, the ones who embrace this dark life — bold young men and women inspiring others to be bold, exciting young men and women attracting others into their excitement — have become the pervasive role models of our culture. This is no exaggeration .... in a world where you can hear one young woman say to another, "You porn star! Go girl!"

Where are God's role models? Who will be the ones who model goodness and perfection? Without them we are lost.

God constantly scan the earth looking for one who is good. Yes, they exist, but they are not commonly found. When one does find them, however, that moment is a golden one. For they are radiant, gracious, perfect in their modest speech and charity, whom the angels frequent as familiars. Who does not want to be near them? Who does not want to be like them? Have you met the saints? Have you encountered the ones who have conquered ego, to whom carnal thoughts are alien, even repugnant, who are filled with godly love? Have you received their gracious attentions? Everybody wants to.

I have been in settings where everyone is vying to have a moment with that special one. Such a listening heart is balm to the soul. Imagine sitting in a chapel in two chairs, drawing near to this wisdom and love. It is life changing, I can tell you. For such a one is the near Presence of Christ .... and a powerful inducement to follow.

We see in them, right before our eyes, the sinews and muscle and bone of theosis: accepting God's command to become more and more like Him: good and perfect. This is what the God-man envisioned when He called disciples. Such a one as this is St. Anthony the Great.

The demon world could see how dangerous a sanctified man could be. And they set upon him with all the powers of Hell. Early on, they learned they could not possess his imagination, his mind, his soul. They could not prevail with carnal temptations. So they squared off with him directly in that last resort of demons: obsession. Those of us in the West who have read the biography of the Cure d'Ars or of Padre Pio know exactly what I am talking about. The word obsession is misleading. It does not mean the surrender of our will to every impulse or thought ... the way we become obsessed about something. No. This is not our obsession. It is their undivided attention: the obsession of the demons. It simply means "full-on attack."

St. Anthony was assailed from every side within the sacred precincts of his hermitage, nearly beaten to death by demons, St. Athanasius tells us. He went on to write,

It was then that the Lord appeared to St. Anthony. The saint asked Him,

I leave you with this thought. Sanctity is not a theory. It is not a breathless, monkish figure from central casting offering up an extended performance. It is a doing day by day. It is a choosing moment by moment: of the good over the evil, of the virtuous over the vicious, of life over death. You see, it is a constant becoming, with the possibility always of addition and subtraction ever before us. For God cannot know who or what we are .... in our freedom. We humans are a changeable lot! God can only know us through the things we act on, who we are minute-by-minute and day-by-day.

The Lord Jesus wrote,

St. Anthony poured fire upon the earth. Soon other men caught fire through his example. They joined him in a collection of hermitages. (They actually did.) They founded their own monasteries and lavras, too. And from these holy places, they set great bonfires (so to speak) upon hilltops, shedding the light of Christ out into the hateful darkness. And others, seeing this, also started bonfires.

What should stop you from doing likewise? Is there anything holding you back from living godly life? Does anything prevent your becoming a hermitage .... or a community of monastic life? The Father of Monastics exhorts you! The Son of God commands you! "Be perfect!" He commands. We must follow Him! We must be friends of God! For you either in, or you are out.

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