MONASTERY LIFE?

MONASTERY LIFE?

Phil 4:12 I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need.  

John 17:15 "I do not ask You to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one.  

Jesus was not a monastic Person living a life in exile from the world in order to attain a level of holiness that the rest cannot because they live public lives. He didn't ask others to live that life. One is not supposed to go off and hide from the affairs of life. Seeing God, He used the world. He was no ascetic; He never did violence to Himself, He never took a whip of cords to lacerate His flesh. Whoever imagines he is spiritual because he is bruising himself with cross or cords or hair shirt is sensual, not spiritual. Jesus “was bruised for our iniquities.” In the mystery of eternal life, He handed Himself over to bruising by His enemies, but He never bruised Himself. He lived a life so perfectly natural and artless that men said of Him, He was a wine bibber. Instead of retiring from them, He sat down with publicans and sinners, and ate bread with them, until the alarmed Pharisees and Sadducees said, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” He lived His life amongst men, loved flowers, birds, and little children; He was perfectly simple, perfectly artless, and perfectly natural. He took His place in the God filled natural order; seeing God everywhere, recognizing that all things were of God and for God, He took them as God’s great sacramental gifts.