Obedience is Life: Elder of Ephraim of Katounakia (1912-1998)

By Elder Joseph of Vatopaidi

Christ glorifies His saints, and they glorify His Body the Church as His genuine members. One of these godly men is the Athonite Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, who reposed in 1998. He lived 65 years of strict ascetism on the Holy Mountain (42 of which were as a monk in obedience), far from the world, poor according to the world, but rich in the divine charismata of the Holy Spirit that he had acquired, and was shown to be an obedient disciple filled with spiritual gifts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pemptousia
• Release date: Aug 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9786185314262

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ELDER JOSEPH OF VATOPAIDI

OBEDIENCE IS LIFE

ELDER EPHRAIM OF KATOUNAKIA

(1912-1998)

THE HOLY GREAT MONASTERY OF VATOPAIDI

MOUNT ATHOS

OBEDIENCE IS LIFE

ELDER EPHRAIM OF KATOUNAKIA

Elder Joseph of Vatopaidi

© Holy Great Monastery of Vatopaidi, Mount Athos, Greece

Digital edition 2019

ISBN: 978-618-5314-26-2

Printed edition 2003

ISBN: 960-7735-25-0

Translation: Holy Great Monastery of Vatopaidi

Translated from the Greek

Ο ΧΑΡΙΣΜΑΤΟΥΧΟΣ ΥΠΟΤΑΚΤΙΚΟΣ:

ΓΕΡΟΝΤΑΣ ΕΦΡΑΙΜ Ο ΚΑΤΟΥΝΑΚΙΩΤΗΣ

Holy Great Monastery of Vatopaidi

630 86 Karyes, Mount Athos

Greece

tel: [phone]

email: [e-mail]

PROLOGUE

FORWARD TO THE ENGLISH

EDITION

INTRODUCTION

1

FROM THEBES TO THE HERMITAGE OF SAINT EPHRAIM IN KATOUNAKIA

Fr. Procopios and the Saints Theodore

Elder Nikiphoros

The Elder’s Father and Mother

2

DISCIPLESHIP WITH ELDER

JOSEPH THE HESYCHAST

The repose of Elder Joseph

3

THE NEW BROTHERHOOD OF ELDER EPHRAIM

Compassion towards the poor and the weak

The Repose of Elder Ephraim

4

A VISIT TO THE HOLY MONASTERY

OF VATOPAIDI

A. The Role of the Elder in the Monastic Life

The Elder and the Disciple

Do not do anything without the consent of the elder

Without the blessing of the elder, do not do anything

I have an elder

Do not hide your thoughts

You must see others as holy

Oneness with the elder

The worthy disciple

The only one that I loved and I feared

Do not judge your elder

You judge the elder, you judge God

B. Obedience is Life; Disobedience, Death

Our own effort

Levels of obedience

Obedience will bring about all things

Let’s not forget our vows

The possessed man and obedience

The calendar issue and obedience

He who knew and did not do

Obedience to the brother monks

An example of disobedience

Disobedience means death

C. Pray Without CeasingΕ

Monologistic prayer

Elder, I forget to say the prayer

Praying for the afflicted

D. Trials, Temptations, and Afflictions

Physical illness and healing

E. Topics on the Spiritual Life

Maintaining the spiritual program

The cenobitic system

The thoughts are reckoned

Self-examination

Experience is helpful

Preserve your zeal

Beware of vainglory

Divine providence and the parents of monks

5

PERSONAL ACCOUNTS

6

LETTERS

EPILOGUE

GLOSSARY

Come here, O fighter, come stand with me in fervour;

bow your neck entirely in obedience,

full of humility, dead to your own will,

revealing your heart’s every thought,

that you might endure to the end in the arena.

Be concerned not about the desert, the pillar,

nor the other monastic ranks of those running to God;

you are with the best, as the Scripture has it,

for you follow the way of the martyrs’ First Himself.

Saint Theodore the Studite, to a disciple in obedience.

The venerable Elder Ephraim was insistent about the subject of obedience. He often referred to the words of Saint Theodore the Studite in order to impress upon us the sublimity of the cenobitic life and the value of blessed obedience.

PROLOGUE

The Holy Mountain Mountain is the place par excellence for the living out of the Gospel. It is the place of the experience of God, of the communion of the created and the Uncreated, of unceasing prayer, and of a mourning that brings joy. This place has been sanctified by the ascetic struggles of holy men who became partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4) and were rendered chosen vessels (Acts 9:15).

Christ glorifies (deifies) His saints, and they glorify His Body the Church as His genuine members. One of these godly men is the Athonite Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, who reposed exactly three years ago, in 1998. He lived 65 years of strict asceticism on the Holy Mountain (42 of which were as a monk in obedience), far from the world, poor according to the world, but rich in the divine charismata of the Holy Spirit that he had acquired, and was shown to be an obedient disciple filled with spiritual gifts. Indeed, in our contemporary materialistic, rationalistic, and humanistic world, it is difficult to attain to the acquisition of the gifts of the Holy Spirit – but not impossible.

I first heard about Elder Ephraim when I was a student at the Theological School in Athens, and this kindled a desire within me to meet him. During this time, I sent him a letter pertaining to certain problems that I was then encountering. The response of the discerning and clairvoyant Elder not only solved those specific problems, but also revealed and explained my entire inner state. When I finally visited him at Katounakia, he laid out, like a true prophet, the entire course my life would follow.

The blessed Elder was a man of God, a violent (Matt. 11:12) monk who verified the definition of St. John of Sinai that a monk is the the continual forcing of nature. He thirsted insatiably for Divine Grace, maintained his initial zeal to the end of his life, and had the activity and spiritual state of prayer. He also had the gift of tears to an unbelievable degree; he wept and sobbed during the Divine Liturgy, as well as throughout the night in his prayers for his grieving brethren and for the salvation of the world. His appearance alone betrayed his high interior spiritual state; you thought you were looking into the face of the God-seeing Moses. When standing before him, you became transparent, and with the penetrating eyes of his soul he would take your spiritual X-ray. As soon as he saw some layman, he discerned whether he had a good spiritual life or not, whereas if it were a monk, whether he was living in proper obedience.

With exactitude in his conscience and with his extreme diligence in the practice of obedience and in prayer, he was elevated, with the cooperation of Divine Grace, to the heights of a holy Athonite figure.

Although he was a great hesychast, he recommended obedience as the way of spiritual perfection for monks. He especially emphasized the disciple’s pleasing of the elder as a sign and indication of the spiritual progress of the monk. Grace revealed to him the beauty and magnificence of the cenobitic way of life, and it showed him signs of how pleasing a good cenobitic monk is to God. This we have also ascertained through the moving homilies he gave at various cenobitic monasteries both within and outside the Holy Mountain. He upheld the cenobitic life in spite of his own absolutely strict ascetic way of life.

Many times, while I was still a student, I had the blessing to be present at his compunctious liturgies. As a liturgical celebrant before the divine altar of sacrifice, he was irreproachable. He celebrated the Divine Liturgy with a burning heart and a full sense of Grace. Often, from the profusion of his tears and his divine revelations, he was unable to say the responsory prayers. For me it was something unparalleled. As he himself told me, from the first liturgy he celebrated up till his last , he would always see, in a spiritual manner, Divine Grace consecrating the venerable gifts into the Body and Blood of Christ. Many times he would see, not the bread as we see it, but Christ Himself on the holy paten. At other times he saw angels at the right and left attending before the awesome Mystery. His entire life was one Divine Liturgy – the preparation through the precise keeping of his con- science, followed by the execution of this truly sacred Rite, and the fruits that it produces.

He had become a font of Divine Grace, and as God’s fellow worker (1 Cor. 3:9), transmitted this Grace when he was praying for someone. Often he would say impromptu prayers brimming with theological meaning over those who visited him, while at the same time laying his hand upon their head, communicating to them pal- pably the energy of the Holy Spirit that is beyond mind and senses.

Our venerable Elder Joseph of Vatopaidi was his spiritual brother from the year 1947, and he experienced him up close as few others. Feeling within himself the need – and in a certain way, a debt of honor – he has set forth in writing his testimony about the amazing life of his spiritual brother whom he so loved and by whom he was so loved.

As our venerable Elder himself relates, Papa Ephraim of Katounakia, by his holy life, showed himself to be a true and precise imitator of the life of his blessed Elder, Joseph the Hesychast. Elder Joseph played a leading role in ensuring that contemporary Athonite monasticism would continue living out the neptic practices and in general the hesychastic life, which is the essence of Orthodox spiritual life.

I remember something that the blessed Elder Paisios told us: Make note of the experiences of pious elders that you know about, because a time will come when the practical example will be lacking, and the people of God will yearn to hear a word from living experience and to be nurtured by it. Without a doubt, this prophecy of Elder Paisios is coming true in our time. Having this in mind, I believe that the writing of this book comprises a timely offering for Christ’s Church, bringing to light the life experiences of a contemporary holy man who lived among us in our own days.

The Abbot of the Holy and Venerable

Great Monastery of Vatopaidi

Saturday of Cheese-fare Week 11/24 February 2001

The Commemoration of all the Illustrious Ascetic Saints

Elder Ephraim of Katounakia with the then priest-monk and present Abbot of the Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, Archimandrite Ephraim, at the hermitage of the Elder in about 1984.

FORWARD TO THE ENGLISH

EDITION

With great joy we present to our English-speaking brethren a second book from the series of writings of our Elder Joseph of Vatopaidi. It is one of his most recent works, one written with a certain urgency to provide the world with one more much-needed image of a contemporary spiritual hero to look toward and emulate in this age of denial, where nothing is left standing upright, as our Elder often describes it. This urgency was heightened by a sudden life-threatening crisis in the author’s own life, and a concentrated effort was made by him to record and gather as much as possible from his personal recollections of Elder Ephraim, his older brother in the spiritual family of Elder Joseph the Hesychast, as well as from the experiences of others in our brotherhood who were close to or knew the Elder.

This book then, for us in the Vatopaidi brotherhood of our Elder Joseph, is more then simply a biography of a holy Athonite monk; we might say it is part of a special family album. Several members of our brotherhood, and particularly our Abbot Ephraim, had an intimate spiritual relationship with Elder Ephraim that is reflected in their personal accounts, and even in many of the photographs that help complete this album. Both directly and indirectly, the effect of his living example and his teaching – especially regarding obedience – on the brotherhood can hardly be overstated. He is at once for us a spiritual uncle, an instructor of obedience and noetic prayer, and an amazing model of monastic diligence, exactitude, and humility.

We mentioned above that this book about Elder Ephraim of Katounakia is only part of a family album. We are of course speaking about the extended family of Elder Ephraim’s own spiritual father, Elder Joseph the Hesychast. This album, we might say, began with the publication of Elder Joseph’s letters in 1979 by the brotherhood of Philotheou Monastery, then under the direction of Abbot Ephraim, who is presently the Elder for several men’s and women’s monasteries in North America. Four years later, the letters were followed by our own Elder Joseph’s account of the life and teachings of his holy elder Joseph.

Many years passed before time began drawing other members of the saintly Hesychast’s immediate spiritual family to join him in the heavenly mansions. Though Elder Arsenios, Elder Joseph’s lifelong co-ascetic and soul mate, had died in 1984, it was not until the repose of Elder Ephraim in 1998 that the album rapidly began to take on greater dimensions, first with a book about Elder Ephraim published by his own brotherhood at Katounakia, and then with the Greek edition of this present book in 2001. The absence of an account of the holy life of the amazing Elder Arsenios was remedied a year later by Monk Joseph of Dionysiou, who immediately after its completion went to work on the biography of his elder and abbot