Caring for elderly monks: the hardest and most blessed obedience

Elder Philimon, Dikaios of the Holy Patriarchal Coenobitic Skete of the Prophet Elijah on Mount Athos, speaks about diakonia, service, in monastic life. He explains that the deacon is the one who serves, and that in serving you give something of yourself. He turns to the service of caring for the elderly monks and calls it a beautiful diakonia, though he notes that his own skete does not yet have this service because it has no elders.

Caring for the elders, he says, is among the hardest and most blessed tasks a monk can be given. Whoever undertakes it gains many crowns, but the work demands great patience, because it forms a person into one who loves. The talk links the meaning of service in general to this concrete obedience: ministry is not an abstract idea but giving of oneself to another, and the frailty of aged fathers makes that giving daily, bodily and hidden.

The elder presents the care of the old not as a burden to be endured but as a task that rewards beyond measure while it costs patience and love at every moment.