It’s Time to Tell a Story part VII: Death to the World

“The world” is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honor which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancor and resentment, and physical fear. Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead…. Someone has said of the Saints that while alive they were dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.”

-St Isaac the Syrian (7th Century)

I wanted so badly to be dead to the world. In the storm of modern life, raging hormones, and general teenage instability the monastic ideal was my escape. I figured out very quickly that I was unable to live a fully Christian life “in the world” the way that I’d internalized what a Christian life was. I liked boobies, I liked to eat, I wanted to be cool, to be liked, to have fun, to be normal, but I couldn’t figure out how.

My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. 

-John 17:16-16

At this point the Death to the World zine and the book Youth of the Apocalypse entered my world, heralded by none other than Fr. John Marler.

Fr. John was so cool. I idolized him. He was everything I thought was cool all rolled into one. He was an ex-punk who lived with Green Day, before they were famous! He played guitar for the band Sleep! And he left it all behind to become a monk! I wanted so bad to be like him and Fr. Nikodemos (the other cool punk turned monk).

I loved this shirt.

I was already an early 90s grunge kid – long hair, baggy camo fatigues. Now I had all this intense death imagery that looked cool AND it was Orthodox! Awesome! I was so inspired by their example. I wore my DTTW t-shirt all the time. The soundtrack to my teens was the Valaam chants record and Fr. John Marler’s DIY tape Lamentations. Our church started a Valaam Society bookstore. I was always there evangelizing (and flirting with girls. For Jesus, naturally).

In the late 90s my summers were marked by the Youth conferences in Forrestville and Platina. Fr. John was my role model. And then one summer I found out he wanted to start a school…in Alaska. I was so stoked about this. I begged my parents to let me go. They were not into the idea at first. I was going to be starting Catholic high school in the fall. I was already enrolled.

Depression filled me. This was my chance! My chance to escape; to live for real. I knew with every fiber of my being that if I stayed in the world, my soul would die.

There is a drawing in one of my old journals of a kid with black eyeliner in tears with a noose around his neck.

I related to this pic when I first saw it on the pages of Youth of the Apocalypse. My insides felt like that.

His hand is outstretched to a a church replete with onion dome and three bar cross. This pencil drawing perfectly illustrates my state of mind.

My parents found it and it obviously scared them.

Less than a month after my fifteenth birthday I was on a plane to Alaska to meet up with Fr. John Marler and company to embark on the grand adventure of starting a boys school on Spruce Island.

For more music here is the youtube search Monk John Marler it has individual tracks. I’m partial to the tracks Deicide and Prison.