Finesse

[anglomedved]

I am reading ‘Counsels from the Holy Mountain’, by Elder Ephraim, former Abbot of the Monastery of Philotheou on Mount Athos – they give it me as a gift when I visited Philotheou seven years ago with my son Ben.

Solid stuff. But there is one thing which irks me here, and in other Orthodox spiritual writing also: no sense of beauty comes across, no finesse.

I compare this with the 13th (??) century Welsh poem, ‘The Loves of Taliesin’, which an English Anglican friend sent me this week:

   “The beauty of virtue in doing penance for excess
    Beautiful too that God shall save me…..
    The beauty of a faithful priest in his church, ...
    The beauty of a strong parish led by God…”

This sense of beauty, of finesse, of κаλоς, which is part in particular of the Celtic tradition, remains important to me, and, yes I fear losing it in certain parts of the Orthodox world.

I remember the words of the late Dom Paul Grammont, my abbot when I was a Roman Catholic novice 30 years ago, who once said to me of very strict women’s monasteries that where the life is too harsh and regimented, people can lose something, a certain finesse, a certain humanity”.  I think he was right…..