There was
a tradition in a monastery in Greece to give the brothers some money for hard
work. Monks in a monastery are referred
to as brothers because they live together like one big family. There were monks
who wanted to work more and donate the money that they’d earned to the poor.
There was only one monk who did otherwise. No one ever saw him give anything to
anyone. So other monks called him the Greedy One. Years went by but everything
remained the same.
“He’s
such a skinflint!” other monks were thinking. Finally, there came the time for
the so-called Greedy One to pass away into the afterlife.
When
people who lived in nearby villages learned about his death, all villagers
flooded the church yard to kiss goodbye to the reposed monk. They shed tears
for the Greedy One and mourned his death.
The
brothers were astonished.
“What did
that man do for you? Why are you weeping by his grave?” they asked.
One of
the peasants exclaimed:
“He saved
my life!”
Another
peasant added:
“And
mine, too!”
The
peasants had to work from dawn till night in order to feed their children. It
was hard to till the land without an ox. If they had an ox, their children were
never hungry.
It turned
out that the monk, whom the other monks nicknamed the Greedy One, had saved his
hard-earned money to buy oxen for the poorest peasants. That was how he had
been rescuing them from hunger and poverty.
Those who
considered that monk a scrooge were really amazed when they learned about it!
Elder
Paisius concluded with the following words:
“How can
you judge if you don’t know everything? Jesus tells us not to judge.”
By Elder Paisius the Athonite
Translated
by The Catalog of Good Deeds
CONVERSATION