Orthodox Parables and Stories: The Monk and the Mouse

Once, my Christians, a certain monk left the common life and blessed obedience and went to the desert to become a hesychast. His calculus demanded that he devote himself day and night to the study and theory of the name of Jesus Christ and indeed to the mystery of the Trinity of the Holy God.

Thus he believed that in the wilderness and in the peace of the quiet he could unite with God without worries and without interruptions.

But after two or three days, can no one endure more than that, as we speak, at some point in his sacred meditations, he felt the presence of someone close to him.

What was it? A little mouse.

He had climbed into his patched and holed slipper, and was smelling his big toe. Thus he was distracted, and it was impossible to keep his mind still, in the remembrance of God and in his prayer.

He saw it and said to himself, "I left everything to communicate carelessly and correctly with God and now a mouse has spoiled it for me. Well, that's it, he pulls the string, and says angrily to the mouse, loudly now:

-"Why are you interrupting my prayer, you b*st*rd?"

-"Because I'm hungry," replied the mouse.

And the hesychast retorted with indignation, not noticing that the mouse spoke with a human voice,

-"Get out of here, you wretched one, I am trying with a thousand efforts to see how I can unite with God, and you came to ask me to deal with your belly?" and frap, he shook his leg and flung the mouse into the opposite corner of his cave. And then the mouse turns and very calmly, after looking him in the eyes, answered him, in human language:

- "Learn this once and for all, father, if you can't with your fellow worshipers around and with old Abbakum, who is burning with fever and dying of hunger in a cave next to you, but also with each Abbakum, that is, your neighbor, who hurts and suffers, who hungers and thirsts and lies naked and wounded, and you do not sympathize with him, and do not stand with him, in his problems, then, never, never will you be able to unite with the God of love and mercy. » And the mouse disappeared.

From Gerontikon