Like a Growing Olive Tree

Joy, Testimony, and the Need for Monastic Roots

As we drink more deeply from the well of the Holy Fathers, something unmistakable and unexpected emerges. Their words wound and heal, cut and console, tear down illusions and build up hope. Yet even as they descend into the depths of repentance and expose the tangled root systems of the passions, there rises within the heart a quiet and inextinguishable joy. It is the joy of recognition, the joy of coming home, the joy of discovering that what they describe with such unadorned humility is not distant or impossible but the very landscape of the soul beckoned by grace.

As we interiorize their teaching, it is not simply knowledge that increases, but trust. The conscience becomes more supple and the will more free. The Fathers become companions who walk before us, bearing lamps lit from the uncreated Light. They reveal the contours of the spiritual battle not to overwhelm us but to help us recognize the hidden movements of the heart. They name our condition without condemnation because they speak from within the mercy of God.

It is here that the psalmist’s cry becomes our own:

I am like a growing olive tree in the house of God.

Growth is not sudden or spectacular. The olive tree matures slowly. Its strength is hidden beneath rough bark and twisting roots that press deep into the earth. Yet it is precisely because it grows in the house of God that its fruit remains, its leaves do not wither, and its oil becomes light, healing, and consecration.

To sit at the feet of the Fathers is to sink one’s roots into this holy soil.

To ponder their words with repentance and faith is to allow sap to rise.

To struggle against the passions in the quiet places is to produce fruit unseen but nourishing.

I trust in the goodness of God forever and ever.

This is not a trust born of naïveté but of experience: of discovering that every battle fought with humility is met with grace, that every descent into repentance is a rising with Christ, that every confession of weakness invites the strength that is not our own. Those who live the teaching of the Fathers learn to see God’s goodness not merely in consolation but also in correction, not only in light but even in the shadows where He refines the heart.

And so, joy does not remain private. It presses outward as witness.

I will thank you forevermore; for this is your doing.

The soul who has tasted the honey of stillness cannot keep silence about the One who made bitterness sweet. The more the word is hidden in the heart, the more it longs to be shared. Gratitude becomes proclamation; humility becomes testimony.

To speak of what God has done is not self-aggrandizement. It is the confession of mercy:

This is Your doing.

I will proclaim that your name is good in the presence of your friends.

Here the psalmist gives voice to the impulse that grows with grace—the desire to gather others into that communion of joy. We speak not because we presume to be teachers but because we have been taught by mercy. We proclaim not ourselves but the Good Name that heals.

Yet this raises a deeper question for our time. If the words of the Fathers fill us with joy and anchor our faith in the experience of God, then how can the Church flourish where their life is absent? Books alone cannot preserve the living tradition. Online resources, lectures, and study groups awaken the mind, but the heart requires embodied sanctuaries where the Gospel is lived without compromise and where prayer becomes the air one breathes.

If the olive tree needs soil and light, the Church needs places where asceticism is not an idea but the common labor of every day. The future of the Church in the West will depend upon whether there exists a generation of men and women who live the hesychastic tradition not as a historical curiosity but as the beating heart of Christian life.

Without monastic roots, the faith withers in the aridity of pragmatism and secular technique.

Without visible icons of repentance and unwavering trust, the world forgets that holiness is possible.

Without communities of silence and prayer, the voice of the Spirit is drowned by the noise of productivity and competition.

The need is urgent, not because monasticism is an ornament of the Church but because it is its hidden root system.

Where monks pray, the Church breathes.

Where the Jesus Prayer ascends continually, the world is sustained by mercy.

Where men and women offer their lives as living holocausts of love, the Gospel becomes believable.

If we have tasted the sweetness of the Fathers, if their joy has erupted in our hearts, then we must ask how God desires that joy to be shared. Perhaps He is calling for the planting of olive trees in new soil: for a renewal of Eastern monastic life in the West, small in beginning, hidden in appearance, slow in growth, yet capable of bearing fruit that will endure.

For if the soul that trusts in God is like a growing olive tree, then the Church that nurtures such souls will become a garden in a parched land. And its shade will be for many, and its oil for healing, and its fruit for the life of the world.