By Fr. George Dorbarakis
This blessed one embraced the monastic life from a young age and extinguished the stirrings of the passions through great self-control and fervent prayer. He attained to the heights of dispassion and was shown to be a vessel of the Holy Spirit, remaining a virgin until the end of his life, both in soul and in body. He never wished to look upon the face of a woman. Living in the mountains and wandering in the deserts, he watered his soul with the coolness of tears. For this reason he also received gifts of healings: he cast out demons from people and cured every other disease. Having lived in such a manner, he reached a deep old age and departed to the Lord.
Entirely paradoxical is the life of Saint Timothy according to human reasoning: he lived in the mountains, wandered in the deserts, did not wish to see the face of a woman, and yet he proved to be, as his hymnographer Saint Theophanes notes, “father of orphans, protector of widows, clothing of the naked, food of the hungry.” To pursue God unceasingly by withdrawing from people and yet to become the greatest social benefactor is indeed, at the very least, a paradoxical condition. But Saint Timothy lived what most ascetic saints also lived: the more you turn toward God, the more God turns you toward people. Why? Because “God is love.” And we find Him precisely where He is chiefly manifested: in His creatures made in His image and likeness. As the Lord Himself said in the Parable of the Judgment: “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.” Therefore the measure of our love for God is revealed by the measure of our love for our fellow human being. And did not the same happen with Saint Anthony? He withdrew from the world for God’s sake, and in the end God led him back to the world. And Saint Seraphim of Sarov: he sought isolation and seclusion, yet the Most Holy Theotokos appeared to him to tell him to go out and help the world. It is also the complaint of Elder Paisios the Athonite: “I came to the Mountain to find quietude, and I entered into the program of people.” But as we have said: the criterion of our faith and of the saints is love. Where there is love, there is God. Can one depart from love, even for reasons of “faith”? He loses God. “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”
Thus Venerable Timothy could not escape this rule. As Theophanes notes, “Knowing, O Father, that mercy triumphs over judgment, you did not overlook the stranger, but in goodness you opened your compassionate heart to all, O Venerable One, becoming father of orphans and protector of widows, clothing of the naked and nourishment of the hungry” (Ode 9). It is not by chance, therefore, that Saint Theophanes repeatedly compares the Venerable One to the Patriarch Abraham, whose chief characteristic, beyond his faith, was his love for people, especially his hospitality. “Compassionate toward all in your sympathy, you became another Abraham, receiving those who came from every side, O Timothy, and through them ministering to the God of all” (Ode 3).
His thirst and love for God, which took the form of practical love toward his neighbor, were, according to the hymns of our Church, the result of his unceasing ascetic struggle to overcome whatever negligence the passions create in a person and to acquire blessed humility, the foundation of all virtues. The flower of love does not grow, as is well known, on common roads and simple paths. It is a shoot of the lofty peaks — that is, it requires the bloodstained offering of a person’s will to the holy will of God. For how can the grace of God’s love act in a heart filled with the thorns of egotism? “Give blood and receive the Spirit,” our saints always said — something we indeed see in the life of Venerable Timothy. “Having the eye of your mind earnestly fixed upon God, you cast off from your soul the sleep of negligence, O Father, and became a temple of the divine Spirit and a place of holiness, O Timothy” (Ode 1). “Sealed with humility, O Father, you passed unharmed through the devices of the evil one, and were raised up to God and delight always in His glory, O blessed Timothy” (Ode 1). It is true. No one can overcome the snares of the devil, spread out everywhere upon the earth, unless he finds the path called humility. This is what the word of God reveals and the experience of the saints confirms: “I saw the snares of the devil spread out upon the earth, and I groaned and said: 'Who can pass through them unharmed?' And I heard a voice saying: 'Only the humble-minded'” (Venerable Anthony the Great).
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
