Last week 60 Minutes aired an episode about Mt. Athos, a sacred mountain in Greece that is home to 22 monasteries.
Praying goes on 24 hours a day there, and all the monks are committed to a life of prayer that focuses on becoming closer to Jesus. The monasteries are thousands of years old, and because of this Mt. Athos is considered one of the most sacred sites on earth.
There are 35,000 visitors to this holy mountain every year, and they are all male. Women are not allowed on the mountain. One of the monks explained the reasoning behind this rule. “When these communities were first formed, women were allowed in as visitors. We found it distracting for the monks, and they didn’t stay as focused on their prayer life. That was when we instituted our policy that no women were allowed on the mountain.”
How do you feel about the fact that the answer to the monk’s inability to ‘focus on prayer’ with women present was to ban the women from this sacred site?
once again… women are expected to just accept that because someone else cannot control their thoughts, they have to go hide. What does “coming closer to Jesus” mean? I would ask if their “prayers” include women or do they just pray for men? Or just for themselves? Stop pointing fingers at women as the problem. If women visitors caused problems with attention for the Monks, then the Monks need to focus on why that is an issue. Sounds like even after thousands of years of “praying”, lust is still a problem, and it is not the women’s problem.
Greece was and is still very much a patriarchal society. The cradle of democracy ironically was one of the most oppressive places for women. A married women was not allowed to look her husband in the eye when he came home, was expected to be totally subservient, had no legal rights to speak of and was expected to stay within the walls of her home. A man sought an intellectually arousing partner in his consort, not wife.
I don’t believe “praying” – being able to focus or not – or the mountain has anything to do with banning women. It’s an excuse. Not a reason. This only reveals that the monasteries are just as sexist as the culture in which they exist.
women are beautiful wonderful people whom i could never ever leave behind. but if i wanted total concentration on prayer i would not want women present. and i would not want many other men present. I would want no distractions because prayer is always difficult no matter how much you pray it is all lost in one distraction. When i pray i do so either in solitude or in a sanctuary where i can fix my gaze upon anything besides other people. Women and men alike