When Edith asked me to contribute to this conference on peace, she asked for a response to the difficulties we all face living peacefully ~ in a world which is so full of fear and anxiety. I felt, and still feel, daunted by the challenge.

At the same time, my mind jumped to Elder Tadej, whose teachings come back again and again to the theme of living peacefully. Furthermore, a feature of his teachings that resonates with the aspirations of this conference is his insistence that a peaceful person spreads peace to others.

He sees us humans as “transmitters”. Like a communications mast we transmit what is going on inside us to those around us. A peaceful person will literally “transmit” peace to others. Perhaps this is a contemporary take on St Seraphim’s famous words: “Find peace in your heart and thousands around you will be saved”. Personally, I find the image of a human being as a “transmitter” helpful and evocative. That is why I came up with the title of the talk: “Transmitting Peace”.

So, before we get onto exactly what this teaching is, let’s look briefly at the elder’s life. It’s a biography far from peaceful in its outward circumstances.

Father Tadej I was born in Serbia in 1914. His childhood brought him little joy. He was born two months prematurely at a village fair, baptised immediately and remained sickly throughout his childhood, and indeed his whole life. His mother died when he was young and his father married again twice. Neither of his stepmothers gave the little Thomislav any love, and he fled from home more than once. His poor health made him unable to work usefully at home and he was ridiculed as a parasite.

When he was eighteen, he ran away to Gornjak monastery. But, after six months he developed a serious pulmonary disease and was sent to hospital in Belgrade. He declined a therapy which would have been gruelling for a healthy person, knowing he wouldn’t survive it, and was given a maximum of five years to live.

“Well,” he thought, “I’ll spend the next five years serving God” and he returned to the monastery. A Russian monk there heard him describing his vision of monasticism to the Abbot. Next day that monk took him aside and told him he would only find what his soul desired among the Valaam monks who had fled from Soviet Russia to Miljkovo monastery in eastern Serbia. So, he left for Miljkovo. There he was welcomed by the Staretz Ambrose, who was himself a spiritual child of the monks of Optina, steeped in the hesychastic tradition. Fr Ambrose radiated a pure love. It was said that he never spoke a harsh word to any of his brethren, (although there are some colourful examples of monastic behaviour that might reasonably be expected to attract severe rebuke.) No doubt Fr Ambrose’ example was formative in Elder Tadej’s belief that love is the true measure of the Christian life.

Thinking he had only 5 years to live the young monk gave himself completely to the way of life. He was taught to practice vigilance over his thoughts and the Jesus Prayer. He confessed every night. In this state of total dedication, he received the gift of unceasing prayer very quickly - and he lived for a while in a state of ineffable joy and peace. In his simplicity he thought that all monks received this grace and only realised later what a gift he had received.

Elder Ambrose died only a year after Tomislav’s arrival at the monastery, so he lost the only person who had ever treated him with love and kindness. Devastated by the death of his elder, he also lost unceasing prayer. He entered a period of spiritual and emotional torment. He sought relief by going into the hills and playing his accordion. Gradually he found consolation in the writings of St Theophan the Recluse, and later in the writings of St Isaac the Syrian. Later he would say that sometimes God sends great help to a person through a particular book. This experience of finding consolation through the writings of the fathers was formative for him. Later, his spiritual children would say that he always answered any question by quoting from the fathers.

It was in this hard, very hard furnace, of having to find his way in the spiritual life with no-one at hand to guide him, that the young monk learned through experience, and through reading, the science of guarding his thoughts.

After the death of Elder Ambrose, Thomislav returned to Gornjak where he was tonsured a monk on 11 March 1935. On 1 June that same year, he became a hierodeacon and then a hieromonk on 3 February 1938 in the Rakovica monastery.

Father Tadej was arrested twice during the Axis occupation of Serbia. At a certain moment he felt absolutely desperate and was convinced he was going to die in prison. He had a waking vision of an angel who showed him a map of the whole of Serbia, looked straight at him and said: “Look! Do not be afraid, do not be frightened, for there are many of those to whom you must comfort and must give courage.”
After the war he was sent as Abbot to the Patriarchate of Pech. The monastery was in a terrible state with dilapidated buildings, refugees camping out there, local Communist partisans using it as headquarters. He suffered two nervous breakdowns because of physical exhaustion, and these immense outward difficulties.

During this time, he dreamt that he had died and someone was reading charges against him. “That’s him! The one that cannot get along with anyone”. Then someone was standing beside him saying: “Do not be afraid. It’s not true that you can’t get along with anyone. You just can’t get along with yourself.” Perhaps this vision gave force to his frequent quotation of his beloved Isaac the Syrian – “Make peace with yourself, and both heaven and earth will make peace with you.”

In 1981 he returned to Vitovnica. By this time, he was already in his late sixties – a completely unknown, frail monk. But then the pilgrims started to come. First trickles, then streams, then rivers of pilgrims and penitents came to him from all over Serbia, especially Belgrade. His teachings were disseminated through cassettes and typewritten papers.

He would talk to pilgrims for hours. He taught, counselled, and prayed for all who came to him in pain and sorrow. His words of love and hope provided spiritual balm for people from all classes of society. These conversations caused him extreme physical exhaustion and strain on his voice and breathing. Often, he could only speak in a whisper.

Pilgrims related that the least significant problem of an “ordinary person” was important to him. He didn’t differentiate between people or their problems. He showed by his actions that he believed that any person, whatever their social status, is important to God. Many attested that he had the gift of insight - his answer, although almost always a quotation from the fathers, written at a different time and place, was often an answer to an unspoken problem.

He spent the final years of his life staying in the family of some of his spiritual children at Bačka Palanka in Vojvodina. He suffered a stroke and a long illness and died on 13 April 2003. His body was immediately taken back to Vitovnica Monastery, where he is buried. Flocks of birds gathered at his funeral.

~

So now for what he actually taught: The book that is available in English on Elder Tadej is entitled: “Our Thoughts Determine our Lives”.
(Sister Magdalene tells me that this book flies off the shelves in the bookshop at the Essex monastery. She barely keeps up with the demand…)

The phenomenon of “thoughts” is an important theme in Orthodox and patristic teaching on prayer. It features prominently in the hesychast tradition. There is a vast amount of material, stretching back to the sayings of St Anthony the Great, about the phenomenon of “thoughts” how they damage, or support, our relationship with God and how the mind must practice vigilance to manage the influence of these “thoughts” so that prayer can become strong.

He comes back again and again to the subject of “thoughts” and crucially for our subject – their relationship to peace. Here is a typical example:

Life depends on the kind of thoughts we nurture. If our thoughts are peaceful, calm, meek and kind, then that is what our life is like. If our attention is turned to the circumstances in which we live we are drawn into a whirlpool of thoughts and can neither have neither peace nor tranquilly.

Elder Tadej was no stranger to outward circumstances of life which create a “whirlpool” of inner chaos. But, in very simple terms, he advises taking hold of our attention, turning it away from those circumstances to thoughts that are “peaceful, calm, meek and kind.”

This “taking hold of our attention” is what “nepsis” or watchfulness is all about. To follow Elder Tadej’s advice, we need to vigilant, watching what is going on in our heads and making a deliberate choice to change it.

Fr Tadej links the power of our thoughts to the fact that we are made in the image of God and that God’s creative activity is primarily “divine thought”. This is a big subject, not to be tackled here. For the time being, let’s just take account of the idea that our thoughts have a creative energy.

Everything, both good and evil, comes from our thoughts. our thoughts become reality. Even today we can see that all of creation, everything that exists on the earth and in the cosmos, is nothing but divine thought made material in time and space. We humans were created in the image of God. Mankind was given a great gift, but we hardly understand that. God’s energy and life is in us, but we do not realise it. Neither do we understand that we greatly influence others with our thoughts. We can be very good or very evil, depending on the kind of thoughts and desires we breed.

So, he sees our thoughts as having a direct effect on the people around us, the living organisms in our environment and ultimately on the whole world.

One cannot underestimate the importance of his statement: “Neither do we understand that we greatly influence others with our thoughts”.

In the following quote he uses the word “radiate” to describe this influence on the world around us – both positive and negative:
If our thoughts are kind, peaceful, and quiet, turned only towards good, then we also influence ourselves and radiate peace all around us - in our family, in the whole country, everywhere. This is true not only here on earth, but in the cosmos as well. When we labour in the fields of the Lord, we create harmony. Divine harmony, peace, and spread quiet everywhere. However, when we breathe negative thoughts, that is a great evil. Where there is evil in us, we radiate it among our family members and wherever we go. So, you see, we can be very good or very evil. If that’s the way it is it is certainly better to choose good!

When I first read Elder Tadej I was struck by how far reaching the effects of our thoughts can be. He says: “The plants, too, have a nervous system. They expect peace, comfort, and love from us”.

I think that no-one who has visits a place saturated with prayer fails to notice how the physical environment - trees, grass plants - is changed. It seems vibrant with the presence of God, somehow made tangible by the prayer that happens there. Animals too are affected.
(Fr Tadej had a great love of birds. One visitor related how, commenting that the Elder had some bread crumbs in his beard, instead of brushing them off, the Elder sat back and invited a sparrow to hop down and peck them out – which is exactly what the bird did!)
Elder Tadej has a remarkable gift for communicating spiritual truth in simple language and avoiding any religious jargon. In other words, he doesn’t seem to assume any particular religious background in his hearers. A rare gift!

For example, I notice this when he sometimes says “Absolute Goodness” instead of “God”.

“Repentance is a change of life, a change of direction, turning towards absolute good, and leaving behind all that is negative”.

“The Lord will reward us with his peace if we change our way of thinking and turn towards absolute goodness. Absolute goodness is God Himself. He wants his children to have this divine attribute as well …”

~

This is a particular character of Elder Tadej’s teaching. He teaches the authentic patristic tradition on prayer and spiritual life in a way that assumes that it is for everyone. We see the life of every member of the Church engaged in the same battles, the same efforts, the same joys and sorrows. Everyone is called to live out their baptism in a specific “mode”, but the life of the Church is one!

I mentioned that early in his monastic life he experienced the grace of unceasing prayer, with the accompanying ineffable sense of peace and joy. He later commented that in all the years he had spent in monasteries he had only met one monk who had received this gift – BUT he had met a number of lay people who lived with their families who had received it.

There are many examples of counsels that Elder Tadej gave to people about their difficulties with family members, colleagues, teachers and so on. It is clear that he never imagines that people are living in a privileged, protected environment, but are facing the many challenges of contemporary life. First of all, he usually counsels changing the thoughts we have about these people.

Sometimes he characterises these negative thoughts about other people as a “war”. He tells a story about a woman who told him she was leaving her work because everyone was so horrible to each other. He told her to stop the war she was fighting with her colleagues. “But I’m not fighting anyone” she replied. He insisted that she was fighting her colleagues in her thoughts and advised her to change her thoughts about them. He met her again several years later – she the situation had completely changed, but she admitted – she had changed too by following his advice!

He taught that the presence of a peaceful person in the workplace has a transforming effect – but this peace depends on an ascetic effort:
And so it is clear that that if we wish good for ourselves and our neighbours, we must change. Our thoughts influence not only us but everything that surrounds us. That is why we must omit only good, quiet, and kind thoughts. The Lord commands us to love our enemies, not for their sake, but for our own good. For as long as we wallow in the remembrance of an insult we have suffered from a friend, a neighbour, or a relative, we will have neither peace nor rest. We must become free from such thoughts. This means that we must forgive from the heart. Everything must be forgiven. The peace we feel afterwards brings a sense of well-being, joy, and comfort not only to us but to all who surround us.

And he makes an interesting comment about loving ourselves, as well as our neighbours and families. Unusual in the patristic tradition I think…:

We can all be good if, with all our hearts, we unite ourselves with the source of life, God. He will give us strength to love both ourselves and our neighbour. Without God it is not possible to love oneself, even. Many people become depressed and hopeless and attempt to take their own lives, for without God, we cannot even love ourselves, let alone our friends, family, and neighbours - or our enemies for that matter. All is possible with God, for He is our strength and life.

Elder Tadej taught that everything has to be handed over to God. After all, God is ultimately in charge of everything. He describes how this awareness grew on him as a child: Even as a child I greatly desired to serve God. Even then I knew that here on earth everything was some kind of service. Parents attend to their children and children attend to their parents. Everyone serves someone else. That was when I decided that I wanted to serve God. Since He is the Parent of all mankind and the entire universe, one should serve Him who is the greatest of all. As a young child I very much wanted to do that.

Fr Tadej relates this childhood aspiration with no self-consciousness. But I think it is a key aspect of his holiness. For most of us, willingness to really put God first – “Thy will be done”, is a life-long struggle.

Elder Tadej strongly emphasised handing worries over to God. This may seem paradoxical, as we know that he suffered acutely from the many responsibilities he faced during his periods as abbot. However, his teaching, the result of bitter experience, returns again and again to the same themes:

Everyone will feel the impact of our thoughts if our thoughts are kind and peaceful. And the opposite is true, as well. If the head of a family is burdened with worries and cares… the other members of the family have no peace. Even the little children who do not yet understand the problems of life will have no peace, because the father is burdened with cares. Therefore, all of us and especially those who have a family household under their charge must learn to “commit ourselves and one another and all our life to Christ our God”. Challenging!
Elder Thaddeus’ life was full of suffering. He was always physically weak. The absence of anyone who showed him love in his childhood influenced the formation of his nervously fragile personality. He said that for many years he suffered because of his thoughts about his father, who had failed to defend him from the cruelty of his stepmothers during his childhood. The feeling that he could never please anyone dogged him well into his adult life. His responsibilities during his periods as Abbot were onerous indeed. He was persecuted by his brother clergy. The political environment of Serbia during his lifetime was anything but peaceful - two World Wars, the Nazi occupation, the Communist takeover, the Kosovo war and Nato bombings.

I think that this gives a particular authenticity to his witness. No-one can say: “Well it was alright for him, but….! His teaching is not a PolyAnnaesque. He doesn’t advocate a naïve cheerfulness. As his biography makes clear, for much of his life he suffered anxiety and depression. The bliss of unceasing prayer was a temporary gift, which like St Seraphim and St Silouan, he struggled hard to regain.
His teaching is quintessentially Christian – it recognises and acknowledges suffering – extreme suffering – but it focuses on the reality of Christ and his victorious presence.

Elder Tadej was not teaching a kind of mental yoga. Transmitting peace is a grace, which we will never do if our lives are not continually turning towards the gentle and all-loving Christ. I will close with a last quotation that illustrates this:

The Lord is always waiting for us to unite ourselves with Him in love, but instead we drift further and further away from Him. We know that there can be no life without love. This means there is no life without God, for God is love. But his love is not according to the understanding of this world. …… The man who is given Grace and who is united with God’s love is also protected by this divine love and the evil spirits cannot come close to him.

Love is the most powerful means of defence there is. There are no weapons and no power that can measure themselves against love. Everything is defeated before love.

Elder Tadej, pray to God for us!

Given by Mother Sarah