Do you renounce the world and what is in the world, according to the Lord’s commaundemente? the abbot asked Amvrosy.
I do renounce it, answered Amvrosy.
He heard someone slam a door in the back, and the candles’ fire evened out. There was no agitation in the flame now. The soul should become thus, thought Amvrosy. Impassive, placid. But my soul will not come to peace because it aches about Ustina.
The abbot said:
Take the scissors and offere them to me.
And Amvrosy gave him the scissors and kissed his hand. The abbot then slackened his hand and the scissors fell to the floor.
And Amvrosy picked up the scissors and handed them to the abbot and the abbot dropped them again.
And then Amvrosy again gave him the scissors and the abbot dropped them a third time.
When Amvrosy picked up the scissors this time, too, everyone in attendance was assured Amvrosy was being shorn voluntarily.
The abbot set to the shearing. He sheared two locks from Amvrosy’s head to form a cross so that he would leave behind his hair, along with the weighte of the thoughtes that drew him to erthe. As he looked at his gray locks on the floor, Amvrosy heard his new name:
Our brother Laurus is shearing the haires from his heade in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. We shall say for him: O Lord, have mercy!
O Lord, have mercy, answered the brethren.
August 18, when Amvrosy took the Great Schema, was the day of the martyr saints Florus and Laurus. Amvrosy was Laurus from that day on.
Elder Innokenty said from his secluded celclass="underline"
Laurus is a good name, for the plants that carry this name, laurus, are medicinal. Being evergreen, they signify eternal life.
I no longer sense unity in my life, said Laurus. I was Arseny, Ustin, Amvrosy, and I have just now become Laurus. My life was lived by four people who do not resemble one another and they have various bodies and various names. What do I have in common with the light-haired little boy from Rukina Quarter? A memory? But the longer I live, the more my reminiscences seem like an invention. I am ceasing to believe them and they thus lack the power to link me to those people who were me at various times. Life resembles a mosaic that scatters into pieces.
Being a mosaic does not necessarily mean scattering into pieces, answered Elder Innokenty. It is only up close that each separate little stone seems not to be connected to the others. There is something more important in each of them, O Laurus: striving for the one who looks from afar. For the one who is capable of seizing all the small stones at once. It is he who gathers them with his gaze. That, O Laurus, is how it is in your life, too. You have dissolved yourself in God. You disrupted the unity of your life, renouncing your name and your very identity. But in the mosaic of your life there is also something that joins all those separate parts: it is an aspiration for Him. They will gather together again in Him.
Three weeks after taking the schema, Laurus left the monastery and went to find a secluded cell for himself. This was Laurus’s inner intention for himself, but it raised no objection from the abbot and brethren.
Strange though it was, they felt a certain relief after Laurus’s departure, since the flow of people longing for healing had disrupted the monastery’s established way of life. They had only opened the gates for visitors with special permission, but the crowds of people waiting at the monastery walls could not help but trouble the brethren.
Both the brethren and the abbot tried to regard those who sought Laurus with understanding. They remembered the Lord’s words about how a city that is set on a hill cannot be hid, neither do men light a lamp, and put it under a bushel, but on a lamp stand; and it gives light unto all that are in the house. It is something else altogether that, in a cenobitic monastery, this light could feel too bright for those who thought a monastery’s particular power lies, above all, in collective prayer. That, apparently, was how the light felt.
Laurus left the monastery, taking only a chunk of bread. They attempted to compel him to take more since it was unclear what was waiting for him in his new place but Laurus said:
If God and His Most Blessed Mother forget about me in that place, then why would I be needed?
And so Laurus set off in search of a place where his soul would feel at peace. He walked through the damp autumnal forest, not memorizing the path he had taken. This was something he did not need because he did not foresee returning. He understood that his movement was the beginning of another, more important, departure.
Laurus stepped on half-rotten branches that broke under his feet without a crack. Frost shone white on yellow leaves in the mornings. Toward noon the frost turned to tiny drops that shone coldly in the sun. Laurus drank water from black woodland lakes. And each time he bent over the water, the figure of a timeworn elder in a monastic hood, with white crosses on his shoulders, rose toward him out of the depths. Laurus lifted his eyes to a sky lined with branches and pointed out the elder in the lake to Ustina:
One would think that is me, since there is no one else here to be reflected. I still continue to live through you and see you: you remain the same but you, my love, would no longer recognize me.
Sometimes Laurus thought he had already seen this reflection many years ago, but he simply could not remember when or under what circumstances. Perhaps, he thought, it was in a dream, for when dreams present images, they do not go to the trouble of observing relative things, one of which is time.
Each day, Laurus broke off a piece of the chunk of bread he had taken but it did not shrink. That circumstance surprised him so he asked Elder Innokenty:
Listen, O elder, maybe I just think I am eating?
You are a grown man and a doctor besides, but you are reasoning like a child, said the angry elder. So you tell me, how is it that a body can survive without nourishment? By what biological laws? Obviously you are eating in a most natural way. It is another matter entirely that the chunk of bread increases in weight every day, otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten off so easily.
Calmed by Elder Innokenty’s explanation, Laurus continued moving. He saw many worthy places along the way but had no preferences for any of them. He understood each time, with an inner sense, that this was not yet the final point of his wanderings. Some places were too narrow. Trees would be clustered there, standing almost right up against one another, and could, in Laurus’s opinion, crowd out any soul who settled in that place. By contrast, other places were too broad and their open spaces demanded considerable effort to adapt, for his soul to make them his own. It had been stated in one of Christofer’s manuscripts that many expanses submit to the Russian people but that these Russians will not be able to make those expanses fully their own. Being a Russian person, Laurus was wary of events taking that turn.
He wandered for many days, so many that he recognized his own notches on trees in some parts of the forest. One night, he dreamt of a place on a rise. It was a glade surrounded by tall pine trees. Bushes grew along the edge of the glade and a stone cave was visible through a thicket. The sun’s rays shone freely through the pines’ trunks, making the place bright and peaceful.
Laurus headed toward that place after waking up in the morning. He walked with the brisk pace of a person who knows his way, walking without inner doubts. Toward the end of the day, Laurus reached the place he wanted. It proved to be exactly the same place he had seen in his dream. After saying a prayer of thanks, Laurus kissed the ground he had discovered and said: