Pachomius is not well known or much remembered. His primary claim to notoriety is that he began the first monastery with written-down rules (an order, per se)–this all happening in Egypt at some point in the early 4th century.

Yet what is remarkable is how Pachomius came to Christianity, and the startling contrast with much of what passes for Good News (i.e., Evangelical) Christianity in America today.

Pachomius was raised in a family who, Butler informs us, had idolatrous beliefs (meaning that they were neither Jews nor Christians). He went into the Egyptian branch of the Roman army at an appropriate age, and discovered that soldiers (at least those recruited from Egypt) were treated terribly, and were little more than indentured servants subsisting on the most meager rations, shunted into wretched and over-crowded quarters, and punished like the galley slaves in the epic motion picture, Ben-Hur.

At one point, he and a number of his fellow soldier-slaves were put on board a boat on the Nile River, only to end up in the city of Thebes. There, they were met by a group of strangers-to-them who were Christians. Butler writes:

Those true disciples of Christ sought every opportunity of relieving and comforting all that were in distress, and were moved with compassion towards the recruits, who were kept close confined, and very ill-treated. The Christians of this city showed them the same tenderness as if they had been their own children; took all possible care of them, and supplied them liberally with money and necessaries.

This, put simply, rocked Pachomius’s world. These Theban Christians were zealous in caring for any and all among the strangers and the needy who happened, literally, to wash up on their shores. Their care was disinterested with respect to anyone’s nationality, faith, heritage, or circumstances, and yet that same care was personal, tender, and bounteous. They did not require that Pachomius be or become a Christian, nor did they require that he show proper identification, fill out paperwork (papyrus work?), go to a detention center, get on a waiting list, swear allegiance to Thebes, or anything other than that he consider accepting the love and the tangible care that they offered him (and for which they asked nothing in return).

What better things do Christians in America today have to do than this? Seriously?