As he was giving up his spirit, Abba Benjamin said to his spiritual sons: Do this and you will be saved: Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks for all things.
A word spoken at the hour of death has no room left for rhetoric. Everything superfluous falls away, like leaves shaken from a tree, and only the wood remains — what truly holds the fruit. This is why the spiritual testaments of the Fathers, spoken at the very threshold of the soul’s parting from the body, carry a different weight than any other teaching: there is no more time for nuance, for softening, for „perhaps.” Abba Benjamin does not leave behind one counsel among others. He leaves everything he understood could be said in a single breath.
And he chooses three things, not one. He could have ended with a single word — „pray” would have sufficed, for prayer contains everything. But he binds three together, as though even one, however great, could still stand crooked if left alone. It is the same wisdom spoken by Ecclesiastes: a threefold cord is not quickly broken (Eccl. 4:12). A single strand frays at the first rough test; three braided together bear a weight none could carry alone. Joy without prayer slides into groundless euphoria. Prayer without thanksgiving can close in on itself, becoming endless petition, discontent dressed in pious words. Thanksgiving without joy hardens into stoic resignation, clenched endurance. The three hold each other like a cord: each strand weakens when severed, but together they do not break.
What St. Paul writes to the disciples of Thessalonica — Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you (1 Thess. 5:16-18) — is not a coincidence of vocabulary with Abba Benjamin, but the same cord, handed down strand by strand, from Apostle to desert-dweller. The order is telling, and not accidental: joy comes first, not as the fruit of prayer but as its foundation. Evagrius knows this when he writes that true prayer cannot rise from a soul in turmoil; first the passions’ disturbance must be stilled (apatheia), or the mind prays with its hands bound. But this „always” joy is not the world’s gladness, which lasts only as long as its occasion. It is what St. Isaac the Syrian calls joyful mourning — penthos that does not exclude joy but gives birth to it: the one who weeps for himself before God discovers, beneath the tear, a joy that nothing external brought and nothing external can take.
Here philosophy stops halfway, not for lack of depth, but for lack of anyone to receive the gift from. Aristotle ties eudaimonia to the soul’s activity according to virtue, across a whole life — a joy earned, built, merited through long practice. The Stoics go further toward „give thanks for all things”: Epictetus teaches receiving all that comes as permitted by providence, even loss, even death. But it is thanksgiving without a face before it — gratitude toward an impersonal order, not toward a Person. The difference is not one of nuance but of foundation: the Stoic endures what he cannot change; the Christian gives thanks to Someone who loved him before he asked for anything. Job does not say „so it had to be”; he says the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord (Job 1:21) — the name, not merely the fact.
Modern psychology has rediscovered fragments of the same cord, without the stitching that holds them. Emmons and McCullough’s research on gratitude shows, with laboratory instruments, what Abba Benjamin knew without a laboratory: those who record daily what they are grateful for sleep better, fall ill less often, complain less. But science stops at correlation and technique — „practice gratitude” as a cognitive exercise, recommended much like running or intermittent fasting. Thanksgiving for all things, including what hurts, remains unintelligible to a psychology that seeks the good of subjective well-being; it belongs only to one who believes his true good does not coincide with what he feels today, but with what God is working through what he feels today.
This is why Abba Benjamin’s three commands are not three counsels among others, lined up beside the rest, but the strands of the cord by which the soul is bound to the ship’s mast in the storm — so as not to be swept away by the wave. A word spoken at the final hour does not describe a state of well-being; it shows the way. And this way, for whoever attempts it, proves to be not three ways, but one, threefold only in appearance.
