This is very sad indeed.
The title of this post, though, should more accurately say "former novice", since he had not been a resident of the monastery for some time before his tragic demise.
This man and his family are now in need of much prayer. His non-Orthodox parents were vehemently against Orthodoxy and the monastery in particular; and constantly harassed the bishop, the monastery, and their son about his decision to become an Orthodox monk. His dad has been known to join Orthodox discussion lists and send lengthy messages railing against all things Orthodox. After 6 years, his son did leave the monastery and returned home to his parents; but now that he has left his parents and returned to the monastery to end his own life, his father is all the more enraged and blames Orthodoxy, the bishop, and the monastery, for his son’s decision to take his own life. May the Lord remove this bitterness and heal these most painful wounds.
The former novice left a lot of comments on YouTube in the months prior to his tragic end that suggest that he was not well. He claimed, for instance, that the monastery buries monks while they are still living (to explain why monastics there and on Mt. Athos do not experience rigor mortis before their burial), that the Holy Fire in Jerusalem is a fake, that Elder Joseph the Hesychast was a charlatan, the monastery’s Elder is “from Satan”, and many other things that are beyond belief.
In his public YouTube profile, it can be seen that this man was also viewing and "liking" a number of videos on machine guns and the making of explosives in recent months. The fact that the report linked above states that he went to the monastery with two guns and a knife suggests that he may have intended to end more lives than just his own. In the midst of such a tragedy, we can perhaps be relieved that more lives did not end on this sad day.
May the Lord have mercy and give strength to all who are impacted by this tragedy.
