It is very different indeed.
As to being indwelt by the Holy Spirit, this is something that is experienced by all believers. Spending a life in seclusion from society does not deepen the indwelling for when we are saved we have as much of the Spirit as we are going to have. Spending extended time in the Word can certainly deepen our understanding of it, and usually does, but it does not make us perfect people.
Your monastic appears (and I only say this because none of us truly knows the inward man)to have spent his life devoted to God. He did not become a perfect human though (not that you were claiming perfection for him). If what he said was in conflict with Scripture (and I hold that it was in this instance), it should be rejected no matter how blessed is memory was.
God does not await us in the sense of Him reacting to what we are going to do. When we become ready, it is only because the Spirit has already been at work in our lives. Again, it is all His initiative, His drawing, His wooing, and His sovereign action on our minds and hearts by supplying us with believing faith. Faith itself is, after all, a fruit of the Spirit.
"Spending a life in seclusion from society does not deepen the indwelling for when we are saved we have as much of the Spirit as we are going to have."
Here is something else the archimandrite wrote:
"While we are still in this life we shall often waver in our self-determining, hesitating whether to fulfill the commandments or give way to our passions. Gradually, as we struggle, the mystery of Christ will be revealed to us if we devote ourselves totally to obeying His precepts. The moment will come when heart and mind are so suffused by the vision of the infinite holiness and humility of the God-Christ that our whole being will rise in a surge of love for God."
You see, herein lies the difference. Even before the end of the Roman persecutions, men and women went into the desert to live lives of prayer and seclusion, withdrawing from the world. The hope was and is that such a life might lead to a death to the self so that one's entire existence is focused solely on God. The result of such a dying to the self is this:
"When the intellect has been perfected, it unites wholly with God and is illumined by divine light, and the most hidden mysteries are revealed to it. Then it truly learns where wisdom and power lie.... While it is still fighting against the passions it cannot as yet enjoy these things.... But once the battle is over and it is found worthy of spiritual gifts, then it becomes wholly luminous, powerfully energized by grace and rooted in the contemplation of spiritual realities. A person in whom this happens is not attached to the things of this world but has passed from death to life." +Thalassios
Put another way, +Symeon the New Theologian wrote this:
"Can a man take fire into his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?' says the wise Solomon. And I say: can he, who has in his heart the Divine fire of the Holy Spirit burning naked, not be set on fire, not shine and glitter and not take on the radiance of the Deity in the degree of his purification and penetration by fire? For penetration by fire follows upon purification of the heart, and again purification of the heart follows upon penetration by fire, that is, inasmuch as the heart is purified, so it receives Divine grace, and again inasmuch as it receives grace, so it is purified. When this is completed (that is, purification of heart and acquisition of grace have attained their fullness and perfection), through grace a man becomes wholly a god."
For Eastern Christians, this describes the fulfillment of God's plan for us at creation, lost in the Fall and restored by the Incarnation.
The minute you say "wooing" we have you.
I feel like that's what we've been saying all along. Wooing is ALL ABOUT asking permission - -don't you remember? And yet, if you know your business, you know the permission will be granted when you ask it.
The problem is, Does God wnat lapdogs or free humans? Yes there's a sense, I tried to address is above in the post about geometry, in which we are swallowed up, overwhelmed, ravished and glad to be so. But the lover always wants to hear the freely given "yes," of the beloved. He can compel a "yes," surely, but what is that worth? The challenge of wooing is to get a free yes, and yet the wooer knows he will get one, as I say, if he knows his craft.
He is such a sovereign that His subjects freely, eagerly, and joyfully grant him Sovereignty