Interviewer: Were there a lot of young people then who took the monastic vows in secret?

Puzik: Well, it all depends what you mean by a lot? I can only tell you about our spiritual family.

Of course there weren't many. Father selected people who were capable of it. They were absolutely diverse: he had young people, intellectuals, people from various professions. And the girls were also incredibly varied, simple workers and those from intellectual professions.

It's not just profession that determines whether you are drawn toward the spiritual life. The spiritual life could be opened up in other ways. And among us there were people to whom Father later administered the first rank of monastic vows.

Father was very strict: he only administered the first rank of vows. There were simple girls who worked in the factories, doing manual labor. They were worn out. They came to church tired, and they sang and read.

I never had a talent for singing. That's why I always stood in line and watched to see who was coming to see Father. And that's why it came to be that I was observing his inner life. I watched how his parish gradually grew, how the number of people of all kinds was increasing, coming to see him. There were intellectuals, artists, and well-educated people from other fields, the elderly, and mothers with their children.

And I was able to watch all of that because I was praying instead of singing. The Lord let me see all of that. And since He let me see it, I went ahead and described it. 

By the word “tonsure,” from the Latin tondere, that is “to shear,” we usually mean a sacred rite instituted by the Christian Churches by which a baptized and confirmed Christian is received into the clerical order by the shearing of his/her hair and the investment with the vestment prepared for the reception of orders. The tonsure itself is not an ordination in the proper sense, nor a true order; it is rather a simple ascription of a person to the Divine service.

Over time, the appearance of tonsure varied, ending up for non-monastic clergy as generally consisting of a symbolic cutting of a few tufts of hair at first tonsure in the Sign of the Cross and in wearing a bare spot on the back of the head, which varied according to the degree of orders.

In the Catholic Church, the shaving of the head, with the tacit consent of the Holy See, seems to have passed out of use. No provincial or national council has ordered it in recent decades, even when treating of clerical dress, nor has the responsible Congregation in Vatican inserted the issue when correcting the decrees of those councils.

In Eastern Orthodoxy and in the Eastern Catholic Churches of Byzantine Rite, today there are still three types of tonsure: baptismal, monastic, and clerical. It always consists of the cutting of four locks of hair in a cruciform pattern: at the front of the head as the celebrant says "In the Name of the Father," at the back of head at the words "and the Son," and on either side of the head at the words "and the Holy Spirit." In all cases, the hair is allowed to grow back; the tonsure as such is not adopted as a hairstyle.

Baptismal tonsure is performed during the rite of Holy Baptism as a first offering by the newly baptized. This tonsure is always performed, whether the one being baptized is an infant or an adult.

Monastic tonsure (of which there are three grades, Rassophore, Stavrophore and the Great Schema) is the rite of initiation into the monastic state, and symbolizes the cutting off of self-will. Orthodox monks traditionally never cut their hair or beards after receiving the monastic tonsure as a sign of the consecration of their lives to God (reminiscence of the Vow of the Nazirite).