وجبـــــــة روحيـــــ(†)ــــــــــة يوميـــــــــة

[Mary Naeem]

Regarding Prayer

A young man asked an Elder in the Holy Mountain: “Elder, how I can obtain the unceasing prayer? How I can obtain the prayer of the heart?”

The Elder responded: “The quantity will bring the quality.”

Personal Testimonies to Dr. Nick Stergiou

[Mary Naeem]

Christmas Are we Ready?

Beloved in Christ, I would like to ask you a question; I ask it of myself and I ask it of you. Are we prepared to celebrate the great feast of Christmas?

There are two kinds of preparation; material and spiritual. Our material preparation is more or less finished. Housewives have cleaned their houses, husbands have finished – or have almost finished – their shopping, and children await their presents. Everyone has written their Christmas cards, signing them with the customary, ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘Happy New Year’. This is worldly preparation; I am not interested in this. What I am interested in is spiritual preparation, the kind of preparation which makes us ready to celebrate the great event of the Incarnation of the Divine Word as is proper. Only a small number have properly prepared themselves. Of a thousand Christians, I doubt if even one celebrates Christmas truly. Does my estimate seem exaggerated? Let us see.

How is Christmas celebrated today? A portion of Christians will celebrate it ‘typically’, let us say. Hearing the bells on Christmas Eve, they will go and take part in the service out of habit. This is certainly better than being absent altogether; it is something at least.

Others will imitate foreign customs and practices, forgetting the ecclesiastical celebration altogether; in other words, they will pass Christmas Eve without the scent of Christ. For Orthodox Christians, Christmas is meaningless if it is celebrated without church services, without prayer, without confession, without Holy Communion, without forgiveness, without almsgiving. Indeed, the devil has sown a new seed in our homeland, and it is sprouting up everywhere like mushrooms grow in manure. On Christmas Eve people put on these reveillon – a foreign custom and a foreign word – they put on parties in luxurious hotels and other such places, far from the Church, far from hymns, far from the Divine Liturgy, where people gather and amuse themselves with worldly music, with food, with drink and whatever follows from these things. Such a practice is a thorn in the field of our homeland. If it continues to spread, the spirit of secularization will overtake the Christian feast altogether.

Some, then, celebrate Christmas ‘typically’, others put on these reveillon and trade in the Church feast for something altogether worldly. And still others, what do they do? They leave. They are not satisfied here. Greece is not enough for them. They have money to spare so they take trips and go on tours. On Christmas Eve when the bells are ringing, these people will be far from their homes in different places, and not only in our country. They aren’t satisfied here, so they hop on an airplane and go celebrate Christmas in Rome, in London, in Paris, in different places.

These, beloved, and anyone else who has openly denied the faith, have cast Christmas out of their hearts. For a large number of people, then, Christmas is nothing but another chance to dull their boredom; the actual content of the feast holds no appeal for them. Yes! That day you will have it all! You will have your great salons, your ornate rugs, your curtains, your fancy cutlery, your drinks, your meals, your music, your trips. You will have everything! You will be missing one thing, however. Your will be missing the most valuable thing; the thing which gives the feast meaning! Lacking this thing, what kind of Christmas can you expect to have? Your Christmas will be a Christmas without Christ!

But why? How did this happen? How did things get to this point? This is the age which the Prophet Isaiah foresaw. There will come a day, he said, when men will be drunk without wine. This day has arrived. Contemporary man is, “…drunk, but not with wine.” (Isaiah 29:9) For one to be drunk with wine during these days in undoubtedly a sin, for, drunkards shall not inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Cor 6:10) There is, however, a worse kind of drunkenness: woe to those who are drunk without wine, says Isaiah.

What, then, is contemporary man drunk on? One is drunk on the love of glory. Another is drunk on the love of money; another is drunk on women and indecent sights; another is drunk on card playing, on games of chance; another on an obsession with sports teams; another on plays and films; another on enjoyments and luxuries. I have particularly noticed that a good many are drunk on politics, something which has become a passion only for us in Greece alone. I say this as one who keeps himself out of party politics. Were you to open my heart you would find nothing but my homeland and my Christ. Here in Greece there is a pathological attachment to politics. Even on Christmas Eve, the feast will be overshadowed by discussions of politics. Nowhere else can one find such a phenomenon.

I have also noticed of late that many have become drunk on that strong wine described in the Apocalypse; that wine which the noetic Babylon will give the rulers and the people to drink. This wine, the commentators say, is the pagan spirit, the moral depravity of the world. This wine is so strong that if you were to drink just a few drops, it will cause you to lose your faith, you will forget everything. The strongest wine, then, is not money, or women, or shameful lusts, or other sensual pleasures; it is the cosmopolitan spirit of modern life, it is the emancipation from devotion, knowledge infused with pride, the science of the atheist, the atheistic rebellion, the denial of God and the divinization of man. It is this wine which has made many in our age drunk.

Men are drunk, then, on various wines offered to him by the ruler of this age in his golden cup. Do you know what these men are like? I will show you by means of an example.

I try, with God’s help, to be a teacher. So I travel to a village where I find someone and try to teach him something about Christ, about the faith, about the mysteries. He listens, but the others tell me, “Don’t waste your time, he’s drunk! Don’t bother sitting with him and taking to him!” This is how the world is today…it is drunk without wine! Is it worth speaking to such men?

But I appeal to you, my brothers. I am not speaking to drunks, to those made dizzy by the idols. It is my hope that I speak to the faithful who know but one kind of drunkenness, that holy drunkenness described by the Psalmist who exhorts us to, “…taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 33:8) I hope that you have you ears open for, “Blessed is he that speaketh in the ears of them that will hear.” (Sirach 25:9)

[Mary Naeem]

Modern Saints: Abbess Thaisia

A Glimpse of Her Holy Life:

Abbess Thaisia was born in 1840 to a noble family in Novgorod. She was named Maria in honour of the Most Holy Theotokos who had granted Maria’s parents the safe arrival of their baby after two previous children reposed at birth. Little Maria was enrolled in the Pavolovsky Institute for young women in St. Petersburg where she received the (prophetic) nicknames ‘nun’ and ‘abbess’. Even at this young age Maria’s spiritual nobility began to emerge as she received multiple visitations of divine grace. To her mother’s dismay Maria disclosed that she wished to pursue monasticism. After her mother received a vision of the Mother of God reprimanding her for prohibiting Maria from following in the footsteps of countless holy fathers and mothers, Maria became a novice in Tikhvin at the Holy Monastery of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple (the feast day is November 21). In 1870, at the age of 30, Maria was tonsured a nun with the name Arcadia. She was tonsured again, into a higher degree of monasticism, with the name Thaisia in 1872. Over the next 10 to 13 years or so Mother Thaisia lived in three or four different monasteries, suffering on account of poor living conditions and cruel treatment by the sisters. In 1885 Mother Thaisia was made Abbess of a convent in Leushino. Here she laboured to establish a firm foundation for the holy monastery, as well as set up a school for orphans of clergymen which later became a centre for spiritual education as an ecclesiastical college for girls. In 1891 she met her beloved spiritual father, St. John of Kronstadt, to whom she “poured out her soul”* even after his repose. In 1915, after serving as abbess for some 30 years, Mother Thaisia reposed on January 2. May we have her blessing!

Wise Counsel from the Abbess:

“It is through sorrows that the great designs of God’s Providence are manifested to us. ‘God is known in His burdens.’ But how heavy and hopeless our sorrows appear to our short-sighted and faint-hearted minds! We do not understand, we do not even want to see in the sorrows that befall us the great purposes of Providence; we are unable to obey God without murmuring” (Abbess Thaisia: An Autobiography, p.131)

“Commit yourself, I repeat, without defence to the will of your [spiritual] guides – give way to them, like clay to the potter, like iron to a smith; let them mold and hammer on the forge of obedience (as was expressed by St. John, author of the Ladder) your unruly and proud will, until it will be ground into the soft wax of humility, so that with understanding and discernment you may repeat the words of the Psalmist: “In our humiliation the Lord remembered us” (Ps. 135:23), or, “It is good for me that Thou hast humbled me, that I might learn Thy statutes (Ps. 118:71).” (Letters to a Beginner, p. 47)

*This is a line from a poem the abbess wrote about her spiritual father after his repose

matushka constantina

[Mary Naeem]

With all our strength we serve selfishness

Man has many powers within himself and with them he serves selfishness. When he serves it, it arises, and all the powers of [his soul] are at attention with much fervour and high spirits. When he does not serve it, he becomes helpless. He is not able to do vigils, nor prayers, nor prostrations, nor fasting. He is powerless, spiritless. His strength is sapped.

This happens is mainly evident to those who are sick and in situations where a person has a psychological state operating within him. You see the most active person within the community, in life, in the home and in the family, and then he is seized by the symptoms of sickness, as if he has no strength. And the poor creature thinks that he has suffered something and has no strength. No, he hasn’t suffered anything. But what then? From the beginning he has been serving an idol. And now, that something comes up so that he is unable to serve the idol any longer, from that moment, he loses all strength, loses all spirit, all his desire is gone.

The secret is for someone to show the courage to pin himself down to a spiritual struggle in order to humble himself. But no matter what he needs a guide. No matter what he needs to be supported in some way. He isn’t able to do it alone. He will just mess everything up. If he will be under obedience, and will take the right stance before God, he will be freed from his infirmity and become a true Christian.

[Mary Naeem]

Spiritual life. Sayings of Saint Paisios of Mount Athos

“What gas is to a machine, so is the heart to the spiritual life. Whenever man does something from the heart, he’s not exhausted by it. For this reason, whenever people ask me what they should study, I tell them instead what they should love. In particular certain professions, like ‘doctor’, and ‘teacher’, require that those doing them love the work a lot. This is the same in the spiritual life. The heart must participate in prayer”.

***

“The spiritual life requires a great deal of self denial, and of love of virtue for virtue’s sake”.

***

“When someone has low morale, we should give him courage and raise him up. However, when someone’s morale is high and he has egotism, we ought to humble him.”

[Mary Naeem]

Be like a tire!

“We have to live with sincerity and without hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and pharisaism. The course of our life should resemble the course of a tire of a car. In a tire there is one point that touches the ground but the rest is raised above it. Let us have the same in our lives, by not being immersed completely on earthly material concerns.”

Saint Ambrosios of Optina

[Mary Naeem]

Sayings of Saint Paisios of Mount Athos

“The time has now come for the prophecy of St. Anthony the Great to become reality: ‘A time will come when men will go mad. If someone is logical, they will call him crazy’. And this, simply because he won’t be like them”.

***

“Fools for Christ have a great deal of humility, as well as something unique that sets them apart from the other Saints. Because of this, they learn the secrets of God. In the past, one would see a lot of them here, on Athos (…)”.

[Mary Naeem]

Enduring Trials

“Whatever you endure is a gold medal. To endure trials and tribulations gives you so much more than doing good deeds and you gain Paradise.”

Elder Panais from Lyse

[Mary Naeem]

Before the Nativity

(Mat. 1: 1-25)

The biggest evil and the biggest of all goods

It so happens that even a lot of christians have not realised that all tribulations, all evil are due to sin, due to the badness within us. It is not the others to blame. And if Christ doesn’t save you, you are not saved; there is no other way to salvation.

If sin is the biggest evil, the biggest of all goods is that Christ is “with us”[1]. Not only does God save man, but He saves man in a miraculous way; because Man Christ is united with God forever and this thread will never be cut. Now, the whole point for every person is to find God for sure, to have and hold God in him for sure. And that happens, when you believe in Christ, when you repent, when you humble yourself, when you obey to Christ, when you strive to do his will.

If you take the decision not to remain a superficial christian but to give your heart to Christ and belong to him, you will experience, while struggling, what it means not having God by your side or what it feels like not being with God. You will see your poverty, your “nothingness”, that you are in shambles and you will realise you are being destroyed, that there is chaos below your feet. At that moment wish to be with Christ, long for Christ with all your might and your whole existence; feel the great need to be united with Christ.

Then, as all support and human comfort give way, you really long for Christ, love Christ; you begin to realise what it means that Christ came to earth, what it means that his name is Jesus-Saviour, Emmannuel, which translates “God is with us”. And the heart fills with faith, hope, love for Christ, even the longing to go through martyrdom, for the sake of not losing Christ.

Let’s hope that God sheds his light on us and helps this present Christmas to have such a life living experience as described.

[1] Mat. 1: 23

Transcribed talks by Archimandrite Symeon Kragiopoulos

From: Holy Hesychasterion “The Nativity of Theotokos” Publications.

[Mary Naeem]

Turn the wheel

For everybody that lives in the world, do not despair when you are possessed by many passions, the weight of your sins is extremely heavy, and you feel you are driving really fast “downhill”. Put your hope in Christ’s hands and turn suddenly and abruptly the steering wheel in the way of God, uphill. Soon you will even bypass other slowly moving cars that were running ahead for many years on the road of God.

St. Paisios the Hagiorite