Do not direct your gaze towards the enemy. Never get into a controversy with him whom you cannot possibly resist. With his millennia of experience he knows the very trick that can render you helpless at once. No, stand in the middle of your heart’s field and keep your gaze upward; then the heart is protected from all sides at once: the Lord Himself sends His angels to guard it both from right and left
When Dwight D. Eisenhower was President from 1953 to 1961, he received a letter from eight-year-old Keith Aiken of Trumbull, CT. Kevin wrote, “After listening to the news about the cold war, I am worried about the people in the world. In thinking it over, I have a plan. Get all the leaders together who want war, put them in a ring and let them fight it out.” I’m sure that many veterans of foreign
While in sadness we react passively to our unfulfilled wishes, anger is an active response. Evagrius also identifies anger with a demon. For him anger clearly shows how humans can be utterly dominated by another force. “Anger is the most vehement of the passions. It is a welling up of the excitable part of the soul directed against someone who has injured us or by whom we believe ourselves injured. It unceasingly irritates our souls
DAY TWENTY-SIX 29. A brother in a monastery was falsely accused of fornication and he arose and went to Father Anthony. The brothers also came from the monastery to correct him and bring him back. They set about proving that he had done this thing, but he defended himself and denied that he had done anything of the kind. Now Father Paphnutius happened to be there, and he told them this parable: “I have seen
DAY EIGHTEEN 21. It happened one day that one of the brothers in the monastery of Father Elias was tempted. Cast out of the monastery, he went over the mountain to Father Anthony. The brother lived near him for a while and then Anthony sent him back to the monastery from which he had been expelled. When the brothers saw him they cast him out yet again, and he went back to Father Anthony saying,
DAY THIRTEEN 16. A brother said to Father Anthony, Pray for me,” The elder said to him, “I will have no mercy upon you, nor will God have any, if you yourself do not make an effort and if you do not pray to God.” DAY FOURTEEN 17. One day some elders came to see Father Anthony. In the midst of them was Father Joseph. Wanting to test them, the elder suggested a text from
DAY EIGHT 10. He said also, “Just as fish die if they stay too long out of water, so the monks who loiter outside their cells or pass their time with men of the world lose the intensity of inner peace. So like a fish going towards the sea, we must hurry to the cell, for fear that if we delay outside we will lose our interior watchfulness. 11. He said also, “He who wishes
DAY ONE 1. When the holy Father (Abba) Anthony was living in the desert he was afflicted with lethargy (“accidie” – despondency/melancholy), and attacked by many imaginations (“logismoi”- thoughts/imaginations). He said to God, “Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts will not leave me alone. What shall I do in my afflictions? How can I be saved? A little later, when he went outside, Anthony saw a man like himself sitting at his
By Fr. George Morelli “But whosoever shall cause one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be to his advantage that a millstone turned by an ass were hung upon his neck, and he were drowned in the deep of the sea.” (Mt. 18:6) In the United States and many European countries as well, we are coming up to the annual festival of the celebration of “All Hallows’ Evening.”
By Father Lawrence Farley We Orthodox confess that we are amphibians—that is, that we are part animal, part angelic, that we simultaneously inhabit both the visible and the invisible world, the realms of both men and spirits. We have prayers in our daily prayer rule to our guardian angel, and we ask for help against the attacks of demonic spirits. For most of us, this bi-partite existence remains mostly theoretical, in that while we acknowledge
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