The Start of WWIII

[ArmyMatt]

I mean you're more likely to get hit by a bus tomorrow. Every evening my prayer says to point to my bed and say, Is this bed to be my coffin?

this.

 

[The Liturgist]

I mean you're more likely to get hit by a bus tomorrow. Every evening my prayer says to point to my bed and say, Is this bed to be my coffin?

This is the Orthodox way. We don’t know when the end will come, so we have to prepare for our own demise, since either way we will be judged by Christ Pantocrator, but fortunately for us, He is also our advocate and is infinitely merciful, so we must pray to Him and repent so that we can bask in the love of the Holy Trinity which we are called to emulate.

Also regarding the prophecies of Athonite monastics, we must remember what St. Peter wrote, that no prophecy is of any private interpretation. The correct interpretation of what they said is a matter for the Orthodox Church as a whole to address, which includes the laity but also the episcopate, and furthermore it may only be fully comprehensible in retrospect, which has often been the cases with prophecy. For example, there are prophecies of the early monastics, the desert fathers, about the difficulty later monastics would have, which are now obvious in their meaning to us, given the spiritual struggles that the modern world engenders, but which I suspect may have been very confusing and alarming to the early monastic communities that emerged in Egypt in the late fourth and early fifth centuries following the labors of the first hermits such as St. Paul the Hermit and St. Anthony the Great, fighting against the devil alone in the isolation of the desert, which is a vocation which interestingly the Desert Fathers sought to move their followers away from due to the extreme danger faced by solitaries, so that most Orthodox churches at present bless hermits to struggle in a solitary ways only after years or decades of formation in cenobitic monasteries or idiorythmic sketes.