- Oct 5, 2020
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I recently found a number of article snippets from Elder Symeon Kragiopoulos, Abbot of Holy Trinity Monastery in Panorama. He is very straight forward, and I found them simple and practical, so I've pasted a great many in my delight.
This one was an "oof", as someone who reads too much.
Make Good Use of Pain
“Know this: When pain will have completed the work it is supposed to do, God takes away. It is not difficult at all for God to remove whichever pain. … A Christian is capable of making such good use of every pain so that he can constantly be in paradise. …. Let there be no complaint, no rebellion, no kicking about.
If possible, whichever pain you have, deal with it by saying these words: “Let it be blessed, my God. Whatever You Want.” This way our pain won’t get wasted but will be exploited to the full. We will take advantage of it, and the great good which saves will come to our hearts. When God visits you with sorrows, say: “Thank you, my God. As I had absolutely no intention to embrace a few ugly things, a few pains, and truly follow your path, you caught up with me and gave me a few. How can I thank you enough?” (!) [+S.K]
God acts at will through human habits and situations
The moment people give you trouble and tick you off, inwardly all sorts of passions fire up. If you look at this fact from the right perspective, it will do you good. Because you get to see what is in you, which makes you feel embittered, sad or worried. You get to see why you want to take it out on others and why you react in such a way. You should drink this bitter cup thinking, “Oh my God, look at the badness with- in me!” Because if there weren’t any passions or sins in your heart, you would not suffer nor would you feel anything at all, no matter how badly people treat you.
Everyone should have this yearning, everyone should be possessed by this truth and should start like this, and then the rest, the deeper things of spir- itual life will follow.
God acts at will through human habits and situations or, if you like, through human sins. He carries out His plan.
Pain is a shortcut to salvation
It says in the Gerondikon: “In the morning you may be in hell and in the evening you can be in paradise”. What is meant is that in the morning man may have committed sins, but, as in the course of the day he came to his senses, showed reverence, repented and wept for his sins. As the sun sets, it is no big deal for God to place him in paradise. Things are easy and the road to salvation is short. We, by having the wrong attitude, make things hard and the road to salvation “un-short”.
Whatever your condition is, if you repent, God welcomes you and you are saved. All you need is to repent truly.
You may repent for something you have done, but you repent because your egoism has been hurt. You go to confession, for the one and only reason that your egoism has been wounded. Not because you have sinned in the eyes of God. You had a good impression of yourself. As you have sinned though, you can no longer have it. And that makes you suffer. This is not repentance, though.
Walking together with God
We often feel miserable, because we think we lack this or that. We lack nothing, but even if we may lack a few things, we shouldn’t be feeling miserable. Let us say: “Dear God, you are ahead of the game, you outmaneuvered me again and I am grateful for that. I was not at all in the mood to deprive myself of certain pleasures. But you have outstripped me and allowed for things to happen in such a way, that these pleasures have been taken away from me. Thank you, my God. I am grateful to you”.
Why are you hurting, dear man?
Why are you hurting so much? Not for any other reason, but because there is resistance in you, because there is rebellion. And here is how this rebellion works. As it happens with a fortress… which is being under assault from the outside. The stronger the person, who is inside fighting for it, resists, the more intense the efforts of the attackers become to siege the fortress. To break doors, to get into it and occupy it.
This is what happens with God and the soul. Every one of us is entrenched within his impregnable fortress-stronghold of his own establishment.
For a lifetime long God tries through His grace to knock down this fortress, to reach you, to touch you, to embrace you. And you fight against it. You fight back with all your might.
The visitations of pain, the visitations of God through pain, are such a thing exactly. And you don’t give in. That’s why you are hurting. Because you have your own strong will. You’ve got egoism. You’ve got selfishness. The resistance and rebellion are solid, they aren’t something vague.
No matter what happens to him, a saint will say: “let it be blessed”. And he moves on. And he savours all the blessing of pain. A saint doesn’t get hurt because there is no resistance to the will of God in him. Nor is there any rebellion against how God did or does everything. What hurts a saint is sin only. But this kind of pain nurtures the soul, invigorates man, endows man with life.
Humble yourself and say: I am under God’s wing. I live under God’s providence. It can’t be that God has done things wrongly. It can’t be that God has lost control. It seems He needs to hurt me. It seems I need to struggle. It seems that this, that or the other suffering is absolutely necessary. And so is all that’s happening to me. If you say so, you see everything differently.
Whether we like it or not, we will live this life and whether we like it or not, we will go through whatever there is to go through.
All sufferings are the warp through which, like a weft, goes the grace of God, his miraculous interventions, his whole uncreated divine energy, and in such a way, day by day, man is transformed.
Elder Simeon Kragiopoulos Reposes in the Lord
However, we know that we have a Saviour, we know that Christ came to earth. Then we start to understand what it means that he came to save us, and we run to the Saviour. We run to the Lord with pain, with prayer, with a cry, with faith, with hope and a firm conviction that the Lord will accept us and will save us. The Lord wants us to approach things exactly like this. This is not our own daring or our own boldness. He wants us act just like that, to entrust ourselves in this way, and for this reason he gave us promises. So someone does this work, and little by little the decay of his soul, that lies in the subconscious and the unconscious, emerges.
This one was an "oof", as someone who reads too much.
Why does someone become a hypocrite?
Man is troubled, struggles for years, he tries this and he tries that in order to achieve something, but he sees no progress in the spiritual life. Since we have within us an uncontrolled part that does what it wants, how will we succeed? But it’s not just that we don’t progress in our Christian life, in our spiritual life. It is also that something else happens. While we are Christians for years and we hear and read so much, and have a good disposition, we start pretending to be pious. Not that anyone plans to do this, no. We take this situation where someone has a good disposition, but he doesn’t manage ultimately to be a spiritual person as he’d like, as he hears and reads in the lives of the saints. Instead, he starts to pretend. So not only is a person ignorant about himself and his entire inner state, not only is he not able to accomplish great deeds, but furthermore he becomes a hypocrite.
Now how can a person be healed? Life passes just like this. It ends, we leave this world, and what have we done? Only God knows. God knows, but He wants us to know too, even from this world. He wants us to do what is required so as to become holy.
