St. Silouan says, "The Lord moves the soul by His grace to pray for the whole world – or sometimes to pray for one particular person". He emphasizes how effective and pleasing such prayers are before the Lord: "When the Lord would have mercy on a man, He inspires others with the desire to pray for him, and helps them in their prayer. Therefore we must know that when we feel a wish to pray for someone, it means that the Lord Himself wants to show mercy on that soul and will graciously hear our prayers." It is like He wants to do good for a person, but He wants you to be a partner with Him in doing good for that person.

Once I was in Greece and a nun phoned me late in the night to tell me of some problems she was having with a person who was very precious to her, and who had become displeased with her, and punished her. I took the phone, even though I was absolutely dead after a very intense day of working. (At that time, I was proof-reading one of my translations of Fr. Sophrony's books, with the help of a former Professor of mine from Thessalonica, who used to help me check all my translations from Russian into Greek.) And this sister phoned me late one night and told me about her problem, and as I was holding the receiver I was thinking to myself, "Lord, you know that I am dead now, but give me a word for Thy servant." Suddenly, a word came to my mind, which Fr. Sophrony mentions, and which had been given to him by his Hegoumen, Archimandrite Missail, and I told her: "Never mind, be happy that you received a judgment by this person who is responsible for you – that you have been judged by this person. If you accept his judgment, then you are free from the judgment of God, because God does not judge twice." And that sister knew the monastic way, and said to me: "Thank you very much. This is enough for me. I am freed from my problem."

Elder Zacharias of Essex

Sayings of our Holy

 Fathers

The Writings of Staretz Silouan:

Adam's Lament

Staretz Silouan

But what is hard and intolerable for others becomes easy and acceptable for those who have fallen away from virtue and spiritual riches. For the soul that has lost its former confidence; that has lost hope of dispassion; that has broken the seal of chastity; that has allowed its treasury of gifts to be robbed; that has become a stranger to Divine consolation; that has rejected the commandment of the Lord; that has extinguished the beautiful fire of spiritual tears, and is wounded and pierced with sorrow by the re­membrance of this, will not only undertake the above-mentioned labours with all readiness, but will even devoutly resolve to kill itself with ascetical labours, if only there is in it a remnant of a spark of love or fear of the Lord.

I remember a remarkable lady who came to confession. She used to take people to her house for six months in order to help them when they had a crisis. One day she came and told me, "I am not at peace, and I do not know where I have stumbled. I examine myself and I see nothing wrong." Fearful and ignorant as I am, I did not know what to say to her. Somehow I managed to bring my mind to my heart and ask for a little word, and I said to her. "But it is not enough to see ourselves as we can see ourselves, we must see ourselves as God sees us. So, pray to Him: 'Lord, deliver me from my secret sin." She was a very pious woman. She started praying like that, and after two days she came back and said, "No" I know where I stumbled", and she told me. It was good, because she discovered it herself, and so she was courageous to confess it and. by the strength of the Lord, she had already overcome it.

Archmandrite Zachariah

 20 Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! 21 Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight! 22 Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink: 23 Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him!

Very noble and kind as he was, when he was speaking with me in Russian or in Greek, he would never address me in the singular, but always in the plural. Usually we do this for people who are older than we are. (In English, though, there is no distinction between formal and familiar speech.) He was strict with us when he perceived pride in us, because he knew that if he did not "service us", we would have a crash. Otherwise, he was very loving and very kind. We used to go and "tire" him, especially myself, because I was very talkative and I had a lot of questions. Sister X and I were the ones who tired him most. Fr. Sophrony named her "a barrel of questions", and another sister said to me, "That's why she's become 'a barrel of answers' now!" When he got tired, in order to tell us that it is enough, he would say a very nice rhyme in Russian, like a poem: "Allow me to express my gratitude and, with heartfelt satisfaction, take my leave."

By Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, based on an article in Pravoslavnaya Rus, No. 11, 1955, translated from Blagovestnik, a parish bulletin of the Holy Virgin Cathedral, San Francisco, CA, November 1991 (edited for length)

    What is the purpose of the Church and also of the parish within her? The word of God gives the answer. The Apostle writes: And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers: for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. (Eph 4:11-13). Here, then, is the purpose: the perfecting of the saints, the work of ministry, the building up of the Body of Christ -- a triple task of the Church and, consequently, also the task of each parish.

The first point, the perfecting of the saints is the moral perfecting of the members of the Church. The salvation of souls in Christ is first and foremost; one must never relegate it to second place. They are wrong who set as the basis of the Church’s activity the social task, i.e., the transformation of social relationships through the Church and through this the Christian elevation of the individual. Salvation in Christ is attained through prayer, the divine service, the regulations of the Church, deeds of love and beneficence, spiritual struggle. A pastor’s main concern is and must always be the salvation of the souls entrusted to him. This is also the personal concern of each member of the Church. It is accomplished within the common body of the Church -- not in isolation, but by way of mutual spiritual support, and thereby the self-loving thought only for oneself is overcome. A personal, worthy life in Christ is a responsibility before the Church as a whole.

The second task is the work of ministry -- to God and to men. It opens up before each member of the Church and of the parish a broad field of church social activity. Ministry to God: participation in the divine services, in church reading and chanting, in constructing churches, in caring for the beauty and cleanliness of the church -- these are particular examples of works, as they say, “for God.” Ministry to men: every kind of benefaction for the needy, help for the sick, disinterested efforts on behalf of others, as have been expressed recently in the sending of spiritual books, foodstuffs, clothing and medicines to needy areas overseas. In some parishes, this duty of ministering to one’s neighbor has brought to life auxiliary parish organizations. A special, very important task is the churchly upbringing of children and youth. This is a matter of exceptional importance. We are threatened with the loss of the younger generation for the Church. The duty of the parish leadership, on the one hand, is to influence families in this regard, that they not forget their duty towards their children, and, on the other hand, to form centers, Saturday and Sunday schools, children’s church choirs, and to take other measures for keeping the younger generation attached to the Church and under the Church’s influence.

One should not complain about our parishes, that they are inert in this regard. Under our meager conditions, they have displayed appropriate work, diligence and sacrifice. But here precisely is that point over which the interests of the pastorate clash with social interests. The difficulty of the priest’s position lies in not snuffing out spontaneous social activity in the parish and initiative that not infrequently comes from the laity. A priest cannot do everything himself, by himself, for everyone; he needs cooperation. But here the cooperation of individual persons with the pastor often turns into an urge to lead, to criticize, to create opposition, etc. A priest can calmly make use of the broad cooperation of the members of the parish when he has confidence in the preservation of church policy. Then there is no fear that the rights of the pastor will be usurped, there is no fear that the work will turn aside from the Church, and even do her harm. Then, too, every kind of assistance rendered to the priest, in case of his weakness, ignorance, inability, etc., cannot disturb the correct relationships in the parish.

The common Church task: The third task, the building up of the body of Christ, is the ministry for the Church as a whole, a task that expresses to the greatest extent the unity of the part with the whole, of the parish with the Church. In our church consciousness, we should never extinguish thought for the whole Orthodox Church, love for her, zeal for the Church, and more concretely and first of all, for the Orthodox Church at large to which we belong. And so, in fulfilling this third task, we are hardly equal to it.

Ministry to the Church as a whole is, practically speaking, concern for church centers. It requires, first of all, an awareness of how many ways we at the local level are indebted to these church centers. The Church administration takes care for the correct observance of the order of the services, for the printing of divine service books and the supplying of churches with them; it safeguards the succession of episcopal and priestly ordination; it takes care for the education and preparation of sacred ministers, and provides pastors for church communities. It guards the Church against arbitrariness and against those people who introduce scandal into the Church; it safeguards the external dignity of Orthodoxy as well. It cuts off overt moral temptations, wards off attacks on the faith and the Church, wherever they might come from. It is responsible for both the ideological defense of the Church and her juridical defense.

The fullness of general church life and the many-sided, fruitful activity of ecclesial, episcopal centers is direct evidence of the well-being of life within numerous individual Orthodox parishes. And conversely, an episcopal center laboring under difficulties and having a weak range of activity invariably speaks of difficult conditions in the life of a parish.

The task of building up the body of Christ’s Church is great and many-sided. Insofar as it touches the parish, it consists in the parish community not shutting itself up in its own narrow sphere, but in being a beneficial and necessary, conscious part of the whole church body.

What is the attitude of the Orthodox Church towards the critical study of the Bible, as it has been carried on in the West over the past two centuries? Since our reasoning brain is a gift from God, there is undoubtedly a legitimate place for scholarly research into Biblical origins. But, while we are not to reject this research wholesale, we cannot as Orthodox accept it in its entirety. Always we need to keep in view that the Bible is not just a collection of historical documents, but it is the book of the Church, containing God's word. And so we do not read the Bible as isolated individuals, interpreting it solely by the light of our private understanding, or in terms of current theories about source, form or redaction criticism. We read it as members of the Church, in communion with all the other members throughout the ages. The final criterion for our interpretation of Scripture is the mind of the Church. And this means keeping constantly in view how the meaning of Scripture is explained and applied in Holy Tradition: that is to say, how the Bible is understood by the Fathers and the saints, and how it is used in liturgical worship.

A we read the Bible, we are all the time gathering information, wrestling with the sense of obscure sentences, comparing and analyzing. But this is secondary. The real purpose of Bible study is much more than this—to feed our love for Christ, to kindle our hearts into prayer, and to provide us with guidance in our personal life. The study of words should give place to an immediate dialogue with the living Word himself. "Whenever you read the Gospel", says St Tikhon of Zadonsk, "Christ himself is speaking to you. And while you read, you are praying and talking with him".

In this way Orthodox are encouraged to practice a slow and attentive reading of the Bible, in which our study leads us di­rectly into prayer, as with the lectio divina of Benedictine and Cistercian monasticism. But usually Orthodox are not given detailed rules or methods for this attentive reading. The Orthodox spiritual tradition makes little use of systems of "discursive meditation", such as were elaborated in the Counter-Reformation West by Ignatius of Loyola or Francois de Sales. One reason why Orthodox have usually felt no need for such methods is that the liturgical services which they are attending, especially at Great Feasts and during Lent, are very lengthy and contain frequent repetitions of key texts and images. All this is sufficient to feed the spiritual imagination of the worshipper, so that he has no need in addition to rethink and develop the message of the church services in a daily period of formal meditation.

Approached in a prayerful manner, the Bible is found to be always contemporary—not just writings composed in the distant past but a message addressed directly to me here and now. "He who is humble in his thoughts and engaged in spiritual work," says St Mark the Monk, "when he reads the Holy Scriptures will apply everything to himself and not to someone else." As a book uniquely inspired by God and addressed to each of the faithful personally, the Bible possesses sacramental power, transmitting grace to the reader, bringing him to a point of meeting and decisive encounter. Critical scholarship is by no means ex­cluded, but the true meaning of the Bible will only be apparent to those who study it with their spiritual intellect as well as their reasoning brain.

Earlier we noted, with St Mark the Monk, how the whole of the ascetic and mystical life is already contained in the sacrament of Baptism: however far a person advances upon the Way, all that he discovers is nothing else than the revelation or making manifest of baptismal grace. The same can be said of Holy Communion: the whole of the ascetic and mystical life is a deepening and realization of our Eucharistic union with Christ the Saviour. In the Orthodox Church Communion is given to infants from the moment of their Baptism onwards. This means that the earliest childhood memories of the Church that an Orthodox Christian has will probably be linked with coming to receive Christ's Body and Blood; and the last conscious action of his life, so he hopes, will also be the reception of the Divine Gifts. So his experience of Holy Communion extends over the whole range of his conscious life. It is above all through Communion that the Christian is made one with and in Christ, "christified", "ingodded" or "deified"; it is above all through Communion that he receives the first-fruits of eternity. "Blessed is he that has eaten the Bread of love which is Jesus", writes St Isaac the Syrian. "While still in this world, he breathes the air of the resurrection in which the righteous will delight after they rise from the dead." "All human striving reaches here its ultimate goal", says Nicolas Cabasilas. "For in this sacrament we attain God himself, and God himself is made one with us in the most perfect of all possible unions...This is the final mystery: beyond this it is not possible to go, nor can anything be added to it."

When a man with such a heart as this thinks of the creatures and looks at them, his eyes are filled with tears because of the overwhelming compassion that presses upon his heart. The heart of such a man grows tender, and he cannot endure to hear of or look upon any injury, even the smallest suffering, inflicted upon anything in creation. Therefore he never ceases to pray with tears even for the dumb animals, for the enemies of truth and for all who do harm to it, asking that they may be guarded and receive God's mercy. And for the reptiles also he prays with a great compassion, which rises up endlessly in his heart, after the example of God.

This effort to purify the passions needs to be carried out on the level of both soul and body. On the level of the soul they are purified through prayer, through the regular use of the sacra­ments of Confession and Communion, through daily reading of Scripture, through feeding our mind with the thought of what is good, through practical acts of loving service to others. On the level of the body they are purified above all through fasting and abstinence, and through frequent prostrations during the time of prayer. Knowing that man is not an angel but a unity of body and soul, the Orthodox Church insists upon the spiritual value of bodily fasting. We do not fast because there is anything in itself unclean about the act of eating and drinking. Food and drink are, on the contrary, God's gift, from which we are to partake with enjoyment and gratitude. We fast, not because we despise the divine gift, but so as to make ourselves aware that it is indeed a gift—so as to purify our eating and drinking, and to make them, no longer a concession to greed, but a sacrament and means of communion with the Giver. Understood in this way, ascetic fast­ing is directed not against the body but against the flesh (p. 61). Its aim is not destructively to weaken the body, but creatively to render the body more spiritual.

Purification of the passions leads eventually, by God's grace, to what Evagrius terms apatheia or "dispassion". By this he means, not a negative condition of indifference or insensitivity in which we no longer feel temptation, but a positive state of rein­tegration and spiritual freedom in which we no longer yield to temptation. Perhaps apatheia can best be translated “purity of heart.. It signifies advancing from instability to stability, from duplicity to simplicity or singleness of heart, from the immaturity of fear and suspicion to the maturity of innocence and trust. For Evagrius dispassion and love are integrally connected, as the two sides of a coin. If you lust, you cannot love. Dispassion means that we are no longer dominated by selfishness and uncontrolled desire, and so we become capable of true love.

The "dispassioned" person, so far from being apathetic, is the one whose heart burns with love for God, for other humans, for every living creature, for all that God has made. As St Isaac the Syrian writes: 

When a man with such a heart as this thinks of the creatures and looks at them, his eyes are filled with tears because of the overwhelming compassion that presses upon his heart. The heart of such a man grows tender, and he cannot endure to hear of or look upon any injury, even the smallest suffering, inflicted upon anything in creation. Therefore he never ceases to pray with tears even for the dumb animals, for the enemies of truth and for all who do harm to it, asking that they may be guarded and receive God's mercy. And for the reptiles also he prays with a great compassion, which rises up endlessly in his heart, after the example of God.'

Sometimes we think we have no energy , but we have an incredible amount of energy in us. The secret is to find a humble thought which will put us to shame, which will bring contrition to us and release that spiritual energy in us. That is why we have  to put ourselves in the humble way of "going down", in order to "fish out" those humble thoughts that release the internal spiritual energy that will enable us to do the work of God. I have a fellow priest and one day he was very tired from his ministry with the people. It was a Sunday and he was completely exhausted. He told me, "In the night when I am so exhausted, I usually just go to my room, look at the icons and say, 'Good night to all of you', and go to bed." But that night he felt ashamed of doing that, instead he walked up and down the corridor saying, "Sorry Lord, I cannot pray tonight. Forgive me." "Sorry Lord, I am tired, I cannot pray tonight. Forgive me." For half an hour he went up and down the corridor saying these words, and in that way God enabled him to perform the rule of his prayer. So we can always discover in ourselves an incredible amount of spiritual energy, if we find the right key, "the key of David" (cf. Isa. 22:22, Rev. 3:7), and make the right movement to release it, that is to say, a humble thought, given to us by the Lord, when we put ourselves in His judgment, by "going down". He gives us "a mouth and wisdom" (Luke 21:15), the humble thought that releases spiritual energy.