Perché disturbare Dio? Il padre era discreto non solo nei confronti degli uomini, ma anche verso Dio. Nel periodo successivo all’intervento all’occhio aveva dei dolori fortissimi, si era ridotto quasi in fin di vita e i medici avevano perso ogni speranza. Le monache hanno pensato allora di celebrare il rito della benedizione dell’olio (efcheleo): con […]
The same lady remembered the following: “Once the Elder said to me, “Many of you women go and throw away whatever broken and useless thing you’ve got - old pans with holes in them, furniture, shoes and other worn out things. You put them in some storeroom out of the way. Then you lock the […]
With inner enlightenment, the Elder knew about my love for music in general. He wanted to help me in that area. One afternoon, as we were walking through the pine-forest he said to me, “It’s good to listen to music. The most superior music is Byzantine music, because it doesn’t agitate the soul. Instead, it […]
I wanted his opinion about something that I had apprehended. When I got the chance, I said: “Elder, observation of various incidents in my life have made me come to the following conclusion and I try to put into practice as much as I can. When someone disagrees with me, and I am convinced of […]
The Elder lived out the love of the New Testament, and evaluated everything using this love as a criterion. I once talked to him about the moral crisis of our age. A crisis which, with the amazing audio-visual means of telecommunication, has taken on the form of a worldwide epidemic. There has been nothing […]
The Elder also reacted against all factional and separatist tendencies within the Church. He viewed this as the amputation and division of the united body of Christ. He wanted the improvement of Christian community life to come from the sanctification of persons, embodied in the Church, not cut off from it, whether obvious or not. […]
The Elder told a young couple that visited him, “Because you two don’t love each other, the child you will have, will have problems.” The Elder’s prophecy came true, as events showed. The Elder, of course, did not consider it a prophecy, but the deterministic relation between two factors (lack of love between husband and […]
