Tag: patience
Failure
Failure is not usually a once in a lifetime experience. It is a weight that has to be carried, unpleasant as that may feel. Faces presented to the world often hide an inner world that is filled with chaos, fear and pain. It is not the complete picture of course for any human, for along… Read More ›
Suffering becomes patience only when it is carried beyond itself
If there is no overt cause, the probability is that our pain has a providential purpose. We endure for the Lord’s sake, exactly as the martyrs did. It may seem as though every day is an encounter with death, but we must learn to pray with that ancient hero of patience: “Even if he kill… Read More ›
Importance of loving others in community
Living with other people and learning to lose ourselves in the understanding of their weakness and deficiencies can help us to become true contemplatives. For there is no better means of getting rid of the rigidity and harshness and coarseness of our ingrained egoism, which is the one insuperable obstacle to the infused light and… Read More ›
What is evil?
Abba Antony … learned that evil is the scattering of mind and spirit away from God’s presence. When the monk’s focus is deflected away from God he or she becomes subject to the demons. The demonic influences do not drive out God; they mask the awareness of God’s presence and transformative power. Patient endurance in… Read More ›
Patient endurance
Abba Poemon once said (Patient endurance) is like having a chest full of clothes, if one leaves them in disorder they are spoiled in the course of time. It is the same with thoughts. If we do not do anything about them, in time they are spoiled, that is to say, they disintegrate. . …. Read More ›
Patience and Anger
A certain brother while he was in the community was restless and frequently moved to wrath. And he said within himself, “I shall go and live in some place in solitude: and when I have no one to speak to or to hear, I shall be at peace and this passion of anger will be… Read More ›
Enduring in Prayer
Abba Nazarius once said: “Standing in God’s temple, picture to yourself that you are in heaven itself, that you stand before God with the higher powers and do with them everything that they do. In picturing this to yourself, make a rule for yourself that under no circumstances will you leave church before the end… Read More ›
Patience
First of all, we honor one another. Then, he goes on (and he is very realistic): infirmitates suas sive corporum sive morum patientissime tolerent. We tolerate, with the greatest possible patience, the infirmities of body and of the way of morum—the way of acting, functioning, the way we present ourselves, the way we live. We… Read More ›