"The trials, the temptations, that tried to destroy you turned out to be your helpers. They did what you yourself should have done, but could not. You have experienced the truth expressed in the Saying of the Desert Fathers: 'Take away temptations, and no one will be saved.' They destroyed what needed to be destroyed.
But something appeared within you that cannot be destroyed, because it has a different sort of endurance and a different nature: it 'rejoices in sufferings.' (Col. 1:24).
In the end, we are saved by what destroys us, just as the seed is saved by its 'death' in the earth when its time comes. Salvation does not lie in our successes or our career in the realm of corruption, but in the abolition of death and in the kingdom of love. Furthermore, deification is not the acquisition of virtues, but the divine change and transformation achieved by them.
If I had not gone through that suffering, if I had not patiently endured the way I did, if it had not taken the time it did take… this change of the right hand of the Most High could not have taken place. Blessed trials! Blessed operations, painful as they are, carried out by the physician of souls and bodies!
How everything functions as a whole! How nothing is irrelevant, nothing is wasted! How the blessings go deeper than we hoped! How the afflictions, pains, and perplexities till the field of our souls like a deep-cutting ploughshare! How totally and utterly the strange and heaven-sent rest differs in nature from the rest and satisfaction afforded by any earthly and temporary success! How it teaches us humility; how it schools us in love; how it reconciles us with others! It strengthens us, it invigorates us, and at the same time it makes us weaker, without any prickles or sharp corners which could wound others!
Reverence for this least and greatest thing takes the form of constantly going outdoors without protection; of asking at every moment only 'that His will should be done' - asking not with my mouth and my voice, but with my whole way of life, all the time.
And when you ask that His will should be done, when your whole being is one bleeding petition, it happens. But this 'happening' is not something you can determine in advance. It may happen by happening or by not happening. It may be that before your petition is even finished, the answer comes. Or you may wait years and wear yourself out, and be disappointed, and reach utter exhaustion, and be destroyed. And then, when you are no longer expecting anything - neither you nor anyone else - He Himself will come to raise you up, to take you with Him on a new journey."
- Archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron
Submitted January 10, 2016 at 02:28AM by Unknown
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