On the Blasphemous Treatment of Holy Things, God's Wrath, & Trusting God - St. Paisios the Athonite

How instructive are the Lives of the Saints! How necessary they are to stay on the royal path and live in true repentance!

St. Paisios: “I remember also at the Cenobium we had a monk who as a layman had been a police captain. They made him a reader because he was educated. He had been in the monastery for years yet still disgusted by many things. He would not even touch a doorknob! He would try to open a door with his foot, or try to turn the knob with his elbow and then clean his sleeve with alcohol. He would even enter the door of the Church with his foot. In his old age, God permitted that his feet develop gangrene, especially the one he used to open the door. I was serving as a nursing aide when he first came to the monastery’s hospital with his foot all bandaged up. The nursing orderly told me to untie it while he went to get some bandages. When I untied it, I gasped. It was covered with little worms.   

'Go down to the sea to wash it and get rid of the worms, and come to have me change the bandages.' I was at a loss seeing the condition of his foot, the degree of his punishment. The nursing orderly asked me, 'Do you know the cause of his affliction?' 

'Yes, it’s because he opens the door with his foot,' I told him." 

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St. Paisios: "...Others would kiss the doorknob touched by the Elders, while the monk who was disgusted by everything would barely touch his moustache to the Holy Icons when he bowed to reverence them. One can only imagine what his poor moustache had to endure with the rubbing alcohol!"  

Spiritual Child: "Geronda, when something like this happens with sacred things, is it not irreverence?"  

St. Paisios: "Of course; this is how things start, and then move on to further developments. This same monk reached the point of not kissing the Icons because he feared that the monks who reverenced them before him had some illness!" 

Read the complete account from "Spiritual Counsels III: Spiritual Struggle" here: https://www.orthodoxethos.com/post/a-must-read-st-paisios-on-the-blasphemous-treatment-of-holy-things-god-s-wrath-and-trusting-god

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Elder Evthymios, disciple of St. Paisios, written April 2020 regarding the Coronavirus crisis:   "When Saint Paisios was asked, he said that we should do the sign of the cross and eat fearlessly, which he himself first did, setting an example. Were he alive today, it would be inconceivable for us to see him wearing a mask and gloves, carrying a little bottle of alcohol in his pocket and avoiding people or speaking to them from a distance. He would surely be pacifying the people, he would be helping them put away fear, and most of all he would be saddened by the closing of the churches. Such a fear is unbefitting for Christians inspired by the example of the God-Man and by the Martyrs of our faith."  

Elder Evthymios offered us one of the most important letters to date regarding the Covid-19 crisis, addressing fear, vaccines, globalism, closure of churches, and the spirit of antichrist permeating so many both inside and outside the Church. Read the full letter here: https://www.orthodoxethos.com/post/the-coronavirus-crisis-letter-from-the-holy-mountain-elder-evthymios-of-kapsala

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