Once a reclusive ascetic, who had
heard a lot about Elder Paisios, came to visit him. They talked for a
while, and he ascertained that Elder Paisios was an exceptionally
reverent man. Indeed, the elder had a rare reverence, which he had
learned from his parents, and mainly his mother.
While
at the monastery, he benefited from many of the fathers, and especially
from a particular hieromonk. He would say, “We can't reach the
reverence he had—impossible. He would celebrate liturgy every day, and
he struggled greatly. Once, for half a year, he ate nothing but half of a
small prosphoron and a few tomatoes dried in the sun.”
When he would serve out in the
chapels, this reverent priest, like other priests of the monastery,
preferred to have as a chanter the young Father Averkios (as the elder
was then called).
The elder had an innate
reverence, but he also cultivated it a great deal. He placed such
emphasis on it that he once said that “reverence is the greatest virtue,
because it attracts the grace of God.” To the elder, reverence was the
fear of God and spiritual sensitivity. Reverent people behave carefully
and modestly, because they intensely feel the presence of God.
The elder wanted reverence to be
unaffected and internal. He turned away from mere external forms.
Regarding a group of monks who had great order and discipline in their
liturgical life, he commented, “I respect that, if it’s something that
comes from within.” The elder’s conduct was reverent, but with a freedom
that was alien to dry forms. If he didn’t feel something, he wouldn’t
do it. He distinguished reverence from piety — a word he even avoided
saying. He would say that reverence is like incense, while piety is just
perfume.56
The elder’s reverence
encompassed not only small and seemingly unimportant matters, but also
spiritual and essential issues. “If someone neglects the little things,”
he taught, “the danger is that he’ll start neglecting greater, holier
things. And then, without realizing it, rationalizing it all to himself—
‘This is nothing, that doesn’t matter’ — he can end up, God forbid,
totally neglecting the things of God and becoming irreverent, arrogant,
and atheistic.”
His reverence could be seen in
the way he prayed, venerated icons, received antidoron and holy water,
partook of Holy Communion, held icons during processions, chanted, and
arranged and beautified the small chapel of his hermitage. He paid
attention to details, but in a way that wasn’t ritualistic or
fastidiously formal. This was his own attitude toward God, which wasn’t
laid out in advance by any typikon of the Church: it was his personal
disposition. He felt that his whole hermitage, not just his chapel, was
sacred space. He arranged his cell, where he prayed, just like a little
church. There was an iconostasis with many icons and a lamp that burned
continuously, and he would cense and light many candles there. He had
constructed his bed so that it was like a coffin, and he would say,
“This is the altar of my cell.” Icons and holy books never touched his
bed, with the exception of an icon at its head.
The icon was rather tattered and
faded, and a brother once asked him why it was in this condition. The
elder tried to hide the truth, but the monk finally realized that it was
like that because of his many kisses and tears. The elder reluctantly
admitted, “I can get through an entire vigil that way”; that is,
weeping.
He also treated the other areas
of his hermitage with reverence — the workshop where he made the little
icons, the guest-house where souls were reborn by God’s grace, the
balcony, and even the yard. He thought that it was irreverent to have a
toilet inside the hermitage. It was partly for ascetic reasons that he
kept it at such a distance, but mostly it was out of reverence.
Once when he was away from the
hermitage of the Holy Cross, the fathers of the monastery (out of love,
so he wouldn’t be uncomfortable) made him a small outhouse, outside but
sharing a wall with the hermitage. The elder never used it. At
Panagouda, when his health had deteriorated toward the end of his life
and he needed to go out frequently at night —in cold, rain, and snow
—his spiritual children began to insist on building him an outhouse just
clear of the balcony to make things easier for him. He refused. “That’s
where the Panagia appeared,” he said. “How can I go to the toilet
there?”
The elder’s life was fragrant
with deep and unaffected reverence, just as the angels in heaven worship
God day and night “with great reverence.” This was clear to see from
his relationship with God and from the expressions on his face when
coming into contact with sacred things. He reacted to sacred objects as
though they were alive.
Once, when Elder Paisios was
visiting the hermitage of another monk, his hernia was bothering him.
The elder of the hermitage begged him to lie down and rest a little, but
Elder Paisios declined. He was only able to lie on his left side, and,
if he had done that there, his feet would have been pointing at some
icons, which he thought of as irreverent.
Before entering the holy altar,
he would make a prostration to the floor, remove his monastic cap, and
kiss the cross on the altar-curtain; and then he would enter by the side
door. During the Communion hymn at liturgy, if he intended to commune,
he would make full prostrations. For a time, he had it as a rule to eat
nothing for thirty-three hours before communing.
Because of his great reverence
for the mystery of the priesthood, the elder never assented to
ordination, even though, as he once said, “It’s been revealed to me
three different times that I could become a priest.”57
Plainly, the elder saw reverence
as a fundamental virtue for every Christian — although, rigorous as his
criteria were, he considered it something rare. To the elder, reverence
was greater than most of the other virtues.
He often used it as a criterion.
If a reverent person wrote or said or did something for which he was
criticized, the elder, even before forming a clear opinion on the issue
itself, would go out of his way to propose mitigating circumstances. He
would say, “He’s a reverent man —I don’t believe he’d do something like
that.” The elder believed that this quality preserved a person from
making errors, from deceptions and from falling —perhaps in the sense of
the verse declaring that the Lord “will carefully guard the way of
those who reverence Him.”58
The elder considered reverence
to be extremely important in all of a Christian’s life and struggles,
and especially those of a monk. A person’s reverence, he believed, acts
as a steady factor in his life, affecting everything and raising his
spiritual level.
He advised monks to take care to
acquire reverence. “A new monk, especially, has to be reverent through
and through. It helps for him to always have the Evergetinos
open59 and to spend time with other monks who are reverent.” When a new
monk asked the elder what it was that he should pay the most attention
to, the elder replied, “Reverence and attention to yourself.”
A Russian bishop, presented with
many candidates for the priesthood, once asked the elder whom he should
ordain. “Those who are reverent and pure,” the elder answered —he did
not say educated or energetic men, or candidates with good voices.
Elder Paisios preaching to people outside his cell on the Holy Mountain (source)
In chanting and iconography
also, reverence was more important to the elder than technique. He was
able to discern its presence in chanting or in an icon, and he would
say, “If you pay attention to the meaning of a troparion, it’ll change
you, and you’ll be able to chant in a reverent way. If you’re reverent,
you might make a mistake while you chant, but it’ll come out sounding
sweet. If you only pay attention to technique — I mean, going
note-by-note, without a reverent spirit —then you’ll end up like a lay
chanter I once heard: he was chanting ‘Bless the Lord, Ο my soul’ like a
blacksmith striking an anvil. I heard it in a car, and it disturbed me —
I told the driver to turn off the tape. When someone doesn’t chant from
the heart, it’s like he’s running you out of church. A sacred canon
says that people who chant with improper voices should be given penances
because they drive people away from church.”
Concerning iconography, he
advised, “You should make an icon with reverence, like we were going to
be giving it to Christ Himself. How would we like it if someone gave us a
photograph where our face wasn’t right? It’s not right for the Panagia
to be depicted like Saint Anna —I mean, not to show her physical beauty.
There has never been a woman as beautiful as the Panagia was in soul
and body. How she transformed people’s souls with her grace!”
Of the icon of the Tenderly
Kissing Mother of God, at Philotheou Monastery, he remarked,
“technically, it’s not quite perfect, because Christ’s feet are
wedge-shaped, but it works miracles and has such grace and sweetness.
It’s probably because God rewarded the iconographer’s reverence.”
“The grace of God,” observed the
elder, “comes to reverent people, and it makes the soul beautiful.” But
he observed with sadness that contemporary people pay little attention
to such things. “If a person’s not reverent,” he said. “If he scorns
divine things, then divine grace abandons him. and he’s overcome by
temptations, and becomes like the demons. Divine grace won’t come to an
irreverent person — it comes to people who honor it.” As examples of
irreverence, he mentioned the sacrifice of Cain and the behavior of the
sons of Eli related in the Old Testament. Their disdain provoked the
wrath of God, and they were punished.
The elder considered it
irreverent to place icons, ecclesiastical books, antidoron, and holy
objects in general on the seats of church-stalls, and even more so on
chairs or beds (except on a pillow). He suggested that people put the
little icons that he would hand out in their chest pockets. Once, he
related, a pilgrim came holding his head crooked from neck pain. Through
divine enlightenment, the elder realized that the man had suffered this
at the hands of demonic powers, because he had put a cross the elder
had given him, which contained a piece of the Precious Cross of the
Lord, in his back-pocket. The elder forbade anyone who lived carelessly
to carry the Precious Cross.
He once told us about someone
who had become possessed because he had spit in an unclean place on a
day when he had communed. The same had happened to a woman who had
thrown holy water onto excrement. Another time, he related, a young man
who was engaged to be married visited a conjurer, who told him to
urinate on the wedding rings. Upon following the conjurer’s
instructions, the young man became possessed, because wedding rings are
holy. The elder also gave other, similar examples of careless and
irreverent people being abandoned by divine grace and becoming
possessed.
He didn’t think it was right to
refer to the holy fathers of the Church simply by their first names; for
example, as “Basil” or “Gregory.” “We talk about ‘Father So-and-so’ and
say ‘Father’ to monks and clergy,” he commented, “and this is how we’re
going to talk about the holy fathers?”
He didn’t want people to offer
God candles made from impure or artificial beeswax or to fill their
lamps with olive oil of poor quality or with seed-oil. On the contrary,
he emphasized, “[we should] offer our best to God in worship. We should
offer up our best efforts and our pure prayer — not our yawning.” He
considered it greatly irreverent to use prosphora for the liturgy that
was tainted with mold. “Christ gives us His Body and Blood,” he would
say, “and we give Him moldy prosphora?” He would walk miles to find
prosphora for the Divine Liturgy, and when he carried it he would hold
it by the side, taking care not to touch the seal.
The elder tried to show
gratitude and be pleasing to the One whom he loved. Out of his great
love, he offered to God the very best, and he conducted himself with
refinement, with spiritual sensitivity and reverence. And God, being
pleased, bestowed His grace on the elder in abundance.
Excerpt from Elder Paisios of Mount Athos by Hieromonk Isaac.
NOTES:
56. “Reverence,” in Greek evlavia; and “piety,” evsevia.
The latter word is used in the Greek of the Scriptures and Church
Fathers to refer to Christian reverence and correct faith; and,
especially in older translations, it has often been rendered as “piety.”
By the elder’s time, the Greek word had taken on a negative meaning in a
somewhat similar fashion as the word “piety” has come to do in English;
to many, it was synonymous with pietism and formalism. — eds.
57. Most likely these signs were
not commands — rather, he was presented with the possibility of
becoming a priest. When he was asked about this, he answered, “Christ
gives us gifts. Do we have to accept all of them?”
58. Prov. 2:8.
59. That is, to study it frequently. [The Evergetinos is a collection of anecdotes and teachings from the early Egyptian desert fathers. Unlike the Philokalia,
a more advanced spiritual text that treats the way in which "the
intellect [nous] is purified, illumined, and made perfect” (vol. 1, p.
13), the Evergetinos focuses on the practice of Christian virtues, a necessary precursor to the exalted attainments described in the Philokalia. — eds.]
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