Paisios of Mount Athos

It would have been 2020, right? And March of 20.

And he stands up and he says, Elder Paisios, Saint Paisios, would never have got the vax, would never have put on a mask, would never have done social distancing, would never have not gone to church.

He went out and he said, let me just make it clear to everybody.

The saint that you love and you want to imitate, he wouldn't do any of this, right? Say Elder Parthenios, one of the greatest elders alive, still alive, 50 years an abbot, the dean of abbots on Mount Athos, right? He's been so dogged against every COVID-related nonsense, against Ukrainian schismatic nonsense, against ecumenism.

But at the same time, like if they don't get support by humans, like Christ will support them.

Just kind of like the young man, the guru and elder Paisios, I guess how it's revealed to that man, like you didn't have a lot of good influences.

I think St. Paisios said to him, you didn't have a lot of good influences and you were actually actively being pulled in a different direction.

And so these people that don't have help, God is going to, intercede for them so that they're on a similar playing level to everybody else, to some capacity, you know, to each according to their needs.

Yes.

rooted in the pedagogy and teachings of St.

Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Gregory the Theologian, and other early great fathers, as well as the contemporary saints of the 20th century, Nectarius of Pentapolis, Porphyrios of Cavsoclivia, Paisios of the Holy Mountain, Iakovos of Evia, and others.

The result of this lack of intensive involvement of the church in the education of children has been the formation of a distorted perception among the public, especially among educational professionals and teachers, that the formation of a child's character is the responsibility of whichever government happens to be in power, and of various educational programs derived from foreign sources as directions, many times from the European Union, based on the thinking of various Western pedagogues and not the God-bearing saints of the Church.

The Educational Programs of the Ministry of Education I will share a sad example from our own Ministry of Education in Cyprus.

My mother went to school only until the second grade, because her mother, Mirofora, took her out to help with flax farming in our hometown of Zodia.

My grandmother was a widow and needed another set of hands.

When I realized this, I started to ask myself, how is it that my mother, who was uneducated and did not go to school, let alone college, who never learned to read well, whose first book was the Eurondicon, which she read out loud very slowly because of the complex words, how did she know the Councils of St. Porphyrios? How was it possible for Milia, my grandmother, Mirofora, and my father, Nicholas, a plowmaker, to know the same things that were known and taught by a modern-day saint, an excellent educator? Then I understood that behind Milia, Myrophora, Nicholas, the holy elders, Sophrony of Essex, Paisios of the Holy Mountain, and Porphyrios, there was one who was hiding, the one that enlightens and inspires all, the Holy Spirit.

The Light of a Lighter As a bishop, I have a responsibility to all of these holy people, especially my holy elder, Iakovos Salikis of Evia, who entrusted to me their ways of educating and forming children, to share what I learned with others.

We thought it was appropriate to start the episode out with this one.

And I wanted to, you know, read a quote for those that haven't read The Homilies of Metropolitan Theophytos of Morphou, Volume 1, Words of Empirical Theology from Our Holy Fathers, Porphyrios, Paisios, and Iakovos.

Be sure to check that out from Uncut Mountain Press.

We'll probably link it down below.

But in the prologue to this book by George Kithriotis, he says, and he's a friend of Metropolitan Neophytos, he says, "...in the barrenness of the twentieth century infiltrated even the ecclesiastical sphere, as the ascetic and monastic tradition underwent a serious decline, and an alien moralistic perspective increasingly prevailed over the folk piety." that has been passed down through generations.

And this book in Metropolitan Jovitos talks about this a lot, how some of these great modern saints, again, St. Paisios, Porphyrios, Iakovos, others, Elder Ephraim, they were raised by very pious parents, grandparents in villages, in refugee camps from Turkey, in Anatolia itself as very, very young children in the case of St. Paisios and St. Iakovos.

And this sort of unbroken, true Christian piety that dates all the way back to the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and frankly, even early church history, this is Romanity, as some people call it.

This is that sort of universal church history.

Yeah, it's kind of like deathbed sort of conversion-y type things almost in some cases.

But when you consider Paisios became a saint, you know, it's...

No, but

he was...

to him about off-grid will.

That book you lent me, it's just so important in starting off my orthodox phrenema that I recommend it to anyone who's tempted by orthodoxy.

The book being, what is it? The Young Man, the Gurus, and Elder Paisios.

Yeah.

Uh, and if anger does happen, uh, we have to immediately begin to sort of rectify in ourselves what we see as the, the, uh, source of that anger.

Uh, Elder Paisios said something very interesting.

He said, "The only anger that is justified is the anger against," quote-unquote, "the old man in ourselves." In other words, all of us as Christians have been a new creation.

Baptism promises to make us a new creation, but the old creation, the old man within us is constantly trying to disrupt what we know to be right, or to-

It's oftentimes because of the life we lived leading up to that, um, we experienced some kind of pain or traumas or different things that inspired us to want to help others heal.

And I think it was St. Paisios that actually gave that as a remedy for those who were hurting, was to help others-

Mm-hmm

... with healing.

And then I have another bookshelf that's all trauma and another shelf that's all addictions, another shelf that's all couples or family or you name it.

And then I have all these shelves of like, you know, the contemporary elders, and you could pull, I could show you which books to pull off the shelf, and you could take, you know, Emotion Focused Therapy by Sue Johnson, or you could take, uh, um, The Developing Mind by Dr. Daniel Siegel or Parenting from the Inside Out from Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell.

And you can go through the book, and you'll look in the pages and on, on the, on the margins on the outside, you'll see places where I say, "This is exactly what St. Paisios says."

Hmm.

Because again, like even the color, there's purpose behind the color.

who would have thought you know I'm thinking like perhaps these are black because like you're using them a lot so they don't you know show as much like wear but there's a purpose behind the black and there's a purpose behind the red bead and it's and it's incredible but what I wanted to start with before we get into the questions is a beautiful quote from Saint Paisios now I have seen this quote sort of circulate social media and I wanted to open with this.

I want to open with this and I want to come back at the end and close with this and forgive me if I forget at the end.

I hope I remember because this is going to have much more significance for you at the end when you hopefully, God willing, listen to the whole episode and understand the components of the prayer rope.