by Monk Moses of Mount Athos
People who are truly humble have no fear. People who love God and their fellow man, even when they are on their own they are not alone.
A humble person feels safety, fearlessness, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, temperance, freedom, grace.
True Christians who love, volunteer, sacrifice themselves, live for others, cannot be other than humble.
Truly humble people enjoy more to give than to receive. They don’t make demands of other people. They endure them, accept them, welcome them, pray for them.
So they are not upset. We fret because of others because we make many demands of them.
We are quite tough with them, while we are quite lenient with ourselves.
We just want others to watch over us, listen to us, love us.
But we are sparing with loving, paying attention and listening to others.
We seek appreciation, praise, the full interest of others. But we become miser with offering.
People get easily upset, discouraged, disappointed, saddened and melancholic, because their faith is not warm, their trust in God is loose and their hope is remote.
The believer has an information of assurance, support, trust and hope. This does not mean that believers have no problems, but the problems they face are promising.
Hope in the Almighty and omnipresent God gives the believer peace, equanimity, tranquility, comfort, mercy.
Old men and women of past times, who faced many more problems, were meaningfully crossing themselves, were sincerely patient, endured persistently, and when they said “God willing” or “God will provide” or “thank God” it was no figure of speech.
Today’s people, who have an inflated sense of self-importance, consider it a great shame to cross themselves or invoke God, and believe that their intelligence, their wealth of knowledge and their versatility will solve all their problems.
But these do not solve their problems and their pockets are full of tranquilizers, analgesics, sedative medicinal products, antidepressants and sleeping pills.
Those who have not believed in their deified logic and their arrogant ego have hovered by a dangerous self-sufficiency, a modern Christianity of a pharisaic holiness, and have become games of demons. Holiness is never proud, hypocritical, self-centered, unbrotherly and isolated.
The saints do not believe in themselves and their works, but they hope and continually invoke the infinite mercy of Most Merciful God.
The saints also encourage us, the sinners, to be moved and become accustomed to the examples of the great sinners who repented and became saints…
