How do you benefit if, for example, you begin to sleep on a hard mattress but instead indulge in warm baths?
Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth
Tito Colliander
Category: ASCETICISM
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A desert hunter saw Abba Antony having fun with the brothers. He was shocked and expressed his dismay because of their frivolity. The old man said to the hunter, “Put an arrow in your bow and shoot it.” When he did so, Antony said, “Now shoot another.” Again, the hunter complied.
Then the old man asked him to shoot a third arrow. The hunter hesitated. “If I bend my bow too many times, I will weaken and break it.”
Antony said to him, “It is the same with God’s work. If we stretch the brothers beyond measure, they will weaken and break.”
By Way of the Desert: 365 Daily Readings
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This exceedingly simple outer life reflected a far more severe inner life. It was well known that Kyrillos slept little. But just how little is for the most part unknown. Each day he would awake at three in the morning for psalmody and Liturgy that would finish some five hours later. The entire day, until late, would be spent in meetings and visits, only to be interrupted by “his work” of Vespers at six in the evening. Most nights he would retire to his patriarchal cell just before midnight. This would allow for three to four hours of sleep at most. Yet even this is called into question. An examination of his letters (unpublished and thus unknown until now) reveals that if a time of writing as specific, then it was consistently between the hours of one to two in the morning. Even the few hours of sleep, it appears, would be regularly sacrificed.
A Silent Patriarch: Kyrillos VI (1902 -1971), Life and Legacy
Fr. Daniel Fanous -
For what is denying oneself? He who truly denies himself does not ask, “Am I happy?” or, “Shall I be satisfied?” All such questions fall away form you if you truly deny yourself, for by so doing you have also given up your will for either earthly or heavenly happiness.
This obstinate will to personal happiness is the cause of unrest and division in your soul. Give it up and work against it: the rest will be give you without effort.
Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth
Tito Colliander -
…one arrives at asceticism by way of an original intellectuality because one sees into the misery of everything or, more properly, the misery which is existence, or is brought through suffering to the point where it seems a relief to let the whole thing come to a breaking point, breaking with everything, with existence itself – that is, with the desire for existence (asceticism, mortification)…
—Søren Kierkegaard -
She also said, ‘As long as we are in the monastery, obedience is preferable to asceticism. The one teaches pride, the other humility.’
Sayings of Amma Syncletica -
Basil emphasises the transformative power of monastic asceticism; in fasting, he says, ‘the whole city generally, and all its people, are brought together in well-ordered harmony: raucous voices put to rest, strife banished, insults hushed’. He proceeds to describe the transformation that fasting brings about not only of individual persons but of the whole city. By means of the solidarity deriving from Christian practice, social space itself is redeemed. Fasting, Basil states, preserves health, keeps husbands faithful, sustains marriages, prevents bloodshed, quietens cooks and servants, limits debt and reduces crime.
Theology on the Menu: Asceticism, Meat and Christian Diet
David Grumett, Rachel Muers
SO GOOD QUOTES 