I don’t know, my brothers and sisters, how you see things, how you feel your whole rapport with God to be. And yet, in my humble opinion, the real way, the right way, is this: At whatever moment you remember your relationship with God, the relation you ought to have with God, the moment you recall your soul and reflect upon yourself, at this very moment, you can immediately make a start. There is nothing preventing you from this, and you can do it in every moment. Therefore, whenever this moment comes, stop before God. Humble yourself, repent, and trust your entire being to God. Feel pain for your sins, but take courage and don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid, on the one hand, to say that you are meant for Hades, and on the other hand, to entrust all that you are to the mercy and compassion of God: at whatever moment. No matter what has come before this, we are able at this moment to actually begin our life from the start.
If he is honest with himself, man never feels that he has made a start. This is because, based on the spirit of Christianity, no one standing before God can ever not feel this way: “I’ve done this, that and the other: let me now begin.” But what? At all times he feels the need to make a start. Namely, he feels not only that he made a mistake and wants to correct it, and that he only did a little and wants to do more, but he feels that his whole position isn’t such that it allows him to be given completely to God. He feels the need, making a start, to be repositioned towards God.
Even in the best cases, man wants to escape a little, to do his own thing, to salvage a bit of his own ego and his own virtues. Because of this, the Lord lays us out completely, saying: “When you have done all those things which you are commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants.’” [1] And even if we do everything we’re supposed to, we are to say that we are unprofitable servants.
But how will man with today’s spirit (the spirit of our age) accept this? He isn’t able to take this up, nor to understand it. It’s incomprehensible to him. When, however, someone is initiated into the true Christian spirit, he considers it the most natural thing to say he is an unprofitable servant. The moment he says he is an unprofitable servant -the exact moment he feels that he is worthless and confesses this -his soul is filled with paradise. His soul is filled by a heavenly reality, by the grace of God.
Holy Hesychasterion “The Nativity of Theotokos” Publications.
Archimandrite Symeon Kragiopoulos
[1]Luke 17, 10.
