The Life of Elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain is now being prepared for publication. The following story is just one small offering from the spiritual treasure contained in the book. It speaks volumes both to the delusion of evolutionism, but even more to the importance of being humble and persistent in the spiritual struggle, for even more than great feats of asceticism the Lord honors the humble thought.
The Elder once told us: “From age of eleven I read the lives of the Saints and fasted and kept vigil. My older brother would take these books and hide them. He achieved nothing by this. I would go into the forest and continue my reading.” Then one of his friends, Kostas, told him: “I will make him want to forget everything.”
“He came and explained to me Darwin’s theory [of evolution]. I was shaken by this and said: ‘I will go and pray, and if Christ is God, he will appear to me so I will believe. A shadow, a voice – He will show me something.’ That’s how much I knew. I went and began to pray and make prostrations, which lasted for hours, but nothing happened. In the end, laden with distress, I stopped. Then something that Kostas had said came to mind: “I can accept that Christ is an important man, righteous, virtuous, who was hated out of envy for his virtue and condemned by his compatriots.”
Then I said to myself: “Since Christ was like this, and even if he was only a man, he is deserving of my love and my obedience and my self-sacrifice on His behalf. I don’t want paradise, or anything. For his Holiness and His goodness, every sacrifice is worth it” (a good thought and magnanimous (philotimo) spirit).
“God was waiting to see how I would deal with it. After this, Christ Himself appeared to me within abundant light. He was visible from his waist and higher. He looked upon me with tremendous love and said to me: ‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’ These words were also written upon the Gospel that He held open in his left hand.”
With this event, the thoughts of uncertainty, which had troubled his young soul, were erased within the fifteen year old Arsenios, and in the grace of God he was given to know Christ as true God and Saviour of the world. He was made certain of the Theanthropos (God-man), not by man, nor by book, but by the very Lord Himself, Who revealed Himself to him, even at such a tender age. Now firmly established in faith, he said to himself: “Kostas, if you want to, come and let’s have a talk.”
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