Elder Paisios said...

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When you ask God for something, and for a long time He doesn’t help, you should know that there is pride. If we have passions - for example: gluttony, vain talk, anger, envy and so forth - and, in addition to that, we also have pride, God won’t help us; because we are obstructing divine Grace with our passions. And even if we only have a tendency to pride within us, we still obstruct God from helping us; though we may be struggling, and perhaps praying more than is needed.

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Blessed are those who were born crazy and will be judged as crazy, and, in this way, will enter Paradise without a passport.

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“…One afternoon something extraordinary happened to him. While praying, he saw Christ in front of him right there in the forest.”

“Was it a mystical vision of the Christ?” I asked.

“No. Elder Paisios insisted that it was Christ Himself who literally appeared in front of him. He had a material body and was seen by the elder with his ordinary vision. It was a living experience, just like the experiences he later had with dead saints. In this manifestation Christ held an opened Gospel and what He said to him was spoken verbatim in the way it was written in the Gospel. Addressing him by his first name Christ told him:

“I am the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in Me will not taste death.”

“This direct experience of the Christ,” Father Maximos continued, “was as far as I know the first entrance of young Paisios into the realm of supernatural revelations and was a turning point on his path toward monasticism.”

- from ‘The Mountain of Silence,’ p.90

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