The Beatitudes of Saint Paisios

My beloved spiritual children in Christ Our Only True God and Our Only True Savior,
CHRIST IS OUR MIDST! HE WAS, IS, AND EVER SHALL BE.

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THE BEATITUDES OF SAINT PAISIOS

1. Blessed are those who loved Christ more than all the worldly things and live far from the world and near God, with heavenly joys upon the earth.

2. Blessed are those who managed to live in obscurity and acquired great virtues but did not acquire even a small name for themselves.

3. Blessed are those who managed to act as a fool and, in this way, protected their spiritual wealth.

4. Blessed are those who do not preach the Gospel with words, but live it and preach it with their silence, with the Grace of God, which betrays them.

5. Blessed are those who rejoice when unjustly accused, rather than when they are justly praised for their virtuous life. Here are the signs of holiness, not in the dry exertion of bodily asceticism and the great number of struggles, which, when not carried out with humility and the aim to put off the old man, create an illusion.

6. Blessed are those who prefer to be wronged rather than to wrong others and accept serenely and silently injustices. In this way, they reveal in practice that they believe in "one God, the Father Almighty and expect to be vindicated by Him and not by human beings who repay in this life with vanity.

7. Blessed are those who have been born crippled or became so due to their own carelessness, yet do not grumble but glorify God. They will hold the best place in Paradise along with the Confessors and Martyrs, who gave their hands and feet for the love of Christ and now constantly kiss with devoutness the hands and feet of Christ in Paradise.

8. Blessed are those who were born ugly and are despised here on earth, because they are entitled to the most beautiful place in Paradise, provided they glorify God and do not grumble.

9. Blessed are those widows who wear black in this life, even unwillingly, but live a white spiritual life and glorify God without complaining rather than the miserable ones who wear assorted clothes and live a spotted life.

10. Blessed and thrice blessed are the orphans who have been deprived of their parents great affection, for they managed to have God as their Father already from this life. At the same time, they have the affection they were deprived of from their parents in God's saving bank "with interest".

11. Blessed are those parents who avoid the use of the word "don't" with their children, instead restraining them from evil through their holy life- a life which children imitate, joyfully following Christ with spiritual bravery.

12. Blessed are those children who have been born "from their mother's womb" (St. Matthew 19:12) holy, but even more blessed are those who were born with all the inherited passions of the world, struggled with sweat and uprooted them and inherited the Kingdom of God in the sweat of their face (cf. Genesis 3:19). (Source: Epistles by Elder Paisios of Mount Athos, Holy Monastery "Evangelist John the Theologian," Souroti, Thessaloniki, Greece (2002).

(To be continued)

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"Glory Be To GOD For All Things!" -- Saint John Chrysostomos

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With sincere agape in His Holy Diakonia (Ministry),
The sinner and unworthy servant of God

+Father George

beatitudes