Saint Anthony The Great As A Model For Our Lives

St. Anthony the Bring to an end (Meal Day - January 17)By Protopresbyter Fr. George PapavarnavasSaint Anthony, the lecturer of the put away, is one of the few who has conventional the epithet "Bring to an end". Stringently he was a complete steeplechaser of spiritual training and ecstatic in his struggles adjoining mistaken belief, sin, the devil and the many-formed passions. His life, which was authored by innovative with the epithet "Bring to an end", his gift Saint Athanasius, the Archbishop of Alexandria, is further wondrous and looked-for. The study of it prerequisite be sustenance for all nation who plan to occurrence the formality of life in Christ.Anthony the Bring to an end, with his shortage and perpetual prayer, reached the ridge of spiritual life and acquired true wisdom. He calls himself "idiot" and was uneducated, but he had as a guru the wisdom from beyond by the Essence. From this wisdom, recent and romantic, he gave the utmost learned responses to many Christians who hunted to mild their souls, as seen in a mixture of parts of the book called "Gerontikon". To one side from these he as well spent the "One Hundred and Seventy Chapters", which are included in the "Philokalia" and bestow complete mild to nation that read them. Poverty is the care a dignitary makes to treat the stimulus of God in their life. It is an care to jaunt their passions, to be purified of their passions, that they may love "with all their person and ignoble" every God and mankind. For it is unattainable to love ego sternly for example conquered by the passions and especially by lack of care, which oppresses man and makes life bad-tempered. Self-love is the knocked out love for ourselves and from this, as from a mother, is innate all the passions, such as vanity, pomposity, sensuality, acquisitiveness, etc.In our days, we smoothly have a chat about love, unity and friendship amid fatherland and nations, and other hit be attracted to this. All this is good, but the think over is how can we love others and be at unity with them, for example we are imprisoned to the passions and cannot attack unity even with ourselves? Atmosphere, according to Saint Maximus the Confessor, is the grandchild of detachment. It is innate and nurtured within a ignoble which has been purified, or at nominal is stressed tenaciously and unimaginatively to be purified from the passions. Consequently love is meditative and stark in check and difficulties. It does not possess an expiration make contact, but lasts further the significant, it is "coeval with the ages". In direct opposite, welcoming love is false and lasts as have a yen as it is proficient to party and scavenge or be fed from the passions. And how is it liable to possess world power and solidity, as coarsen of life transfer, interests transfer and the material make wears out and is altered?The major illness of transition societies are material passions. Furious fatherland induce great big inconvenience in the family and sociable situation, but as well wars and state of confusion on all sides of the world subsequently it comes to fatherland who be valid cave and power. As emphasized by His Vastness our Community Hierotheos: "Sin has sociable implications. Under the weather fatherland make sociable institutions fastidious and moreover sociable institutions make fatherland disdainful fastidious." So, the transfer of material societies for the privileged, or a little their humanization, requires the spiritual regeneration of their populace, which can survive in the midst of shortage, prayer, the sacramental life and entire faithfulness to the Clerical and ecclesiastical institutions. Saint Anthony, by his spiritual struggles adjoining the spirits of depravity and vanity, acquired lofty humility. However, God revealed that offering was a shoemaker in Alexandria who surpassed him in the spiritual life, which was sent to teach him his spiritual way of life. And as Over Sophrony Sakharov notes: "He learned from this to ideal inwardly: each person can be saved, but I alone am separated." These words can lately be endured by nation who possess overwhelmed the grave height of humility.Modesty is the mother of love and all the other virtues. The Distinguished One esteemed each person sacrificially and prayed for the whole inhabited world. Outlook is the way he communicated with fatherland, and especially with the afflicted fatherland. In addition to his beautiful love he sternly comforted and supported them.Once a theologian/writer visited him, named Didymus, who was shade, but as it appears the eyes of his person were opened and, between other hit, Anthony said: "Do not be tap or quaking, Didymus, by the fact that you are absent your physical eyes, like you lack such eyes with which flies and mosquitoes can be seen. You possess such eyes that are hyperactive by the angels, which God has vigorous and His Frail occupies." This encounter shows the countrified way of the Saints. They do not disconcert fatherland nor be off them to despair, but a little they enhance their love for life, and the life in Christ, and sidetrack from the person the mist, enhance their joy, strengthen their prestige and enhance lavish.I would be attracted to to packed this object with the advice/exhortation of Saint Anthony: "It is attractive that we run to be healed of the passions of the person, like in the far ahead we stimulus be judged past the direct of God, so that we do not find ourselves (offering) waste and tricky."Source: "Ekklesiastiki Paremvasi", , January 2003. Translated by John Sanidopoulos.