I recommend you to get a small share in all the virtues. So rise early every day and acquire the beginning of every virtue and divine commandment with great patience, fear, forbearance and love for God, full of zeal of soul and body, and with a lot of humility for bearing afflictions. Pray earnestly with compunction and vigilance. Pay no attention to the faults of others. Do not measure yourself against other people for you are lower than every creature. prepare for battle by renouncing everything that is of the flesh. Be steadfast in vigils, hunger, thirst, cold and nakedness. Close your tomb as though you were already dead, conscious that your death is at hand at every hour... Gaining our neighbor is the basis on which we have to begin. All the commandments of Christ depend on it.
+ St. John the Short (Colobos)1, quoted without attribution in his entry for November 9 in The Synaxarion, volume 1.
1The Short, or dwarf
No comments:
Post a Comment