11,14 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: AKAKIA Publications
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Where is God in my life? How can He guide me? Why do I feel miserable we He is always around? How can I find my own way?
Every week, Father Andreas was helping people to find answer to these (and many other) questions in his radio programme "Unseen Crossings" at the Radio Station Church of Piraeus. His simple, personal yet always admirably wise approach made his broadcast highly succesful and beloved in his country.
This book is a compilation of Father Andreas Koanos' popular radio talks about about belief, God, happiness and finding our own place in the world and inner strenght to deal with our increasingly complex life - first time available for the English speaking brothers and sisters.
"You always deserve your self-worth. And you deserve it because you are a creature of God, His creation. Because God loves you and the whole heaven watches over you, takes care of you and gives you importance. Even if no one calls you on the phone for a whole day, even if no one speaks to you, there is a tremendous power inside you. You have value and personality. You are a unique being and there is no one like you anywhere on earth. No one is like you, no one has your traits, your gifts and talents, but on the other hand, no one has your problems, your peculiarities and your character in general. You are who you are and you have your own value. Jesus loves you and gives you importance. He wants to strengthen you."
The proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated for the completion of the Church of "Panagia Galaxa, Thalassokratousa".
About the Author
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 271
Ähnliche
FR ANDREAS KONANOS
Strengthen
your Soul
Copyright ©Fr Andreas Konanos2013
Published in England by AKAKIA Publications, 2013
Fr Andreas Konanos
Strengthen your Soul
Translation from Greek:
Chapter 1:Heidi Alexiou
Chapter 2: Stella Savvidou
Chapter 3: Ioanna Alexaki
Chapter 4:Ioanna Alexaki
Chapter 5: Giorgos Migadakis
Chapter 6: Ioanna Alexaki
Chapter 7: Eleni Poulakou
ISBN:978-1-909550-85-8
http://www.atheataperasmata.com/pandreas
Copyright ©Fr Andreas Konanos2013
CopyrightHouse.co.ukID:144465
Cover Images:
Source: ShutterStock.com / Copyright:Ase/ File No:105338222
PUBLICATIONS
St Peters Vicarage, Wightman Road, London N8 0LY, UK
T. 0044 203 28 66 550
T. 0044 203 2896 550
F. 0044 203 43 25 030
M. 0044 7411 40 6562
www.akakia.net
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the Author and the AKAKIA Publications, at the address above.
2013,London,UK
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TWO WORDS OF INTRODUCTION
STRENGTHEN YOUR SOUL
I WANT A SESAME BAR
STUDY! STUDY!
LORD, SOFTEN MY SOUL
ALONE AT CHRISTMAS
BACK FROM MOUNT ATHOS
EASTER
FR ANDREAS KONANOS
TWO WORDS OF INTRODUCTION
Nothing special. Just a few broadcasts that we made for the radio station “Church of Piraeus”, 91,2 FM, now written in a somewhat tidy text, and translated into English for the first time for our English speaking brothers and sisters.
We spent several hours in each other’s company, several times in the week. If I were to put a bookmark in this publication, do you know what I would use?I would use one of your tearful tissues. You told me many times that listening to my poor words you cried. We lived together moments of self-awareness, honesty, prayer and hope.
Many people have asked for this book to be published. Big deal!As if you do not know it all already... You know it all, trust me. You just want to hear it in a different way. You want the drug, but sugar coated in sweet syrup. Youcannot standinjections, surgery, bitter flavours.
The truth is that it is you are who enrich me. You give me rough pieces of gold, silver and precious stones. And I take them, edit them and I give them back to you a bit more poetic, literary.
The raw material is yours. You just do not know it. You cannot imagine that your message, your phone call, your sigh and tear, your agony and questions, your sorrow and bitterness can become a radio show; that your sad soul can feed my inspiration so your feelings can become familiar to all those who feel the same way, through a broadcast. This is how I express it. I gather darkness and shadows of your own and my own life and put them in front of the Light of Christ. And just because it is what you say is true and you do not fake it, something true comes out of it. Hope comes from withinpanic; peace comes out of the mist, quietness and confidence through cries of despair.
Thank you for your trust, love and forgiveness that you give me. May God bless you always, may he broadenyour mind allowing you to see far, clearly, humbly. Everything will be fine, all the difficulties and the crises will pass. The love and Christ are the only things that will stay forever and we will go along the way with those.
What is said verbally in the show can hardly be transferred to paper. The way, the tone of voice, the gaps, the colouring of the voice is difficult to retain in this transfer that we are attempting here, in writing. But it does not matter. It is a poor transfer of poorwords. In the end poverty remains, to manifest that ultimately what enriches everything in life is love, with which we surround things. With love even the insignificant becomes important, even the invisible becomes visible.
Thank you very much to theorganisation "Panagia Galaxa, thalassokratousa", which assumed responsibility for publishing the broadcasts in a book and to all those who helped and start this publishing effort. I thank those who wrote, corrected and edited this book.
The proceeds from this book and what will follow will be entirely for the completion of the church and the areas surrounding the hideaway that we are preparing at Galaxidi Phokidas, near Delphi and Arachova. I'm telling you so that you know. There, I hope, future broadcasts will contain more light, more views of the Heaven and the blue sky. Since at Galaxidi, in Panagia Galaxa, the eye sees only light, sky, sea and mountains.
We thank all those friends of the broadcast “Unseen Crossings”, from Greece, Cyprus and overseas who are already helping and those who will help complete the church, the cells and the utility rooms of Panagia Galaxa. Your deposit, however small or large goes directly to Panagia Galaxa.
The needs that deposits help cover are: the painting of hagiographies, pews, icons, shrines, floors, plumbing and electrical installations, library equipment, kitchen, rooms etc.
May God return your love and bless your life and your soul forever.
To make a deposit, please use the following banking details:
National Bank of Greece (Ethniki Trapeza): 040/296223-31
IBAN:GR8801100400000004029622331
SWIFT/BIC: ETHNGRAA
or
Bank of Cyprus: 0150-01-009645-00
IBAN:CY17002001500000000100964500
SWIFT/BIC:BCYPCY2N
If you want to wish something for me, let it be this: that I constantly make an unseen crossing from the appearances to being. This prayer of yourswill perhaps hurt me, but it will be worth it. Thank you.
Father Andreas Konanos
STRENGTHEN YOUR SOUL
Translation by Heidi Alexiou
----------------------
"Sometimes I listen to the ‘Unseen Crossings’
broadcasts and I shed tears.
The point is to find the strength to apply
part of the nice words that we listen to
and to stand on our own feet..."
C.T. Chicago (e-mail)
----------------------
My beloved brothers and sisters, friends of Piraeus Church in all parts of the earth, wherever you are listening to us from, I greet you. My brother and my sister, I wish you well, that you may always have peace and rest in your soul and never stop cultivating your personality. What I mean is that you should tend and take care of your soul and beg God to give you the gift which one day somebody told me he wished to receive for his own soul. “To progress” he confided in me. “I beg God to help me progress. To have my days pass by and always take steps ahead.” This is exactly what people need, as a prayer of the Holy Liturgy declares, God to bestow “progress in life and faith and spiritual prudence on us.” We should progress, mature and cultivate our soul. We should feel rested and contented, be quiet people with whole and integral personalities. We should reach the point that the Holy Bible mentions: “Attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. To the perfect man.”
I know that this it is difficult not only to realise, but also to comprehend or really feel. However, I will give you an example in order to help you; I will tell you what it means not to be whole as a person, not to have a cultivated and constituted personality. How many times, let us say, aren’t we happy, when we hear someone say some words of praise for us? How many times don’t we really need a word of praise? We cannot stand being left alone, we cannot feel rested just being by ourselves and we constantly need a confirmation from others. Our wish for our value to be recognised is a permanent insecurity that characterizes us as human beings. I feel valued if you smile at me. I feel valued if you speak to me. I feel valued if you accept me in your company. If you don’t address me, it means I have no value. This is exactly the point that Jesus Christ wants us to overcome, and lead ourselves to the wholeness of an integral personality.
I do not know if you have ever thought of that as an objective of life. I mean, to enjoy a moment of peace and quiet with yourself, so that you can stay at home, walk in the streets of the city, look, for example, at the displays in shop windows, go into a bookshop, and generally go somewhere all by yourself without feeling lonely. To find yourself somewhere where there are no people around, but be happy and feel that you have company, the company of yourself. But this sentiment has to be genuine and based on the wholeness of self, and not to be based on narcissism or the concept of “I am very important so I need no one,” and of course, without selfishness or contemptuous feelings for the others. You should feel the completion deep inside you, and know that your value is not acquired through others but through yourself, because the seal of God, His image, His grace, and His breath are all inside the soul He gave you.
This is what gives you value and not what the others will say to you or about you. You should rid yourself from the insecurity you feel inside, and I mean that you should stop feeling worthless when the others criticise or insult you, or only feel your self-worth when they highly praise you.
No. You always deserve your self-worth. And you deserve it because you are a creature of God, His creation. Because God loves you and the whole heaven watches over you, takes care of you and gives you importance. Even if no one calls you on the phone for a whole day, even if no one speaks to you, there is a tremendous power inside you. You have value and personality. You are a unique being and there is no one like you anywhere on earth. No one is like you, no one has your traits, your gifts and talents, but on the other hand, no one has your problems, your peculiarities and your character in general. You are who you are and you have your own value. Jesus loves you and gives you importance. He wants to strengthen you.
This is the key-phrase: To have a strong soul. To build your own personal relation with Christ and find the golden ratio of communication. However, you should build such a relationship with Him that will not isolate you from the company of your brothers, for example, the devout members of your parish, or prevent you from going to a meeting. You must not isolate yourself, but you must not try to consort with others in order to acquire value, because value cannot be acquired in such a way. You have value. Even if you are confined to bed or to a wheelchair, completely unable to move, your value is there, even if no one pays attention to you.
Of course, this is easy to say and easier to hear being said. But the greatness is when this realisation pours out from inside you and you feel it. Of course, these are difficult things. However, I often find certain personalities in the Gospels, and while reading the incidents that happened in their lives, how they dealt with them, how they moved, how they spoke to Christ and how they generally led their lives, I am convinced that they had such a strong and brave soul. “I’ll go to find God and create a relationship with Him. Regardless of what the others will do. I don’t care how people will see me or what they’ll think of me. I have a brave soul. I have faith in myself that I can approach my God.”
For example, I remember the bleeding woman who is mentioned in the excerpt from the Gospel. While Jesus was in a street of Capernaum, on His way to cure the twelve-year-old daughter of Jairus, “the ruler of the Synagogue,” that woman came up in the crowd and touched the hem of His garment bravely, without first asking the Apostles to intervene. As soon as she touched the Lord’s cloak, the fountain of her blood dried. Jesus suddenly felt that His power had gone out of Him, so He turned around in the crowd and asked who had touched Him. The Apostles were surprised and told Him: “Why do You ask? There are so many people near You. There are so many pressing in on You. What did You feel?” “Yes, indeed” He replied, “there are crowds all around me, but one person got something else from me, something that all of you have not managed to get. You are all close to me, but you do not attract upon you what I have to give you. You have me so close to you, but you do not take what I have. All of you.
The touch of the Lord cured the bleeding woman andHe praised her for her faith:
(daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague). That woman had a really brave soul. She must have thought: “I will go to find my God directly. I will not use mediators, I will depend on no mortals, and neither will I create idols, because God is not an idol. If, on my way to find God, I use humans as my idols, deify them and expect them to give more than they have to give, then I will have failed. I will go on my own.” That woman must have had a really constituted soul. Her body may have been bleeding for twelve years, as the Gospel says, and she might have spent all her money on doctors without result, but I think that her soul was full of health and she was really brave. That is the reason why that particular woman took something from Christ, while the others were not successful. Because, I think, she had that bravery. She had a beautiful soul which was progressing, and while her body bent to touch the Lord’s cloak that was dragging on the ground, she remained standing tall.
This happens to all of us quite frequently, because we want someone else to intervene in order to help us get what we want, and quite often, we even depend on what they will say. We have become accustomed to having someone to act as a mediator. However, when you ask a Saint to become the “mediator” you have to be careful and fully comprehend and realise the way you will do it. You do not deify the saint, nor create a new idol out of him; you do not worship him, or put him above God. You just ask him to show you the way to Christ so that your soul becomes strengthened after that.
You should be careful who you admire and to what extent you admire them, because this kind of respect can be easily turned into a form of idolisation in the end, which will eventually distress, disappoint and hurt you.Because people hurt each other.Sometimes you think, “This is a terrific person!” “And the other one is also terrific!” You admire orators, simple people, or priests. Of course, you may question yourself: “Is it bad to admire someone?” No, it’s not bad to get inspiration, to derive strength and courage but you must know the limits. I point my finger at the forest of Paradise, at God Himself, and you look at my finger and get impressed. You get impressed with the mouth of someone who is eloquent but he speaks about God. Your aim, though, is to go there, to God, because the mouth of the speaker is only clay, and if you don’t go near Him, you will also turn into clay and then you will be disappointed, because you were not be able to progress spiritually.
People do not help or save us. You must accept it as a fact. Strengthen your soul and develop a personal relationship with God. Allow people to give you what they have to give, do not ask for more, and love everyone. But you should love them in the right way. Be compassionate and keep in touch with them, do not isolate yourself, and always have in mind that this is the only thing you can take from them and nothing more, because your God is there and He is the One you must constantly seek, not idols and replacements.
The Gospel mentions that when the Lord asked who had touched him, the bleeding woman came out of the crowd “trembling” and told him the whole truth saying: “it was me who touched you and that is why you felt your power going out of you.” However, at the time a miracle is taking place everybody gets impressed, but then something comes up and man’s faith in God is shaken. I think that more or less, we all experience such vicissitudes of faith. The moment you feel the faith, the fullness, the soul dynamic, and the humble, inner self-containment which come as a result of the divine ones, something happens and your faith is shaken again and you start wondering: “What is going on? Another problem? Finally, dear God, will you save me or not? All things considered, do You exist or not?Do You really love me or not?”
The same thing happened in the Jairus case. The people who were near him told him: “Don’t bother the Master, your little daughter is dead. There is nothing you can do. It’s too late.” But Christ immediately turned to him and said: “Be not afraid, only believe.” So don’t listen to what the others tell you, you must have faith. That is why we should not rely on people. The same people who had seen the bleeding woman being healed just a while before were the ones who tried to prevent Jairus from turning to Jesus for help. The same thing happens in our everyday life. Those who say today “this man is terrific” may be the ones who will later disappoint you and shake your faith. That is why you can touch people but don’t get hooked on them because if they fall, you will fall, too.
“Be not afraid, only believe.” Jairus hesitated. “No, Jairus. You look at me. Aren’t you asking me to heal your child? Don’t you trust me? Aren’t you calling me?” “Yes, but there are so many people around.” “Live without looking at the people. See the world with your eyes focused on me.” And indeed, they went to Jairus’ house, and the miracle of the resurrection of his twelve-year-old daughter took place, despite the despair that threatened to flood his soul, not that he wasn’t justified, of course. Because Jairus was a man who had feelings, and who felt the pain deep inside his soul. It’s not easy to know that your child is dead and manage to have optimistic thoughts just because Christ is there by your side, and expect that everything will change. In theory, you may be able to accept something like that, but in practice it’s extremely difficult to make your soul bear these times of temptation.
The difficult times are the ones during which our faith will go through a dreadful furnace, and our love for the Lord will be tested through big adventures and tribulations. We often think that we are ready to go through an ordeal, and tell ourselves that we have a strong soul and that we are ready to face any difficulty. However, the moment we say so, we aren’t actually facing a problem. The soul falters during an ordeal. Your knees bend while insecurity and panic come over you. You feel the earth move under your feet and you don’t know who to ask or turn to for help. To God? “But what God?” you say, “He has disappointed me at this moment. He, who was my hope a while ago, now becomes my bitterness again. He becomes my trouble. I don’t understand what He wants! To save me or to trouble me?” This way, and through these blows, your soul matures. It becomes rich. It becomes cultivated. It improves. It becomes holy. All these things that the Bible mentions and which happen when you accept to give in, with all of your trust, to Him who wants to make you a strong man.
The ordeal that Christ subjects you to is often a very difficult one. Just like an exercise the teacher gives a child. But if the teacher gives the student a very difficult exercise, that means that the teacher trusts the student and thinks that he is able to solve it. And even if the student is not ready yet, he will eventually become. The student mustn’t always solve simple exercises and there comes a time when he has to learn how to deal with difficult problems. By doing so, the teacher doesn’t want to belittle the student; he only wants to strengthen him. This is the secret we have to understand and when we do, we will surrender. This is a painful procedure but it brings a brilliant result. It may not be an immediate result, but after a while you will be able to realise it, and people around you will also realise it. They will see that you have a personality, and that you are now capable of helping. Your word will be firm and it will touch the soul of your fellowmen, because it will be the word of a cultivated man and a strong soul. Think, for example, someone saying: “In my life, I have gone through diseases, persecution, and unfair slander. I have faced irony and suffered great injustices.” And another one: “My house was broken into,” “I went through a big adventure,” “I have lost a close person”… After all these, such a person has acquired a strong soul, he doesn’t become dependent on people easily because he has realised the relativity of human affairs. So he loves all the people and sympathises with them, and this attitude, as a way of life, has a spiritual quality.
Compassion. People who have suffered in life are the most compassionate. They sympathise with people around them because they have felt the pain, and they can understand how the others feel. But while they understand and love them, they do not become dependent on them. They do not care about the others’ opinions as they have overcome such things. Because in the furnace of the ordeal where they found themselves, all other things were regarded as trivial and of minor importance.
One day someone who had suffered cancer and chemotherapy came to see me. Fortunately, he had managed to overcome his problem and he was well again. So he said to me as a complaint: “Now, I don’t have much time to read spiritual books because I’m too busy.” Then I answered to him: “What can you read now? You have devoured the entire published anthology. You have personally lived what is written in the collected works of Saint Chrysostom and what is written in the patristic texts about pain, patience, prayer and endurance. You have put in practice the Patristic Theology and the lives of the Saints because you accepted to cooperate with God. You accepted to cooperate with the lessons that God gave you in your life.” Of course, I didn’t tell him that he had become a Saint after all the difficulties he had gone through, because this way, anyone who went through pain would become a Saint. But this is not the case. Everybody goes through pain. But not everybody becomes a saint, because some of them react, feel indignation, and refuse to learn the lesson God gives them through hardships. And they insist on their own way, refusing to mature. But if someone cooperates, he cultivates his personality to the fullest.
Once I was told: “You must, when you think of yourself in the past, feel that you don’t like much the way you were. You should feel that you continuously change, that everything old in you dies and that something new is always born.” The meaning of these words is that you must become a different person every day. You should broaden your mind and your thoughts, and adopt a new perspective on life. Something old should die within you and something new should resurrect. In essence, as the years go by, and as one finds himself closer to God, he loves Him and prays, and as he struggles and tries for the best in his everyday life, he changes, he gains and he realises new, positive parts of himself. Through the pain that he feels at times, through maturity and through the effort that he makes, he realises the change that Christ brings to his life.
One more excerpt from the Gospel that I would like to refer to, is the passage after the Lord’s Resurrection, when Christ asks Peter to follow Him (Follow thou me). Then Peter looks at John who was next to him and asks Jesus: “What shall this man do?” meaning, “I am coming, but what will happen to John?” Then Jesus said: “What is that to thee?” that is “Why do you care about him?” Here the Lord’s saying may give you the impression of contempt, but it doesn’t have anything to do with being mean or indifferent. What He really meant to say was that a person who exists in your life can willingly, or unwillingly, intervene in your relationship with God and have a negative influence. You ought to live your relationship with God paying absolutely no attention to what the others around you say or do. Each one of us carries inside him a personal treasure, his own beauty, which constitutes a special prayer. If you do not establish a personal contact with God, there will come a moment in your life when you will feel pain and you will have to go through trials and tribulations. You must feel God and ignore the others around you. You must conquer the Lord’s saying “Follow thou me,” because He loves you and wants to make you strong.
What really impresses me is the attitude of the ascetics on Mount Athos (The Holy Mountain), and how they live there on their own. They do not care about what the others will say, there is no one close to them – no one to praise them for their attitude, and no one to make any kind of remark. They have no interest in people’s opinions, what they really care about is the opinion of God.
Can you see what God essentially wants to do? He wants us to become mature. But I don’t want you to think that I have personally managed to put into practice all these things I am talking about. But I’m really jealous of the attitude of those people. Every time I read some passages from the Gospel, I think to myself, full of admiration: “This relationship between people and God is so beautiful!” God wants to make them mature, and make them ascend higher and higher. “Don’t stay there. Come on, rise! Become holier and a more beautiful soul. Bring to surface this part of your soul which is hidden deep inside you. Be a little bit more patient and manifest this veiled part of yourself.”
How can this be done? In all the aforementioned ways, with all the ups and downs. One moment you feel that you have Christ and the next you feel you are losing Him. He comes and goes. This is exactly what His disciples felt after theResurrection, when, desperate and lost in their thoughts, they were walking towards Emmaus.
As the Gospel mentions, they had just started feeling their heart aflame for Him, He had shared the bread with them, but as soon as they had started understanding the Lord, He once more went away from them. Why? To make them stronger. He only left a sweet sensation in their soul, warmth, faith and power. To believe, to touch and to feel the invisible as present. To feel that they hold the One who goes away but leaves behind Him His fragrance, His sweetness, His zeal and the yearning for Him. Then, when they went back and said that they had seen the resurrected Lord, they, themselves, were bewildered about what had happened. However, they confirmed themselves whenever they recalled the flame they had felt in their soul.
Christ wants us to love Him, but without having the feeling of certainty that we hold Him. He does not want to give us certainty, but leaves us suspended where we can experience the most exciting flights, make the most beautiful patterns in the sky of His love, and in the sea of life where we are swimming in its waves. You may think that you don’t know where you are going in this vast ocean. Then He tells you, “Let the wind carry you away.” “But I have no compass. I feel I have nothing.” “Just give in and something good will come out of it.”
If you can understand all these things, you will be able to realise how present God is, though you may feel that He is absent. You should know that this is the moment when you don’t feel and you don’t see and when you believe that He is absent. This is probably the moment when He has just given you His bread and as you start realising it, He disappears. In this way, He tells you that He wants you to have another kind of relationship with Him – a relationship beyond patterns, colours, visions, sights, touches and certainty. He wants you to feel in your heart that you hold Him there. Him who always comes and goes. Him who leaves His trace inside us, and Him whom we never know where He is. Him whom we cannot describe to others afterwards, but people can see something different reflected in our eyes, a glow, and they understand that the Lord passed through our soul and left something there. And this leaves room for fresh progress and new steps ahead.
And this will happen, as the Gospel says, in Eternity, in the Kingdom of God, where God will always be what we will relish, what we will enjoy, and what we will always ask for more of. We will ask for Him, however, not as something unknown, something we do not know about, but as something familiar, something we won’t be able to satiate our soul with. Something we hold but always goes away. All these are interrelated, because they make you become a lot more powerful, to feel the absolute certainty and the absolute uncertainty at the same time. For all things in your life.
Maybe I could give you an example, to make you understand better what I want to say, because I tend to use rather confusing and contradictory concepts. When you speak to your child, giving him advice such as what to study, where to go, what he should do, but state at the same time that this is God’s will, too, and that is the reason why he should follow your advice, the child feels a kind of security as to what steps to take because he feels that you know better. But your relationship with God is completely different. God constantly tells you one thing in your life. “I am the God of surprises. I am the God who wants to make you mature and make you realise that whenever you feel security, I am not always involved in it. I am also in insecurity and in surprise. I am in what you feel you lose, but in fact you don’t.
