Here we are with another broadcast today. How many more will we do? We shall see. We thank God that the Lord bears with us, that you bear with us, and that our Church’s radio station keeps giving us this opportunity. And as you understand, the music we play is not meant to be chanted like this in church, so it can be arranged a little differently.

It can be more embellished, fuller, and a little different from what you may be used to. I like it, anyway, and I’m glad you like it too. You often tell us so when you call. Vasilis, thank you once again.

There is a story I love in The Little Evergetinos. Remember the book I suggested you get and read? It is published by the Holy Monastery of the Paraklete. A monk had passions and weaknesses; he sinned, and he went to his spiritual father and confessed it all. But his spiritual father was very strict and scolded him. The poor monk was distressed. “I tell him everything,” he thought, “and he scolds me.” And the scolding did not help him change.

No one changes through scolding. The monk asked, “Father, what am I to do now?” “What are you to do? Haven’t I told you that what you’re doing is unacceptable? You cannot be a monk and behave like this.” “So what shall I do?” “Don’t do it again. Stop all of it.” I don’t know why, but his spiritual father was very strict and unyielding in his advice. Time passed, and the monk made mistakes again, including sins of a bodily nature.

I say this because some people imagine that when a man enters a monastery, he leaves his body outside, puts on a cassock, and walks around as though there were nothing inside it. Children sometimes ask me, “Father, what do you wear underneath?” “What do I wear, children?” “What’s underneath?” “My arms, my legs, my trousers.” “Oh, all right.”

We know, of course. Yet sometimes we imagine that people in the Church have no bodies. No bodies at all. Well, they do. At least the ones I know do. If you’ve met people who would weigh nothing on a scale except for their cassocks, they must be angels—if such angels exist. This monk was no angel without a body. He was a sinner, but he had something wonderful: he was honest. He went to confession. You know how hard it is to open your soul to your spiritual father and say everything: “This is happening to me. This is how I feel, what I do, what I think, what I want.” No excuses or evasions.

Willingly and honestly: “This is who I am. This is how I feel. This is my situation.” But the spiritual father still would not receive what he said. He remained severe. The monk left in despair, thinking as he walked, “What am I going to do? If this is how it is, perhaps I shouldn’t be a monk. I should leave, go back into the world, and get married.” His spiritual father had given him no hope, no encouragement. It is terrible to speak openly and be crushed instead of encouraged. It is terrible to open your heart and be pushed even further down. A person’s soul bends under that weight. As the monk was on his way to give everything up, he came upon the cell of a white-haired elder.

The elder’s hair had turned white with age. “My child, what has happened?” he asked. “Father, this and that has happened. I’m no good.” “And if you’re no good, what of it? People who are not good can still be close to God. The good are in Paradise. Here on earth we are sinful, yet we can be close to God.” “Yes, Father, but my spiritual father is so holy and good. He never makes a mistake or commits a sin. I am terribly sinful, and what I tell him upsets him.” “But doesn’t Christ say that the angels rejoice when you repent? Why does your spiritual father become upset?” “Because I don’t change.” “Are you refusing to change on purpose?” “No. I try, but I struggle and cannot manage it. My spiritual father says the things I find difficult are not really difficult. He says they are all easy.” “All right,” the elder said. “Give me a little time. Don’t leave.”

“Don’t give up. You have struggled and worked hard for so many years. You make a sincere effort, and you are honest. Opening your heart matters greatly. Don’t leave, my child. We will pray, and God will help.” So what did this white-bearded, white-haired elder do? He prayed to God: “My God, please grant me this favor. For just a short while, let the monk’s spiritual father experience what this young monk endures: the sins he struggles with, the troubling thoughts, desires, confusion, strain, and all the suffering that comes with temptation. Give these things for a little while to the spiritual father who thought himself holy, incapable of error or falling, and thought it was easy to be…”

“…perfect, holy, and without sin, as God desires.” He had forgotten what our own Church says: “One is holy, one is Lord, Jesus Christ.” Only one is holy; only one is the Lord. We are sinners. We are unworthy and poor. Our nature is made of clay and subject to decay. What else can we say?

Do you know what happened? That strict spiritual father was sitting in his cell, thinking about how high he had risen in virtue and how perfect he was, when temptations and logismoi—intrusive thoughts—suddenly seized him. He was banging his head against the wall, and nothing would make them go away. He grew dizzy and disoriented. Then he understood that every good thing he had was a gift from God. God had sustained him all that time in a strong and upright state, and that was why everything had seemed easy. None of it is easy. God’s help makes it feel easy. But look honestly within yourself, if you dare, and see what goes on in your own nature, what happens to you and what you think. Some people believe everything is fine because they do not act on certain things. There is much you do not do. Why? Because you cannot.

If you could, you would have done those things. You are ashamed, ashamed, but deep down you still want to. Shame holds you back, but inside you think—you think about everything. That is your nature. A person can reach from the mire of his thoughts to the heights of holiness. He is not only a high-soaring eagle. Doesn’t he also say, “I rolled in the mud like pigs”? I am this, and I am that. We are a mixture of holiness and wretchedness, of filth, yet there is also a piece of heaven in our hearts. That is the truth. Whoever sees this in himself has his feet on the ground and inspires others to be genuine and truthful, and…

…of course, he gives them no permission to sin. Acknowledging what we are does not mean telling everyone, “Since we’re like this, go ahead and sin.” Not at all. It is no license for lawlessness. Besides, if someone wants to sin, can you hold him back by force? Sin and every wrong turn carry their own bitterness, Vasilis. If someone does something harmful or unworthy, the deed itself will bring its own consequence, and he will come to understand. You cannot keep people good with a whip and with fear: “Don’t do this; don’t do that.” Help the other person feel at ease and understand the reality of his own nature. Don’t set an unrealistically high standard while pretending that you yourself live on some heavenly, perfect plane where everything is effortless. It is far from effortless!

And can you claim that you do everything you tell others to do? How could I say, “Everything is so easy, my brothers and sisters. It is so easy to stop smoking, so easy to stop doing this or that. It’s all effortless”? It isn’t effortless at all. It is very difficult.

Saint Paisios of the Holy Mountain used to say, “If God abandoned me, I would go to every music club in Thessaloniki and dance. You see me now spending fifteen hours at a vigil and taking joy in it. That doesn’t mean I am good and you are bad.”

“God sustains me and helps me. Of course, I cooperate with Him and offer Him my hand, but God gives great help. It is not that you are sinners and scoundrels while we are good.” Hearing that brings you back down to earth. You can say, “Father, do you really understand me—how I live, my sins, my reckless ways, my carelessness, my immoral acts, all the dirt in my life?” How could I fail to understand you?

How could I fail to understand you? I carry all these things within me too. “But you haven’t done them.” I haven’t done them in deed, but I have done them in my thoughts, in my heart, and in my imagination. You may not have eaten a pastry,

but just thinking about it makes your mouth water. Then you say, “I didn’t touch the cakes when I passed the bakery.” Once, when I went to London to give a talk, the bakeries had wonderful cakes. I was watching my diet then and eating very few sweets. My doctor had told me to avoid them for a while, so I touched none of them. Yet in my heart I had devoured every last one. Truly, I bought nothing. The people with me knew it. They said, “Have one, Father.” “No, no,” I said. But my heart knows what was happening inside me. I had eaten them all.

So if someone comes and tells me he is greedy for food, how can I say, “What you’re doing is unacceptable; gluttony is a terrible, deadly sin,” without remembering my own struggle and how much I wanted those cakes? What is that remembrance called? Understanding.

It is called mercy. And there is another beautiful word for it: compassion. I suffer with you—with your pain, your temptation, your fall. But to suffer with you, I have to understand you. If I think I am pure, untouched, holy, beyond anyone’s reach, how can I share your pain? And how will you feel able to come to me and tell the truth about what you carry inside?

So many things come to mind now, Vasilis. I don’t know which one to turn to next. My mind is darting about like an electron, trying to gather them all. They’ve come to me now, and soon they’ll be gone; I’ll forget them. But that’s all right. I’ll remember whatever God wants me to remember, and if it comes from Him, I’ll say what you need to hear.

It was an afternoon on the Holy Mountain, on the balcony of a monastery by the sea, one of the first monasteries you come to there. We were talking with the abbot, and others were there too. He spoke about the need for a genuine spirit: to be honest and true. Being honest doesn’t mean pretending to be a saint. It means becoming holy. You can be holy as a sinner who repents. You can be holy when you struggle, make progress in the ascetic life, and win; but even when you fall, you can still be holy. Holiness is not only for those who win. It is also for those who sincerely keep trying. Whatever the outcome, God sees your intention. He rewards it and supplies what is lacking. Then the abbot told us about two spiritual fathers he had heard about years before in Athens. He began with what a woman had said about her spiritual father.

‘Would I choose a spiritual father like this?’ the abbot asked. The woman had said, ‘My spiritual father has overcome everything. No one can compare with him. He is holy, he commits no sin, he has overcome all the passions, and he is free from them.’ Vasilis, this woman was presenting her own spiritual father as the best in the world. Why did she think he was the best? Because, in her eyes, he was beyond everyone else: holy and without sin. ‘Listen to the way she thought,’ the abbot said. ‘Now listen to another story. Once, someone was driving us through Athens. Father Amphilochios of Patmos was in the car with me. We were together, and at some traffic lights near Omonia Square, a young woman walked past, dressed provocatively, hardly clothed.’

Father Amphilochios said, ‘Goodness, what goes on here in Athens! You have a hard time of it. It must be difficult to become holy here.’ ‘I turned to him,’ the abbot said, ‘and asked, “Father, why do you say that? Were you tempted too?” “Of course, my child,” he answered. “How could you not be tempted by what you see here? It’s difficult. Look at all these temptations.”’ So a man as spiritual and as good as Father Amphilochios admitted it: ‘Yes, I was tempted too.’ And the abbot said, ‘That is the sort of man I would choose as my spiritual father. He struggles, but he does not pretend to be something he is not. He has sympathy, compassion, and mercy for the sinner beside him, who falls, gets up, fights, and keeps trying. He does not present you with an idealized Christianity.’

He doesn’t set the bar so high that you feel dizzy and say, ‘There is no way I can do this.’ Otherwise you become distraught: ‘How can I speak about the way I live, what I want, what I think, and everything that passes through my mind, when I’m surrounded by so much holiness? Everyone else seems so perfect.’ But that is a lie. And do you know what else moves me? The holiest person who has walked this earth after the Lord Jesus does not judge us or scold us or keep correcting us. She loves us. That is why we all love her. Isn’t our Most Holy Theotokos good? Isn’t she wholly good, perfect, and holy? Whom does she judge? Whom does she scold?

It is rare to be good and have no wish to impose yourself on anyone. It is rare to be perfect and say, ‘I simply live, I simply shine, I simply love, and I grow in holiness for the sake of the whole world.’ That is what the Most Holy Theotokos does. She is holy for the sake of the whole world. Which world? Everyone who wants to receive her love.

That is why everyone loves the Most Holy Theotokos. She is a tender mother who brings people together. She is awe-inspiring, purer and more radiant than the angels and even the rays of the sun. We sing that she is ‘purer than the sun’s bright rays.’ Yet she respects you, even when you are stained by sin. She loves you, embraces you, cleanses you, washes you, and protects you. This is how someone who wants to change begins to change: through kindness and mercy.

Through a gentle touch, tenderness, and a kiss that takes fear and insecurity from the heart. You say, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ and the other person asks, ‘Are you sure? If I speak, will I get slapped?’ ‘No, you won’t. Speak. Say what you want to say. Open your heart.’ ‘You won’t reject me? But you’re so far above me.’ Above you? My child, how am I above you? I am lower than you. And what do ‘above’ and ‘below’ mean, anyway? Before God, we are all very small. What did the Most Holy Theotokos say to Saint Silouan the Athonite? ‘I do not like the life you are living.’ She corrected him, and Saint Silouan said, ‘If only you could have heard her voice. She rebuked me, but with such love. Her words melted me; my heart went still. If you could hear the kindness in the Most Holy Theotokos’s voice, your life would change at once.’ It was kindness that changed him, not shouting, insults, or punishments. Do you see the distinction? I am not saying that you should excuse what is wrong.

Understand the person. Accept that this is where he is and what he can manage right now. Say, ‘If I were in his place, I might do the same, or worse.’ And, between ourselves, admit that I do the same or worse in the hidden part of my own life, which no one knows about except my spiritual father, if I tell him everything. Some people cannot bring themselves to go to their own spiritual father. They go here and there, looking for somewhere to hide, afraid their sins will come to light and everyone will find out. Why? Because they think, ‘How could I say that to him?’ He has given them the impression that such things cannot be spoken of, that they must never happen. Whether something is permitted or forbidden, it has happened to you. This is where you are; this is how you feel. Open your soul and speak about everything that troubles you. And most of the time, the things you think are so serious are not the gravest things. The gravest things, the ones the Lord

singled out and spoke against, are often not the things that frighten you. They are the things you do not dare to see in yourself or speak aloud.

They are the stirrings of your ego, the first movements of a merciless heart, hatred, malice, and revenge. All those painful things give rise to the rest. There is your lack of faith, your insecurity, your lack of trust in Christ, your reliance on your own strength, your refusal to receive His love and tenderness. These are sins. And when you do not receive His love and tenderness, it becomes easy to seek them in sinful encounters. Yet you look only at the outward act and say, ‘I did this.’ But why did you do it? Other things were hidden behind it and led you there. Christ knows those hidden things, and that is why He does not condemn you. People of Christ understand this too. Think of that white-haired elder, a monk shaped by years of labor and honest self-knowledge. He did not scold

the young monk who was sinning. Do you remember the story we began with? You do? Then listen to a repeat of the program! I cannot tell it all again now. It is repeated sometime during the week, I think on Monday evening. The station can tell you: 41 18 602 or 41 18 640. You can find out there when the program is repeated. Anyway, the temptation left the young monk and went to his strict spiritual father. The spiritual father became so overwhelmed that he got up to leave for the world and get married. But he too met the ascetic elder. ‘Where are you going?’ the elder asked. ‘Father, I have some business to attend to,’ he replied, piling lie upon lie. The young monk, by contrast, had told the truth: ‘I am facing temptations, and my spiritual father scolds me.’

The young monk had humbled himself. The spiritual father would not admit what was happening. ‘Me, admit it?’ he thought. The elder said, ‘What business has you in such a hurry? Your face is flushed, and I can see how agitated you are.’ ‘Father, I must go. I have something urgent to deal with.’ ‘Tell me, my child, what is happening. Open your heart.’ ‘Father, what can I say? Please pray for me. I am facing temptations, and I cannot understand it.’ ‘Why does it surprise you?’ ‘Because the things I am thinking and feeling are unacceptable.’

‘My child, do you know something? What you are going through is a lesson God is teaching you. I asked Him for it.’ ‘You did? What do you mean? What do you know?’ ‘I know the whole story. I only want you to understand this: what has overwhelmed you for these two hours is what that young monk goes through again and again. He comes to you constantly for confession. He is tormented and struggling. God wants to show you, Father, that you must not be harsh

with others. Show kindness, mercy, and forgiveness, as the Lord Himself does. God understands us and loves us without sharing in our mistakes or our passions. How much more should we do so, Father, when we ourselves are sinners? One sinner hears another sinner’s confession. It is human beings, not angels, who hear our confessions. Surely we know something about sin.’ The spiritual father was moved, and he went back.

When the young monk came again for confession, timidly this time, his spiritual father said, ‘My child, tell me. When you used to tell me your sins, I thought I understood what you were going through. But if it is anything like what I endured for those two hours, when temptation nearly drove me out of my mind, then I understand now how hard the struggle is. It is hard.’ ‘Father, forgive me,’ the monk said. ‘I will try to change.’ ‘My child, this is not for my sake. We will both do it for God. But we must humble ourselves.’

‘I must humble myself along with you. You have helped me understand some things.’ So say nothing against anyone. Do not pass judgment on anyone’s sins. I tell you again: whatever you condemn in someone else, you may come to experience yourself. God will humble you. Do you call someone untidy? The time may come when your own home, your room, and your belongings are untidy. Do you say someone has failed in life? You may fail in some way too. This is not revenge. It is a chance for you to learn the same lesson and see how you do. That person scored eight; when your turn comes, will you score eight, or will you fall below a passing grade? Then you will see that it is easy to talk, but hard to suffer with someone, to pray, to love, and to forgive. And, after all, what are you forgiving? Is another person’s life yours to judge and forgive? Their life belongs to them.

I was thinking about all this and wondering how beautiful life would be if we were honest and open with one another. Sometimes hypocrisy takes hold of me, and I do not reveal my true self, my difficulties, my passions, my sins, and my problems, even to the people I ought to tell. At least tell them there. Within a family, a couple should be honest with each other. Parents and children should be honest, and students and teachers too. That is what I mean. I am not saying you should stand on your balcony and tell the whole world what is happening to you. But open your heart, at least to someone, and tell the truth. We are always speaking in

codes and excuses, hiding behind masks. We laugh when we want to cry. Imagine if we cried whenever we needed to. Might the person in front of us be moved and say, ‘Why are you crying? What has happened? Can I come closer?’ Instead, we put on a hard face and think, ‘I’m certainly not going to give in and tell the truth.’ I am struck by that monk who kept going to his spiritual father and confessing his sins, again and again, without losing hope. What does that show? He opened his soul. He went and said, ‘Father, this is how it is, so I will tell you.’ There is something beautiful in that. Simply opening your soul and saying what is really happening to you can bring healing. I tried this once with the children at school, about a practical matter, not my sins. Let me give you an example. I taught a class in their final year of high school once a week.

The final-year high-school class met once a week. At first, the students did not come in right when the bell rang. They were a little late. That bothered me, and I would tell them, ‘Come on time. This isn’t all right. The school has a schedule, and it isn’t right for you to be late. The headmaster makes remarks, you’ll be marked absent, and it bothers me when you’re not there on time.’

I made it sound as though I wanted them to arrive on time so the lesson could start on time.

I said they should not be marked absent, for the sake of the school’s orderly routine. But that was not the truth. It really was not. Why else did I get so angry when they were late? Could a five-minute disruption to the school timetable upset me that much? I had been reading books, including the writings of the Fathers and the elders, about honesty. So I asked myself, ‘Will you dare to tell the truth?’ A thought inside me said, ‘But you’re a priest. Are you really going to tell them why?’ One day, after the children had gathered, I said, ‘I want to tell you something. I want to tell you the truth. When you don’t come to class on time, I feel that you look down on me. I feel slighted.’

And there was more. I was afraid to say it. I thought that if I did, I would make a fool of myself and they would laugh at me.

‘I also feel that you pay no attention to me, that I have no place in your lives and that nothing I say reaches you.’ I had saved the hardest part for last. ‘And I also feel…’ I wondered how to say it. ‘I feel that you don’t love me.’ They began to protest: ‘What are you saying? The only reason we’re late is that we want to take a few more shots at basketball. We use those extra five minutes to play. Of course we love you and pay attention to you. What you say does affect us. We think about it.’ I said, ‘Children, I’m sorry. I wanted you to know the truth. This isn’t about absences, punishment or the headmaster. When you don’t come on time, I feel inadequate. I have low self-esteem, and I feel that you look down on me. That is my own problem.’ They apologized and said, ‘If that’s how you feel, we’ll come on time. We don’t want to hurt you.’ And from then on, they did. Of course, someone will still be late now and then. But they understood how I really felt. To tell them that, though, I had to make myself vulnerable.

I had made myself vulnerable. What does that mean? I had opened my heart and said it all plainly: ‘I feel that you don’t love me. I feel inadequate. I feel like a useless teacher.’ That was how I felt. You might say, ‘What nonsense!’ Nonsense or not, it was the truth. We need to speak to one another with love, truth, honesty and sincerity, all the beautiful things Christ teaches. Someone said to me, ‘But we mustn’t undermine our authority and embarrass ourselves by saying things like that.’ I don’t mind. This is the conclusion I’ve reached, and many others know it and live it too. People who are happy in their homes are happy to the extent that they can be truthful with one another and say what they feel. Think of a woman who told me she kept saying to her husband, ‘Leave whenever you like. As far as I’m concerned, you can get up and walk out on us.’ She was telling him she did not care if they separated, though she did care. I asked, ‘Why don’t you tell him the truth?’ She said, ‘Am I supposed to beg him?’ I told her, ‘It isn’t wrong to ask your husband for love. He’s your husband. And isn’t that what you want?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I won’t stoop to that. I have my dignity.’ So she kept telling him, ‘Go. Leave whenever you want. See if I care.’ Her husband had his own stubbornness and pride, and he left.

Afterward she wept and cried out, beside herself. I asked, ‘Why are you crying?’ ‘Because he left,’ she said. I asked, ‘What were you telling him? Weren’t you telling him to get up and leave? You wanted to say, “I love you. I need love, and I want to give love too.” But you told him to leave. Why did you say that?’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I didn’t expect him to do it.’ ‘Then let this be a lesson for us,’ I told her.

Honesty helps us so much, provided we speak with discernment. Some people speak honestly but say things that wound others. Honesty by itself is not enough. Suppose a man is mired in trouble and asks me, ‘How do I look to you?’ If I say, ‘You look as though you’re stuck in the mire,’ he may despair. Give him hope. That is no lie. The way you tell someone the truth matters a great deal, doesn’t it?

When the hair at the front of my head began to thin during my university years, perhaps from studying, tiredness and stress, a monk at a monastery near Oropos, outside Athens, saw me after a long time apart. He said, ‘Well, I see you’ve acquired a fine, broad forehead!’ He did not say, ‘You’re going bald. Your hair is falling out.’ He knew that might hurt me. A ‘broad forehead’ was how he put it. Or suppose you see someone who has gained weight. What do you say? ‘What happened to you?’ You could say, ‘It looks as though you’ve put on half a kilo.’ I once said that to a man who had gained quite a bit. He replied, ‘Half a kilo, Father? Can’t you see what I look like? I can hardly fit through the door!’

If I had said that to him myself, however honestly—‘How did you get like that? You can’t fit through the door’—I’m sure I would have hurt him deeply. He would have replied, ‘All right, Father, I’m fat,’ and felt awful. The way you speak matters. Of course, this cannot be just a technique. If you are clumsy at heart and rough in your manner, even if you use the gentle words I’ve suggested, something harsh or thoughtless will come out sooner or later. We need to be considerate. We should speak openly, think of the other person, and speak with love, honesty, freedom, modesty and sincerity. All of these belong together. And if you’re young, don’t worry. You’ll make little mistakes, mistakes, and blunders too.

How else do we learn? We learn from our mistakes and from the temptations we have faced. We’ll keep trying to give others courage and hope, and not leave them discouraged.

The greater gain is that someone trusts you enough to open their heart. Think of a child who comes home and tells you they smoke, have tried drugs, got drunk, had a relationship, or have done or are thinking of doing something else. Perhaps they need to tell you about an unwanted pregnancy or an abortion. What you hear may be tragic. But it matters deeply that they are coming to tell you. At that moment, something in their soul is struggling to come out. Perhaps it is like poison they need to bring up so they can find relief. Their trust is precious, if you do not miss that moment. You see, the Lord opened His heart to His disciples. Shortly before His Crucifixion, He told them, ‘My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death.’ He was deeply sorrowful.

It was as though He were saying, ‘The thought of death approaching overwhelms Me. I am almost dying of sorrow.’ He shared that with them. He did not put on an air of holiness. He was holy, and He spoke truthfully. At times He felt pain; at times He was angry. He did not pretend. He was Himself. Stop pretending all the time. Aren’t you tired of pretending to be someone you’re not? Many people around you have already noticed: your wife or husband, your children, your friends. They may not be able to tell you, but they know. And you know that you’re living a lie. Be truthful. Acknowledge who you are, how you are and what you think. Then you will gain something.

You won’t lose anything. I’m moving from one subject to another, Vasilis, but how are they all connected in the end? How are they connected? As someone might say, ‘Admit it, Father? How can I admit it? If I tell another person exactly how I feel, there could be a terrible misunderstanding.’ Our times and our upbringing have taught us that we must never make mistakes. But what does ‘must never’ mean, everyone? What does it mean? Who is sitting above us saying that? ‘But God.’ Did God say, ‘You must never’? God did give us one ‘must never’: we must never stop struggling. God did not say that we must never make mistakes. That would be like telling a little child who is drawing that making a mistake is forbidden. Or a little child who is writing:

The alphabet, the alphabet again with his little hand. ‘You’d better write that letter A properly. I wrote it out and showed you how. Now do it.’ How many times did we have to write our first letters? We are on the path to holiness, on that path. How could we possibly make no mistakes?

Who has the right to forbid you from making mistakes?

Someone says, ‘That’s what I was taught: if I show that I make mistakes, people reject me.’ But anyone who rejects you for that is being false and hypocritical, because they have made mistakes too. Once, at a monastery, I saw a monk painting an icon. He had corrected part of it, rubbed it out and painted it again, so the image looked rather strange.

He turned to me and said, ‘Don’t judge it as it is now. I haven’t finished.’ He had understood what I was about to say. ‘It will look like that icon on the wall. Look at the other one; they’re the same.’ It was remarkable. He said, ‘This part you see now, where I smudged it a little and made a mistake and spoiled the design, will become like that. That is what the finished icon will look like.’ So it is the finished work that matters. Your mistakes, my dear friend, your passions and sins and difficulties, and…

whatever weighs on your heart are not the end of your life. They are not the finished picture you will present to the Lord. Did you hear that? First, it is the finished picture that matters; and second, you will present it to the Lord. People will not judge the painting of your life, the work you are making. God will judge it, and the time for anyone to judge anyone else has not yet come. So when you see someone making a mess of their life, tell yourself, ‘They have made a mark on the canvas. They can erase it and carry on. The painting is not finished.’ While the painting is still being made, there will be mistakes, problems, weariness and tears. Attend to your own work and try to do it well.

And remember what I said about showing the true picture of your soul. You can do that with people God brings into your life, people you trust. It takes courage to be your true self. But if you find even two or three people—or perhaps just one, your husband or wife, someone in your family—with whom you can open your heart about what you need to share, you will feel a great relief. You need not tell the whole world. Having two or three people who can comfort you is a great gift. One day a young woman travelled a long way to make her confession. She said, ‘I came all this way just to tell you something, to entrust something to you, and then leave. I need to feel that I’ve told someone and they haven’t scolded me.’ She told me, and I said nothing to reproach her.

Nothing, nothing. I did not even give her advice, nothing. What advice could I give her? She already knew. But I wanted her to say it. I understood her need; I could see it then, and I understood from how difficult it was for her to tell me. It really was something that took courage to open your soul about, so I said nothing. I only told her, ‘God loves you. Do you know that God loves you?’ You might ask, ‘Is that all you said to her? Couldn’t you correct her and tell her not to do it again?’ Well, it was clear that she understood. She understood that she would not do it again. Of course, there would have been nothing wrong with telling her not to do it again. But her eyes... And you saw it: everything depends on what you convey in the atmosphere you are in. Otherwise, what you say can be misunderstood. You could see in her eyes that she would not do it again, or that she had been deeply hurt, and further words would have been unnecessary.

We could say much more.

What I wanted to say is that we opened our hearts a little today. Vasilis, what did we do? That’s what we did: we opened our hearts again. You opened yours through your melodies and played beautiful music for us. Thank you, Vasilis Hatzinikolaou. And thank you to everyone who called 4118602 or 4118640. The program also has an email address.

If you write, please keep it to five lines. Sometimes so many messages come in that I cannot even read them all. The address is atheata.perasmata@yahoo.gr. The program is rebroadcast; the radio station can tell you the day and time.

Well...

I hope what we said has given you something to think about. Love yourself,

your brother, your wife or husband, and above all your God. And when you love Him, He will say to you, ‘Love Me, and love yourself too.’ Christ says that when you love Him rightly, you also love yourself rightly: you help yourself and respect yourself. Sometimes you treat yourself gently; sometimes you correct yourself. Sometimes you are firm with yourself; sometimes you give yourself a drink of water because you are weary from life. Little by little, you find balance and discernment. May we find that discernment. It takes great skill and wisdom. It takes pain and many hard knocks. We will go through many things and face many temptations, and sadly we will commit many sins before we understand some things and change. Whatever it costs, the struggle is worth it.

I pray that God grants you a good week. God willing, we will speak again next time. If anything I said confused or upset you, set it aside and go on living your life as you see fit. If something made you think, take one small step. Do not overwhelm yourself. Do one small thing, and you will understand the rest another time, little by little. Our spiritual mind cannot take everything in at once, and our heart cannot bear it all at once. May God give you strength as you continue your struggle. Be joyful about who you are: a sinner, yet close to the Lord. You repent, you keep struggling, you are sincere and true, and you are trying. That matters greatly. God rejoices with you.