Gabriel Bunge > Quotes

“The above explains why thoughts of acedia [despondency] can appear in apparently such contradictory ways: in the lukewarm, as sluggishness, indifference, and even depression, and in the conscientious and eager, as unrestrained activism and ascetical maximalism. If this vice is not healed by steadfast endurance and a life of discipline, combined with “tears before God” and constant short prayers, it leads to a complete standstill of the spiritual life and sometimes even suicide. Yet he who bravely and steadfastly passes the trials of this “noonday demon,” who “encompasses the entire soul and [threatens] to oppress the spirit,” emerges from these tests inwardly strengthened. Unexpectedly, those spiritual experiences from which he thought himself forever to be excluded are now revealed to him.”
― Gabriel Bunge, Dragon's Wine and Angel's Bread: The Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Anger and Meekness

“So should the one inflamed with anger not pray at all? By no means! But instead of reaching for what is unattainable and even dangerous on account of his passionate condition, he should resort to those “short and intense” invocations of Christ, mentioned everywhere in the early monastic literature: those “short prayers” (as Augustine calls them), out of which the well-known “Jesus Prayer” developed.

If you want to put the enemy to flight, pray without ceasing.

These “concise,” “terse,” “repeated,” indeed “ceaseless” short prayers are the daily bread of whoever is tempted—even of him who is tempted directly by the demon of anger.”
― Gabriel Bunge, Dragon's Wine and Angel's Bread: The Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Anger and Meekness