Paisios Mendonsa

“Although we cannot encompass God’s trinitarian being within our human knowledge, we can know and glorify God as Trinity and be consciously and thankfully incorporated into trinitarian life. Thus appropriating the meaning of trinitarian doctrine involves learning to think, live, and pray so as to refer to God’s being as Trinity while at the same time learning to disavow a comprehensive epistemic hold on the God to whom we thus refer ourselves.”
― Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine

“Father,’ he said, ’I would like to see you privately for a few minutes.’ Old Paisios waved at him and said, ’Go on my son. Go with the others. It is late and I am very tired.’ ’But Father, please!’ the man implored him. ’I have something very serious to tell you.’ ’Go my son, go. There is nothing to worry about.’ The man insisted and old Paisios seemed impatient. ’For God’s sake, go before the monastery closes its doors.’ ’But Father, my wife is very ill. She is dying from cancer.’ Father Paisios paused, placed his arm around the man, and gently reassured him, ’Go, my dear and have no fears. Your wife is fine.’ “That fellow looked very despondent,” Father Maximos went on to say while we walked towards old Paisios’s hermitage. “With a heavy heart he walked back to the monastery with the others, feeling that he had accomplished nothing. That his journey, coming all the way from Athens to remote Mount Athos, hundreds of miles away, was a waste of time. He had heard that elder Paisios was a holy man whose prayers and intercessions often cured people from serious illnesses. Now his last hope had evaporated. “You can imagine his amazement and great delight when upon entering his home he found his wife walking about and looking surprisingly well,” Father Maximos continued as we approached the hermitage. “His wife claimed that while she was bedridden, a cold sweat took over her body and, after perspiring profusely, she felt completely healed. Her doctor later confirmed that her cancer had mysteriously and literally gotten washed away. Her husband asked about the time the perspiration and the changes in her condition began to happen and she replied that it was on Friday at about four in the afternoon. When her husband heard that he felt a chill. That was the time when elder Paisios had reassured him that his wife was fine.”
― Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality

“The term “unbegotten” (agen[n]ētos) was to carry much of the weight of this newfound clarity on the radical difference between God and the world. This development constituted an agitation or break within the flow of Christian experience inasmuch as it needed to be creatively integrated with another fundamental principle of Christian experience, the primacy of Jesus as Lord. According to everyone’s understanding of Scripture, even the preexistent Christ was begotten, caused by the Father. Moreover, although Creator, he was also closely associated with creation, as its paradigm, “the beginning of God’s works” (Prov. 8:22; cf. Col. 1:17). In a fairly standard interpretation of the latter scriptural phrase, Origen explains that “in this very subsistence of wisdom there was implicit every capacity and form of the creation that was to be.”[95] How then to reconcile the primacy of Christ, closely bound with his double relation to both God and creation, with this newly maximized sense of divine primacy—the radical difference between God and world and God’s absolute priority and freedom from any kind of posteriority (or being caused)? In the tensions evoked by these questions, a reexamination and reintegration of the elements of Christian experience was being called forth.”
― Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine

“that's my most agonizing question. I shut my eyes and ask myself, ‘Would you persevere long on that path? And if the patient whose wounds you are washing did not meet you with gratitude, but worried you with his whims, without valuing or remarking your charitable services, began abusing you and rudely commanding you, and complaining to the superior authorities of you (which often happens when people are in great suffering)—what then? Would you persevere in your love, or not?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov