Spiritual decay
A monk of Mount Athos
The monk … suffers for the difficult and inhuman living conditions that all these ‘achievements’ of our apostasy from the God of our Fathers create. The ecological destruction and the pollution of the environment, the stress and the unnatural tension of life in the contemporary, big cities, the dangerous increase of every kind of illegality, of suicides and of crimes, the destructive, huge spread of drugs, terrorism and anarchy, wars. The babelic lack of understanding (confusion) and disorder of every kind and so many things that spread like an epidemic are all evident proof of the spiritual decay that covers almost everything.
We must confess that our world would be hopelessly unbearable, deformed, foul, and useless if there weren’t in it the striving Christians and Saints, people of God in whose blessed souls dwells the life-giving Grace of the Holy Spirit that beautifies them and their life and also influences positively everything around them; nature, cities, relationships and other people’s lives.
The monk suffers deeply for the legalization of the unjust, the illegal, the unlawful and the sinful. The legalization of sin, being the worst, is the major characteristic of our times, for the legislation of laws and statutes contrary to the eternal law of God. This is passed so that wretched man ceases to have a guilty consciousness, for the repentance of sins, so man ‘liberated’ from his paternal protection, his holy commandments, does not fear God.
They beautify everything to give a false picture here on earth, since the existence of heaven is not wanted, beautifying their prodigal life, the rags of the empty ‘culture’ they wear, the devilish dirts with which they nourish themselves to disguise their hunger, nakedness and homelessness. They dare make all these into ideologies, with their studies and enlightened would-be dissertations, articles and ‘scientific essays’. But these are senseless, silly and soul-corrupting inventions that God hates! ‘Woe to those who call the evil good and the good evil.’
In this distortion of the God-like image of man and in man’s tragic failure to create a holy society and a holy civilization, the way he has been summoned to do by his holy Creator, unfortunately in this distortion few people are conscious of some of the above mentioned. And the greatest pain, the unbearable one, is to think that all these people-masses, as they want to call themselves, are not aware of the existence of the brilliant world of Faith. They are not aware of what they miss by not being members of Christ, of what they deprive themselves of by living a life away from their paternal house.
All this pain urges the monk’s humble heart to cry out: ‘Let’s stand righteously! Let’s return to Christ, recover from the sleep of the deceptive life! Repent! where lies the key to all the dead ends of our life.’
From The Struggle in Christ in the Apostasy of our Times ND