Listen to Father Pimen Vlad who offers us some thoughts and exhortations on the occasion of the new year that opens before us. Of course, Father Pimen does not limit himself to this event, but uses it to give us spiritual advice for the future.
Enjoy!
Look dear ones, we meet again. We started a New Year! We ended the year, we drew a line, we saw what we did this year, good or bad. We started the next year with the hope of better, to be better, closer to God. If we didn’t start it that way, we started it badly. [Do] nothing without God, you know.
Everything we do without God is lost. That’s why we need to take care of it and remember that God commands it! Let us not trust our minds, that we are the great, the smart ones, that we can, do, invent, overturn, because we see what we have done in this world, with our science. They were all made by God, very good, that is, perfect, and we began to tear them down, to destroy them according to our minds because we took God out of our lives.
Let’s try to fix this, call God into our lives, bring Him through our deeds. This will also change the face of the world. If not, there will be chaos, disasters, wars, and the worst, because where God is not, there is chaos.
I remembered one thing — I talked about Holy Communion before. So what’s happening? We can take the communion as often as the confessor allows us, but let it be with the blessing of the confessor, because people come here and ask me if they can take communion, but they did not ask the confessor. It is good, when you leave your home for Athos, for Jerusalem, wherever you go, to ask the confessor: “Father, do I have the blessing to take Communion where I am going? Or does a priest have to give me an absolution there so that I may take Communion?” If you have struggled and kept your mind a bit gathered and you have the blessing of the confessor, then we have much benefit!
I have now referred to Holy Communion and those who come to Athos, to have the blessing of the confessor when you want to partake, because then there is a much greater benefit.
Another thing I wanted to tell you: I have always been proud (not stupid pride, but beautiful pride) and very glad to be Romanian. I have seen that many, after leaving abroad, are ashamed of being Romanians. Why should we be ashamed? If you are ashamed of being Romanian, then you are ashamed of Stephen the Great and Holy, you are ashamed of Michael the Brave, Mircea the Elder, Neagoe Basarab and many other holy princes.
Others may not have as many wonderful people as we had and as many geniuses as our country has given. So we should be proud wherever we go: “Yes, sir, I am Romanian!” That is, to respect ourselves as a nation, wherever we go! Let’s not kneel: “Alas, I am Romanian and I am ashamed!” Let’s think that we are still people and we are Romanians who come from a nation that gave a lot of saints, heroes, people who sacrificed themselves for the country!
Our country is not two or three days old; it has not been formed since the 1990s, maybe like other countries. Our country is old, if we start from the beginning, thousands of years ago and slowly until it was complete. We have wonderful people, and in order to maintain ourselves as a nation, we need to commemorate them somehow. There are certain days, even on the calendar, the saints we celebrate have been set.
We celebrate our heroes, we talk about them in their day, no matter what death they died by, they were people who sacrificed themselves for the country.
You see Stephen the Great and Holy, besides being on the calendar, we celebrate him in every way, there are statues everywhere. Michael the Brave, who made the Union and many others. So we’re talking about them, people who robbed themselves. Mihai Eminescu, a man who fought for the country, was one of the intellectuals, a man who fought at his level for the unification of the country, for the preservation of the language, for the unity of the Romanians.
A mistake of ours, which we allow (we have not seen this among any people): foreigners come and say to us: “You must not celebrate him; you must not speak of him, because we do not like him.” and our leadership quickly bows their heads and decides to tear down the statue, because they told us they didn’t like it. If that man fought for our country, sacrificed himself, contributed to the welfare of the country, how would others come and tell us what to do?!
What would it mean for Turkey to come now and say to tear down all the statues of Stephen the Great, to remove him from the calendar, because for forty years he knocked us down, killed hundreds of thousands of Turks? What would we say to the Turks? Did Stephen the Great go to Turkey and did this? No, they came and assailed the life of the Romanians, the welfare of the country, they overtook it. We just defended ourselves.
Like everyone else, they stood in the country and defended the country in their own way, with weapons or on the intellectual level, with what God gave them. So no one went anywhere, to harm anyone. That others came and tried to harm the country, is something else. They were trying to defend it.
So they are our heroes, whom we must respect and honor for sacrificing themselves. We also see in the communist era, how many were in prisons. Why? Because they were people with backbones, people with holy lives, they lived in prayers in prisons. We must honor them, respect them, and sometime some of them must be listed among the saints because they have found, in Aiud and elsewhere, their relics, their bones which have sprung myrrh.
I repeat: let us not be ashamed of being Romanian and let us respect our heroes! Let’s learn our history, let any Romanian know where he came from and what people we had! Don’t let others dictate what to do. A little attention to this and the leadership of the country and everyone else to see what they did for the good of the country.
I’m looking at the Greeks here. They had an outlaw who lived through the mountains in the hard times of Greece. How much do they respect him? Kolokotronis was his name, he was an outlaw who, during the time they were occupied, he was living in the mountains, fought, as much as he could, in his own way, for the liberation of Greece. What if strangers come and say,
“He was a thief, how do you honor him?” This is not possible, the Greeks have him in great honor everywhere.
So let us respect our ancestors, our geniuses, not by what others dictate to us, but according to our conscience! Let us give them respect because perhaps we trample the earth soaked with their blood. Think, how many saints has our country given?!
We never went to other countries to set them in order. I said from the beginning of this conflict in our neighborhood, not to get into it! Right since it started. It is not our struggle, let us stay in our place, our country, our joys, our sorrows, our needs! If anyone comes to the country, we have always been hospitable and helped.
But let us not go where our pot does not boil, let us not look for a fuss if we do not have it, let us take care of our own, because if we go into other people’s business, it will turn out bad! Some people will try to push us to get involved in order to have reasons afterwards to bind to us, to compromise us!
Let the leadership of our country think well what it is doing, so that they are not later cursed by grandchildren and great-grandchildren for what they did, and also lose their soul! Let them all think well and anchor themselves more in God, because without God we can do nothing, we are lost!
All our hope is in God, in the Mother of God, in the saints! We have the psalm that says, “Do not put your trust in princes, Nor in a son of man, in whom there is no help.” Did you hear that? There is no salvation. And what we do is we very much hope in people, no matter what powers they have, how great they are. We set aside God, who is omnipotent and who can do everything out of nothing, and we put our hope in mortal men, who too can die at any moment.
Let’s think about it and start this year with more faith, with more prayer! Let us fill the churches on Sundays, feast days and every day when it is possible and cry out to God, [go to] confession, Communion, [do] good deeds according to ability, and you will see that a lot changes!
No matter what they say: they say it’s too hot, too cold. You know that until now there was talk of global warming, now you see in certain countries, in America, they haven’t had such cold in forty years, they froze, people died in their cars. It’s not in their hand, when it’s cold, when it’s hot! Everything is as God allows.
That is why our salvation is with God.
Let’s be better, let’s never forget God, and you will see that everything changes and we will have a year with more joys and fewer troubles! And even if there are more troubles, we overcome them more easily if we are anchored in God! If not, then we bear the consequences!
Yes, dear ones, as I said, let us have hope because with God there is always escape, in every situation! With Him there is no impossible! It is impossible with men, but not with God! God can work miracles and He will work miracles, but let us not leave Him, let us call Him into our lives! As I have said so many times before, have the icon of the Mother of God with the Savior at home, the vigil lamp constantly lit and ask Him for help every night, ten minutes, on our knees, to tell Him everything that we have in our soul and you will see what miracles will be done in our lives!
May the Mother of God and the good Lord help us!
God help us!
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May the Lord help us!
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May the Lord help us!
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