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Mother Siluana Vlad has reposed in the Lord on Tuesday, June 8th, 2021. Her ministry in the Romanian Orthodox Church is impressive. She was the abbess of the Convent of St. Silouan in Iasi, coordinator of the Training and Counseling Center “The Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel” and through her many conferences she created a bridge between the young generation and the Church. Before being a nun, she was a teacher-assistant of philosophy at Galati University. Mother Silouana received the great habit and after a long suffering reposed peacefully in her cell at the time the local bishop was reading the prayers at the departure of the soul. Memory eternal!
Video source: doxologia.ro Live stream 28.05.2020
Watch here some other short videos of Mother Siluana with English subtitles: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLykxD12XzsnPKEQicRUgFkjibajg2-inA
These videos have English subtitles. Use the button to switch them on or off. Watch this quick-guide on how to turn on captions on your device: https://youtu.be/if7eELuaYtI
Mother Silouana:
Have you seen people standing in line and crowding to ascend to heaven? I didn’t see them either… Maybe when they distribute holy water, there are crowds, they even jostle against one another… but to ascend to Heaven… We often ask what to do to stop arguing, to get married, to take my exams, to be well… but what to do to get to Heaven? It’s as if we were born to stay here [on earth]…
What do we need to ascend to Heaven, to prepare for it, to build our wings?
The desire, the longing to be with God, to be with Him, here and on the way, and there… If I do not want to be there with Him, to be where He is, as He promised us, then I have no way to get up. I can do good deeds, I can confess, I can give up my passions… For what? To feed my longing, to lighten my burdens, to get rid of the burdens in order to ascend to the Lord and to awaken in me the desire to be with God, to be with the Lord, to be where He is. So, first of all, we miss this longing.
We actually have it, we are all anxious, we all have the clear feeling that we don’t have everything we need, that we are not who we need to be, that we don’t have enough, that we are not happy.
We fool ourselves sometimes, we say we have achievements, we have… but as soon as we stop and look inside we realize that no… it cannot be just that…
So what is this “it isn’t just that”? What is this dissatisfaction with “what I am”? It is the voice of your longing for God that you may feel at first like longing for yourself. At first I was longing for myself. I said, “That’s not me, I want myself,” as I thought I should be… I wanted myself back. Searching for me and searching for the meaning of my life, I certainly found God and then my longing woke up, it rose from the depths of my heart, was felt and formulated in words. Even if it is not formulated in words, it is felt. And when you read St. Anthony the Great, St. Silouan the Athonite, when you read a saint from the Philokalia, then something vibrates within you, something awakens in your depths, sometimes even when you listen to a hymn in the church, something leaps in you and you realize that it is that longing which awakes. So, it is that longing to reach our home, our place, to become who we are called to become.
We ignite our longing by cleansing our hearts of all the impurities of these things in the world that clog our hearts and feelings, which make us sick, these sensitive organs given by God to feel and desire Him. What a wonderful power God has given us… desire… It is an extraordinary force. When you want something you can even turn over the mountains… but this desire is the desire to be god, to be like God, to be with God, in God, to be united with God. But we confuse it with the desire to have, to look, to do, and we bury ourselves and in this way we die asphyxiated. So, let us awaken our longing for God, our longing for God. Let’s ask, “Lord, grant me to desire You!” You might say: “but, what, am I a monk, am I Mother Siluana to stay all day and desire God? I have work to do, we have children and now we have so much homework to do… We have our problems… ”Do you think that this longing should be experienced only sometimes? Like to take a break from life? [No.] This longing is the flame of life…
Someone gave an example: when you are in love, you live everything in your life with that feeling, with that power, with that strong feeling of love: “I love, my beloved is present in my mind, he or she is present in my thoughts”, but in the meantime I prepare for my graduation, I finish my master’s degree, I cry if my grandmother dies, in the meantime I do everything I need to do, but this joy, this love, the waiting time to meet with my loved one is permanent.
It’s much easier with God. You have to meet your loved one in a certain physical place, at a certain time. It’s not like that with God. He is always with us. That is why He ascended to Heaven.
He ascended to Heaven with His body, He departed from AMONG us, so that He could abide IN us. He abides in us. He abides in us from baptism, from Holy Communion, He is even in those who do not believe in Him, because the image of God is there. But we are not there, we do not live there, we do not live that joy.
