Mother Alexandra, founder of Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Ellwood City

This year we commemorate the 25th anniversary of the repose of Mother Alexandra, who began life as Princess Ileana of Romania. She came to America, hocked her jewels, and founded Holy Transfiguration Monastery near Pittsburgh, PA. The monastery's journal this time features writings by Mother Alexandra, and this one is particularly good. It was found handwritten in a notebook:


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God is only asking us to remember Him at all times, in good and bad periods to offer Him this moment of our time--this moment, not the following one. The present is what He asks; not in great gestures of surrender, but in a continual natural stream even as we breathe.


The great moments will then be vouchsafed us by Divine grace when we are reaching for them, when prayer quickens into a life of its own and carries us with it to unexpected heights, and above all peace and joys. Prayer carries us--not we our prayer.


--Mother Alexandra, founder of Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Ellwood City, PA>>