For the Beginning of the Apostolic Fast "With all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind..…" Talking with Geronta Pavlos of Sinai:

For the Beginning of the Apostolic Fast

"With all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind..…"

Talking with Geronta Pavlos of Sinai:

Geronta Pavlos: To us, freedom chiefly means for someone to become freed from the passions, from sin. Because if a person lives in an environment that has political freedom, where personal freedom exists, but he is enslaved by the passions to sin – that person is not really free; he is a slave, of the passions.

In our Church, there is great emphasis on our need to be freed from the passions. It is the heaviest servitude to be a slave of the passions. If we as persons become freed from the passions, from sin, then we will live in true freedom, in whatever environment we find ourselves.

Q What is the difference between a passion and a sin?

A It's the same thing, but a passion has greater hold on you in relation to time. Sin is an isolated act, but the passion is a condition that has become habitual within us.

Q Something that “lurks in the soul,” the “Ladder of Divine Ascent” says … a sin we practice many times?

A Yes, it continues ...

Q In Western society we consider it admirable to have a passion. We use this to identify ourselves – 'my passion is cooking.’

A Yes, in Greece too that's common. It is something excessive, one loves something to the extreme.

Q How is a good passion distinguished from a bad

one?

A The sinful passion is something that transgresses the commandment of God. And the other isn't right. To have a 'passion’ for other interests isn't a transgression of the law of God, but it isn't healthy.

Q Why?

A The extreme? When one eats to the extreme... he will get sick! (laughs)

Q Where then should our excessive love be?

A Our love is where God wishes it. Does God want a particular thing? That which God wishes, that is where we must go to extremes, with much love.