St. Paisios in Sinai: What We Can Learn from Camels

St. Paisios in Sinai: What We Can Learn from Camels

On July 12th the Church celebrated the memory of a new saint of our times, St. Paisios of the Holy Mountain, canonized in 2015. In his monastic life there actually were two Holy Mountains  –  Mount Athos and Mount Sinai as well.  The beloved Elder spent several years early in the 1960s at Saint Catherine’s Monastery, living most of the time alone, as a hermit, in the skete of St. Galaktion and Epistime, high above the Monastery.

More details of St. Paisios’s life in Sinai you can find in a remarkable video – it is a Sinai chapter of a full 6-part documentary about the Saint’s life by director Alexander Kouprin - in our Video Library or on a FMSM page: (http://www.mountsinaimonastery.org/news-blog/2016/7/12/new-video-on-st-paisios-time-at-st-catherine-monastery)

The film is made with great love and devotion to the Saint, and includes unique scenes of the Monastery, interviews with Archbishop Damianos and Elder Pavlos, who knew St. Paisios while in Sinai, as well as his thoughts and words of spiritual advise.

St. Paisios’s Quote from the video:

“If we can not follow the great Egyptian fathers with their strict asceticism, we will imitate at least camels who eat little, but carry considerable weight, from constant kneeling they form callouses and with heavy luggage they obediently follow a small donkey. And they have this feature: they never forget those who do good to them, and are grateful to them.”...