On the Sunday of Adam's Expulsion from Paradise

ENGLISH: On the Sunday of Adam's Expulsion from Paradise

"The history of humanity after Adam's fall is full of tragedy, of the sufferings of absurd and hopeless human passions. But God has shown us what kind of man He had in mind in His pre-eternal counsel, the counsel of the Holy Trinity. For us, after the Revelation, there arises the responsibility to fulfill God's original plan in our lives.

We are a creation endowed with understanding and called by the Creator, in our freedom, to achieve the goal and meaning of our emergence from nothingness, in cooperation with Him. God does not force our freedom. He cannot do anything with people without their cooperation. 

But what do we need in order for God's first thought to be fulfilled in us? This is shown to us in the Revelation itself and in the Holy Scriptures, and confirmed by the universal experience of the Church throughout the centuries: to seek God's will, to know it, to give ourselves to it."

Saint Sophrony the Athonite

in "The Mystery of Christian Life"