Editor's note

Among the recurring counsels in the Elder's correspondence is the assurance to disciples weighed down by the slowness of their progress that God measures the struggle, not the result. He told them that the falls of a soul who is fighting are not the same as the falls of a soul who has given up, and that the very awareness of one's faults is itself a gift of God's grace. He urged frequent confession, the keeping of small rules faithfully, and a refusal to compare one's interior life to anyone else's.

Editor's note

Many of the Elder's letters are answers to parents grieving over children who had abandoned the Church or fallen into ruinous lives. He directed such parents away from arguments and reproaches and toward prayer of a particular kind: prayer joined to fasting, almsgiving in the child's name, and patient love that does not cease. The mother's tears for her child, he wrote, are never lost; the child does not see them, but God collects them.

Editor's note

Writing to nuns and to lay disciples who lived in difficult circumstances, the Elder insisted that joy is a sign of the Holy Spirit and the natural fruit of a clear conscience. He distinguished it from the cheerfulness of distraction. Christian joy, he said, can sit beside sorrow, and even sing in prison; gloom in a Christian is a symptom of self-love that has been wounded.