Today we celebrate the liturgical memory of the early twentieth century saint, Silouan the Athonite (+1938). For many Christians, East and West in the North America St. Silouan is an unknown personage but he is worth knowing as one his biographers writes he has “a sense of cosmic unity and the way that we are called to love and have compassion on all things:
He who has the Holy Spirit in him, to however slight a degree, sorrows day and night for all mankind. His heart is filled with pity for all God’s creatures…For them, more than himself, he prays day and night, that all may repent and know the Lord” (352).The Lord bestows such rich grace on His chosen that they embrace the whole earth, the whole world, with that love (367).
Once I needlessly killed a fly. the poor thing crawled on the ground, hurt and mangled, and for three whole days I wept over my cruelty to a living creature, and to this day the incident remains in my memory….One day, going from the Monastery to Old Russikon-on-the- Hill, I saw a dead snake on my path which had been chopped in pieces, and each piece writhed convulsively, and I was filled with pity for every living creature, every suffering thing in creation, and I wept bitterly before God (469).That green leaf on the tree which you needlessly plucked – it was not wrong, only rather a pity for the little leaf. The heart that has learned to love feels sorry for every created thing (376).The Spirit of God teaches the soul to love every living thing so that she would have no harm come to even a green leaf on a tree, or trample underfoot a flower of the field. Thus the Spirit of God teaches love towards all, and the soul feels compassion for every being (469).