“God has given us the mind not for what we use it for, but for its hidden work. The mind has its own hidden work, which is the watchful pursuit of God, the watchfulness lest it be scattered, conquered and clouded by thoughts; it is the awakening, the sight of God.”
Archimandrite Emilianos Simonopetrite

The present volume is a continuation and, in a way, a completion of the translations that Fr. Emilianos made of the ascetic words of the Abba Isaiah. The catecheses on St. Isaias were given between 1985-1986, at the Simonos Petras Monastery and its metoch in Ormylia. The aim is the same, the Father’s words aiming to urge souls towards the spiritual struggles, to guide them and to share with them the spirit of the Holy Fathers, the monastic spirit, both in the public life of the brotherhood and in the personal life of the monks, in order to prepare them for the mystical encounter with the Lord Who is coming. We could say that, while the text of Abba Isaiah dealt with the practical side of life in all its breadth, and especially the social ties of the monks within a monastery, Abba Hesychios, in his 203 chapters, writes almost exclusively on the theme of the watchfullness. These heads reflect, like the faces of a diamond, all the sides of this fundamental philocalic work, which covers the whole spiritual struggle of the monk who seeks Christ through prayer. Father Emilianos took care to interpret all these little chapters, which often repeat almost the same meanings, because he realized that they form the center of the monastic life, the most important thing of the monastic that makes him worthy before God. Every monastic, whether a penitent or a Chinovite, is called to cultivate temperance in response to God’s call. As it is said at the beginning of the book, the awakening is the “following of someone”, that is, of the Savior Christ, whose presence we feel, but whom we do not see, because our sight is obscured by our sins and by the drunkenness of the worldly and bodily mind. Therefore, the whole art of asceticism consists in the monk’s “obedience” to the footsteps of the coming Christ.