April: Day 21: Teaching 2: Venerable Anastasios, Abbot of Sinai

April: Day 21: Teaching 2:
Venerable Anastasios, Abbot of Sinai
 
(With What Disposition Should One Be Present at Divine Services?)

By Archpriest Grigory Dyachenko

I. The Venerable Anastasios, commemorated today by the Church, was by origin from Syria or Palestine and in his youth received an excellent education and a pious Christian upbringing. Having come of age and having cultivated in himself a devout disposition of soul, the Venerable Anastasios desired to leave the world and entered a monastery. Love for monastic struggles and the desire to find more perfect instructors in them prompted him to visit the ascetics of piety on Sinai, with whom he remained to live. His ascetic labors and spiritual wisdom gained for him the general respect of the brethren; he was deemed worthy of the rank of presbyter, and after the death of Gregory the Sinaite, the brother of John Climacus, he was chosen abbot of Mount Sinai. 

Prologue in Sermons: April 20

By Our Sins We Drive Away From Ourselves our Guardian Angel

April 20

(A Word from Saint Anastasios the Abbot of Sinai)

By Archpriest Victor Guryev

The Lord is so merciful to us, brethren, that to each one of us, at Holy Baptism, He gives for our whole life an invisible defender, an instructor in all that is good and right, and a guide to the heavenly fatherland — the Guardian Angel.

“Those who are in the Christian faith, to every person there is given from God an Angel for preservation during his whole life,” says Saint Anastasios the abbot (Prologue, April 20). And again: “To every faithful one from God, to each one an Angel was given, and he writes down all his good deeds” (ibid., fol. 37).

But if each one of us has a Guardian Angel, why then does the Holy Church every day, in the church services, ask for him for us? “An angel of peace,” it cries, “a faithful guide, a guardian of our souls and bodies, we ask of the Lord.” And in the evening prayer the believer likewise entreats the Lord for a Guardian Angel: “Send Your Guardian Angel, covering and preserving me from every evil.” Why is this so? If once the Guardian Angel is given for our whole life, then why still ask for him?