Quotes About Ascesis

Work is experienced as discipline--the background of which is ascesis--even though it also gives pleasure. One is allowed to become depersonalized in work, to forget the self (to lose contact with its most intimate feelings and needs)--indeed all that is necessary if one is to give oneself fully to the work.

When an ascesis is understood as a technique for the conscious creation of a force that can be applied, in the first place, at any level, then the disciplines taught by the doctrine of awakening can be recognized as those that incorporate the highest degree of crystallinity and independence.

Today, the approach of the Fathers would be to invite well-fed societies to a collective ascesis that would make possible a better distribution of the world's resources, and prevent the gap between the rich and the poor of the planet from growing constantly wider.

In the battle of ascesis and the offering of creatures to God in the cosmic liturgy, our will must cooperate with divine grace. But the ultimate knowledge, the love-knowledge of the Trinity, takes hold of us by grace alone. We prepare for it by a stripping away of our being until we become nothing but expectation.