Daily Reading for March 13 • The First Sunday in Lent
It was said that one of the Desert Fathers had prayed to the Lord and the Lord had taken away all his passions, so that he became impassible. And in this condition he went to one of the elders and said, “You see before you a man who is completely at rest and has no more temptations.”
The elder said, “Go and pray the Lord to command some struggle to be stirred up in you, for the soul is matured only in battles.”
And when the temptations started up again he did not pray that the struggle be taken away from him, but only said, “Lord, give me strength to get through the fight.”
A saying of Abbot Pastor, quoted in The Desert: An Anthology for Lent by John Moses. © 1997. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com.