An enlightened Christian found God with a lifeline to cancer!

Albanian 52-year-old Porphyria talks about her decision to be baptized into the Orthodox faith, about her dark path without her faith and her illness, which eventually made her even stronger.

Porphyria comes from Albania, is a new-born Christian, lived in Greece for many years, always loved Christ and then came the blessed moment when she was baptized and named Porphyria, out of love for Saint Porphyrios. However, various difficulties forced her to live as an immigrant for the second time and now she lives with her family in Germany. We met her in Greece and she spoke to us with the warmth of a true Christian comforted by the caress of God. She narrated without false humiliation her course in the dark path of the life without God and the sickness that she went through. She rejoiced with no trace of pride, as if she were talking about another woman's triumph.

Porphyria speaks to readers of "Orthodox Truth".
“I'm glad to be in Greece after three years. I'll try to tell them how my soul felt. And to speak even to a few who have the same experiences as me and to give them courage. I do not want to talk about my own experiences, but to glorify God for all He has given me. I want God to make me worthy, to express this love and gratitude that I have, to be heard by others. You know it's beautiful when we talk and support as much as we can people who have cancer, but it's very different when you go through the fire yourself and you want to talk by your own experience. The common experience says many things. Actually, I got sick of cancer for the second time. The first time I was ill I was 32 years old. Although I was familiar, I was terrified too. I remember the first day I went to do my first chemotherapy. There was a nest within me, a grief, a sadness, because I knew the road and didn't want to cross it again. That day I felt like the people who were sentenced to death and just before they were executed. I had this feeling when the medicine in my blood started to flow slowly. At that moment, I'm not going to hide it, I was tearful. "

Faced with this suffering, one can not but stand with utmost respect and with this feeling we asked her if she felt abandoned by God ...


Despite my pain, sadness, and crush with the return of my illness, I was not damned. I did not feel that God had abandoned me or given me a punishment. By God's grace, I quickly got used to it. And while I felt like they were executing me, at the same time I was thinking that Christ would turn the potent medicine into water. This poison that would enter my blood, if it wasn't for my good, Jesus would make it water. Until then it was my grievance and my pain, but not against God. "






What Porphyria told us was simply told. We also discerned the noble progress made by the soul through pain, so that it may wish to impart the knowledge she had acquired in such a hard way and to become a missionary of pain to its peers.

After cancer I started searching for myself. I had read about Elder Paisios a lot and also about Saint Porphyrios, to whom I prayed a lot, though I had not met him. Saint Porphyrios was speaking in my soul! He urged people to confession and communion. He said, "My children, most of the things that afflict us, are demons. If you build your relationship with God, you'll have nothing. You will be saved."

So step by step I started to work on myself and say that somehow I have made a mistake. So I was baptized and became an Orthodox Christian. I was learning myself through the mysteries. I resorted to confession. Man must tell everything in confession, even his sinful thoughts, without being embarrassed. Even if he has done the worst crimes in the world. Because it's all tricks of the evil one who wants to separate us from our Father. So the sly one wants to give us false cues and remorse that
make us supposedly so soiled that we can't go near God. But Christ said that He came, just for sinners, the very sinners, the harlots and the publicans, I did not come for the righteous. If He came for the righteous He would have gone to the high priests and the pharisees only. "


From what we discussed with Porphyria, it was obvious that she got this experience without having been thrown into depression. She did not feel it was a punishment of God. Cancer and everything she learned from it did not come across to her as punishment. It was almost a source of inspiration:


"We are often entangled in the prosperity of this world, in the fine foods, the drinks, the beautiful clothes, all of which is what the wicked one wants us to pursue in our lives. This is how it seduces people. And they think they are doing well. And because I lived through cancer, even if for a little while, in Christ's love, I was full in the Holy Spirit in my cancer, and I had nothing to lose. While experiencing the disease, I could not eat, drink, dress, have hair, lag behind other people around me, but I felt I had everything, that I lacked nothing. Diets and food and hair and clothes and beauty. Everything was the grace of God. And if we do not have this grace we will never be happy. God is our joy and our health and our happiness and our wealth and everything is ultimately Christ. We have lost Him and we experience so much pain in our lives. So I want to shout to people that for me cancer is not the boogeyman that scares people, I don't see it as a curse. For me this was God's blessing. Christ knew that I deeply worshiped Him in my soul even before I was even baptized. I was actually looking for Him. I had a good soul and I was a Christian without being a Christian. However, I was also very sinful. When I was an atheist, I had made two abortions in my country. My doctors were telling me abortion is nothing. Later I read that the fetus has a soul and tears to pieces. I was ruthless and God was merciful to me. He allowed the cancer for me to realize that I too could find death. “But I'm not like you, I have a lot of love. I love you, I don't bully you. I only want to slap you just to make you come back because you left Me. How to get you back from going off the cliff. So I allow something that you say is a curse, pain and sorrow, but in reality it is sanctification. This is how I finally felt got the cancer. "


"The reason I live is related to trying to cleanse myself from sin."

Time in patients fluctuates at a different rate, and often clarifies the foggy landscape that faded away so far the dominant thinking. What Porphyria put forward for her life in terms of pre- and post-knowledge was a first-rate lesson for the sick and the healthy:

“But first I found the time to think and draw some conclusions about myself and my life. At first I had a lot in my head and I didn't think about God. I took time, through illness, to think about why I came to life. To work from morning to night? To have more and more to eat? I realized I didn't come to earth for that. The reason I exist on earth is not to sin. Then there is no reason for me to live. The reason I live is related to trying to cleanse myself from sin. To make Porphyria clearer than snow, as the psalm says ... This is what we should ask God, He only knows what is good for us, no matter what we usually ask for in our prayer. We are unhappy because we want our will to be done. But God does not have the same will as ours. Because he knows better than us what we ask him of. And so I slowly learned to leave it in His hands. And let Him bring whatever He wants.
"The Lord used the hard way to bring me back"

It would be naive to believe that after this "happy end" they lived better and we did better. Porphyria does not leave us in such illusions, which gives courage to the people who fall and fall again, that is to all of us. She will tell us:

"I was not always in a state of grace, let's say. Although I got baptized and communed, when I went to Germany again the living worries came. And I was sad because my will wasn't being done. Things weren't happening the way I wanted them too. Of course, man also thinks in spiritual life that he manages things on his own. He reads a book and thinks that's enough. Then comes selfishness and it crushes you. So I want to say that for me cancer was life-saving. It brought me to God from whom I had been so far. When God abandons me I am tragically unhappy. I miss everything, I blame everything and I want to put the blame with everyone and on everything. God used the hard way to bring me back to salvation. Everyone has to search within themselves whether or not they have lost God. God is everywhere and within us and around us, but I may have lost him personally. And something must be done or done to find Him. So I ask God to dwell in my soul, because everything is ultimately a gift from God. Do what you can and you will realize the rest are God's gifts."
“It is a paradise to have Christ in us. Otherwise, we will never be complete”

Often those of us who are baptized as infants run the risk of cultivating, a lifeless silence in our faith. But a newcomer, after years of ignorance that took his breath away, when he finds it again becomes excited and becomes a teacher. Porphyria teaches us:

By the grace of God I realize how much I love the whole world and those who have troubled and distressed me. This can not be done without Grace. People should not fear cancer or other misfortune. Even losing our children, no matter how difficult it may be, even then we are not discouraged. If one divinizes his child and forgets God, then the child's loss can work so that we can find the true God we had forgotten. First of all is God, we must love Christ above all. Then we are complete. If we ask Him, God will teach us His will, He will tell us what He wants from us. I say to myself that I am 52 years old and have lived most of my life. So I have to fight my passions step by step and become a child of light. A child of God, to show us how our Father is. If we are not saints, then we think we are living, but we are dead. It is a paradise to have Christ in us. Otherwise we will never be complete. We will always miss something. And that then leads us on the wrong paths. Because when we miss something we always look for it in the wrong places.
_________
Sophia Chatzi
published in the newspaper
ORTHODOXY ALITHIA Sept 11, 2019

translated by: https://orthodoxgladness.blogspot.com/

post in greek: https://apantaortodoxias.blogspot.com/2019/09/blog-post_62.html

Converstion with St. Paisios about his illness : cancer

–– Geronda, the final diagnosis has been made. Your tumor is cancerous and it's aggressive.
–– Bring me a handkerchief so that I may dance to the song: "I bid farewell to you, O poor world!" I have never danced in my life, but now I will dance for joy as my death approaches.
–– Geronda, the doctor said that first he wants to use radiation to shrink the tumor and then do surgery.
–– I understand! First the air force will bombard the enemy, and then the attack will begin! I'll go up then and bring you news! Some people, even the elderly, when told by the doctor, "You will die," or "You have a fifty percent chance of surviving" get very distressed. They want to live. And then what? I wonder! Now, if someone is young, well , this is justifiable, but if someone is old and is still desperately trying to hang on, well, this I just don't understand. Of course, it's quite different if someone wants to undergo therapy in order to manage pain. He's not interested in extending life; he only wants to make the pain somewhat more bearable so that he can take care of himself until he dies –– this does make sense.
–– Geronda, we are praying that God may give you an extension on your life.
–– Why? Doesn't the Psalmist say, "The days of our years are threescore years and ten?"
–– But the Psalmist adds the following, "And if by reason of strength they be foreshore years..."
–– Yes, but he adds the following, "Yet is their strength labor and sorrow," in which case it is better to have the peace of the other life.
–– Geronda, can someone, out of humility, feel spiritually unprepared for the other life and wish to live longer in order to get prepared?
–– This is a good thing, but how can he know that, even if he does live longer, he won't become spiritually worse?
–– Geronda, when can we say that a person is reconciled with death?
–– When Christ lives inside him, then death is a joy. But one must not rejoice in dying just because he has become tired of this life. When you rejoice in death, in the proper sense, death goes away to find someone who's scared! When you want to die, you don't. Whoever lives the easy life is afraid of death because he is pleased with worldly life and doesn't want to die. If people talk to him about death, he reacts with denial: "Get away from here!" However, whoever is suffering, whoever is in pain, sees death as a release and says, "What a pity, Charon has not yet come to take me... He must have been held up!"
Few are the people who welcome death. Most people have unfinished business and don't want to die. But the Good God provides for each person to die when he is fully matured. In any case, a spiritual person, whether young or old, should be happy to live and be happy to die, but should never pursue death, for this is suicide.
For a person who is dead to worldly matters and has been spiritually resurrected, there is never any agony, fear or anxiety, for he awaits death with joy because he will be with Christ and delight in His presence. But he also rejoices in being alive, again because he is united with Christ even now and experiences a portion of the joy of Paradise here on earth and wonders whether there is a higher joy in Paradise than the one he feels on earth. Such people struggle with philotimo and self-denial; and because they place death before themselves and remember it every single day, they prepare more spiritually, struggling daringly, and defeating vanity.

Reference: Elder Paisios of Mount Athos Spiritual Councils IV: Family Life, pp 274-276.

Saint Porphyrios on Cancer

The wondrous icon of Panagia Pantanassa from Vatopedi Monastery, Mount Athos. Many cancer patients have been healed through this icon

“Do you know that cancer* is the greatest sickness? Because with the other sicknesses, you don't take the issue seriously, because you hope that you will get better and usually you don't change. With cancer, however, you say 'Here it was, it's over, the lie is finished, now I'm leaving.' Men can't help you, and you find yourself alone before God. Only hope in God remains, and you cling to this hope and are saved.”
 
St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia

*St. Porphyrios of course is referring to serious forms of cancer (though this also could apply to other serious and incurable diseases). He of course is not saying that miracles don't happen, nor that we should not seek medical treatment and that some people improve and survive. He is saying that our disease is a blessing when it brings us humility and makes us to hope in God. 

http://agapienxristou.blogspot.ca/2015/01/saint-porphyrios-on-cancer.html

Avoid Cancer, Live Like A Monk ....

A Foolproof Anti-Cancer Diet... With Just One or Two Drawbacks

If you want to avoid cancer, live like a monk. That is the inescapable conclusion from research into one of the world’s most renowned monastic communities.

The austere regime of the 1,500 monks on Mount Athos, in northern Greece, begins with an hour’s pre-dawn prayers and is designed to protect their souls.

Their low-stress existence and simple diet (no meat, occasional fish, home-grown vegetables and fruit) may, however, also protect them from more worldly troubles.

The monks, who inhabit a peninsula from which women are banned, enjoy astonishingly low rates of cancer.

Since 1994, the monks have been regularly tested, and only 11 have developed prostate cancer, a rate less than one quarter of the international average. In one study, their rate of lung and bladder cancer was found to be zero.

Haris Aidonopoulos, a urologist at the University of Thessaloniki, said that the monks’ diet, which calls on them to avoid olive oil, dairy products and wine on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, helped to explain the statistics. “What seems to be the key is a diet that alternates between olive oil and nonolive oil days, and plenty of plant proteins,” he said. “It’s not only what we call the Mediterranean diet, but also eating the old-fashioned way. Small simple meals at regular intervals are very important.”

Meals on the peninsula, which the Prince of Wales has visited regularly and which can only be reached by boat, are ascetic and repetitive affairs that have changed little over the centuries, although there are variations between the 20 monasteries.

The monks sit in silence while, from a pulpit, passages from the Bible are read in Greek. They eat at speed – as soon as the Bible passage is over, the meal is officially completed.

The staples are fruit and vegetables, pasta, rice and soya dishes, and bread and olives. They grow much of what they eat themselves. Agioritiko red wine is made locally from mountain grapes. Dairy products are rare – female animals are banned from the autonomous semi-state.

Life on Athos has changed little over the past 1,043 years. Breakfast is hard bread and tea. Much of the day is taken up with chores – cleaning, cooking, tending to crops – followed by a supper, typically of lentils, fruit and salad, and evening prayers.

Some of the seaside monasteries specialise in catching octopus, a delicacy that is softened up by bashing on the rock. Fish also feeds the Athos cats, protected by the monks for their mouse-catching prowess. Of all domestic animals, only cats are exempt from the ban on females. Some of the monks live in hillside huts or cliff-side caves perched above the sea as satellites of the main establishments, perhaps the closest that modern Christianity gets to medieval hermits. They depend for their sustenance on handouts of bread and olives.

On holidays and feast days such as Christmas and Easter, when other Greeks are feasting on roast meat, the monks prefer fish, their only culinary luxury. Father Moses of the Koutloumousi monastery, one of the 20 organised cloisters scattered over the Athos peninsula, said: “We never eat meat. We produce most of the vegetables and fruit we consume. And we never forget that all year round, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, we don’t use olive oil on our food.”

The olive-oil routine, which also applies to wine and dairy products, appears to have no religious significance, but is a way of eking out their supplies.

All the monks stick to the rigorous fasting periods of the Orthodox Church, in which a strict vegan diet is prescribed for weeks at a stretch.

Michalis Hourdakis, a dietician associated with Athens University, said: “This limited consumption of calories has been found to lengthen life. Meat has been associated with intestinal cancer, while fruit and vegetables help ward off prostate cancer.”

The lack of air pollution on Mount Athos as well as the monks’ hard work in the fields also played their part, the researchers said. There was no mention, however, of whether the absence of women had any effect on the monks’ renowned spiritual calm.

Salad days: Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday

Breakfast: Hard bread, tea
Lunch: Pasta or rice,vegetables, olive oil
Dinner: Lentils, fruit and salad, olive oil. Red wine

Monday, Wednesday and Friday: no olive oil

Holidays and feast days: Fish and seafood 

http://agapienxristou.blogspot.ca/2013/06/avoid-cancer-live-like-monk.html