Though St. Gregory is best known as a teacher and practitioner of hesychasm, the cultivation of holy silence, his life was in fact colorful and tumultuous: he was driven from his monastic home on the Holy Mountain because of the Turkish threat, imprisoned on multiple occasions, captured by pirates, and initially rejected by the people when he tried to take up his episcopal see at Thessalonica.
All of this reminds us that hesychasm, properly understood, is not a rejection of life with all its texture, troubles, and demands: after all, in the Incarnation, God himself entered into this messy world and its multitudinous trials. Rather, hesychasm entails our striving to open ourselves up to encounter God’s grace in the midst of these very tumults. “Be still, and I will fight for you,” God says to Moses (Exod. 14:14). Moses was not fleeing the battle; rather, in the midst of battle, he trusted in God to take up his cause. Likewise, as we try to make our own, in some small way, the practice of the Jesus Prayer and silence, we are not fleeing from worldly concerns, but turning those concerns over to God, taking refuge, through stillness, in his boundless love and mercy.
Holy hierarch, father Gregory, pray to God for us!