Why You’ll Never Become Holy Until You Stop Trying to Be

The soul that labors endlessly to become holy often blinds itself to the one truth that could actually make it so: that holiness is not achieved through striving, but received through surrender. Most Christians who pursue sanctity do so with a heart still tethered to performance — a subtle belief that if they just pray harder, fast longer, or master their passions, God will finally descend. But the life of St. Paisios of Mount Athos reveals something far more unsettling and liberating: that grace does not reward effort, but floods the soul precisely when it ceases trying to earn anything. In this homily, Father Moses opens a window into a saint whose life dismantles the modern picture of holiness — not through argument, but through witness. St. Paisios was not polished, not formal, not austere in the way people imagine a holy man should be. He told jokes. He cut ponytails off university students. He slapped people on the back of the head in love and left them weeping in repentance. He didn’t suppress his personality — he offered it back to God unfiltered, and in doing so, became the kind of man demons feared and pilgrims wept before. His life is proof that the way up is always down, that freedom is found only on the other side of self-forgetting, and that the soul most ready to be sanctified is not the strong, but the one finally too weak to pretend anymore. This homily is not for the self-improvers, the perfectionists, or the spiritual overachievers — it is for the ones who have exhausted themselves trying to be good, and are now desperate enough to let God remake them from the inside out.