“People today are complicated, multi-faceted, confused, and in one way or another, their souls are layered: layer upon layer of blindness, layer upon layer of callousness, layer upon layer of pride. For this reason they are never healed once and for all.

“As soon as you take a humble attitude, though, Grace intervenes and works a miracle: you are freed. But the work does not end here. This Grace, this light, this healing that comes, proceeds also to the next layer further down. And here the sin is more unyielding, is more strongly rooted, the resistance is uncompromising.

“If you say, ‘May it be blessed, My God. I will look even deeper and I will acknowledge my stubbornness and my sin, and will humble myself,’ then another miracle takes place. And in some incomprehensible way, the second and the third, the fourth and the fifth layers of the soul are put right. But some people will not accept this. They remain at the superficial layers, and spend their life like this and are never healed.”

— Archimandrite Symeon Kragiopoulos, author of Do you Know Yourself?