Mother Siluana: Take the gift of your life to the Holy Altar
Receive the dough of your life as a gift from God, just as it is, with good and bad, with weakness and powerlessness, with everything - and accept that all these are yours. Then, take this gift to the Holy Altar and give it to Him during the Divine Liturgy, after having done all that was proper for you to do: confess, make peace with those who upset you, bless those who curse you and insult you, and everything else required by the Lord. And so, leave your gift there and wait for the Lord to receive “His own of His own” and transform them with His grace in a place suitable for Him to lay His head…Receive and guard Him in your heart and your life, and He will raise you as only He knows!
Be yourself, be as you are! Because only by being as you are will you become as God calls you to be! If you try to build yourself up after a different pattern from the one planted in you by God at your conception, which is His image in the depths of your being, you will lose your way and suffer much.
This is our work: to receive Him, to make room for Him in us! It is so simple! It is true that it is not easy, but He Himself works at it together with us!
Schemanun Siluana Vlad - a short biography
Mother Siluana Vlad was the abbess of St. Silouan the Athonite Monastery and the coordinator of the Center for Formation and Counseling “Saint Archangels Michael and Gabriel” in Iasi, Romania.
Mother Siluana was born in 1944. She studied Philosophy at the University of Bucharest. Upon completion of her studies, she taught Philosophy at the University of Galati for one year. She started to be involved in social activities alongside young people, and after 1990 she was one of the founders of the Galati chapter of the Association of Romanian Christian Orthodox Students.
She started her monastic life by joining the Buciumeni Monastery in Galati County as a novice. She then went to Christiana Monastery in Bucharest, where she continued her charitable and social activities, focusing on improving the lives of vagrant children and on offering guidance to young people.
She was tonsured as a nun in 2001, then moved to Jitianu Monastery next to Craiova. With the blessing of His Eminence Theophan, at the time the Metropolitan of Oltenia, Mother Siluana founded there the Center for Formation and Counseling “Saint Archangels Michael and Gabriel”. Mother Siluana moved to Iasi in 2008, and the Center has been functioning in that city ever since. Mother Siluana, together with a group of nuns, also founded the St. Silouan the Athonite Monastery upon their arrival in Iasi.
In the many conferences and seminars she held around and outside Romania, Mother Siluana addressed important topics such as relationships between young people, stages of love, family in the contemporary society, causes of depression in modern man, knowing oneself, spiritual life, and many others.
Mother Siluana fell asleep in the Lord on Tuesday, June 8th 2021, just a few days after turning 77 years old.
You can purchase Mother Siluana’s book “God, where is the wound?” directly from the Sebastian Press website.
You can also watch videos with English subtitles on the YouTube channel dedicated to Mother Siluana.