Once, a reclusive ascetic who had heard a lot about Elder Paisios came to visit him. They talked for a while, and he ascertained that Elder Paisios was an exceptionally reverent man. Indeed, the elder had a rare reverence, which he had learned from his parents, and mainly his mother.

While at the monastery, he benefited from many of the fathers, and especially from a particular hieromonk. He would say, "We can’t reach the reverence he had—impossible. He would celebrate liturgy every day, and he struggled greatly. Once, for half a year, he ate nothing but half of a small prosphoron and a few tomatoes dried in the sun." When this reverent priest would serve out in the chapels, like other priests of the monastery, he preferred to have as a chanter the young Father Averkios (as the elder was then called).

The elder had an innate reverence, but he also cultivated it a great deal. He placed such emphasis on it that he once said that "reverence is the greatest virtue, because it attracts the Grace of God." To the elder, reverence was the fear of God and spiritual sensitivity. Reverent people behave carefully and modestly, because they intensely feel the presence of God.

The elder’s reverence encompassed not only small and seemingly unimportant matters, but also spiritual and essential issues. "If someone neglects the little things," he taught, "the danger is that he’ll start neglecting greater, holier things. And then, without realizing it, rationalizing it all to himself—‘This is nothing, that doesn’t matter’— he can end up, God forbid, totally neglecting the things of God and becoming irreverent, arrogant, and atheistic."

His reverence could be seen in the way he prayed, venerated icons, received antidoron and holy water, partook of Holy Communion, held icons during processions, chanted, and arranged and beautified the small chapel of his hermitage. He paid attention to details, but in a way that wasn’t ritualistic or fastidiously formal. This was his own attitude toward God, which wasn’t laid out in advance by any typikon of the Church: it was his personal disposition. He felt that his whole hermitage, not just his chapel, was sacred space. He arranged his cell, where he prayed, just like a little church. There was an iconostasis with many icons and a lamp that burned continuously, and he would cense and light many candles there. He had constructed his bed so that it was like a coffin, and he would say, "This is the altar of my cell." Icons and holy books never touched his bed, with the exception of an icon at its head.

The icon was rather tattered and faded, and a brother once asked him why it was in this condition. The elder tried to hide the truth, but the monk finally realized that it was like that because of his many kisses and tears. The elder reluctantly admitted, "I can get through an entire vigil that way"; that is, weeping.

He also treated the other areas of his hermitage with reverence—the workshop where he made the little icons, the guest-house where souls were reborn by God’s Grace, the balcony, and even the yard. He thought that it was irreverent to have a toilet inside the hermitage. It was partly for ascetic reasons that he kept it at such a distance, but mostly it was out of reverence.

Once, when he was away from the hermitage of the Holy Cross, the fathers of the monastery (out of love, so he wouldn’t be uncomfortable) made him a small outhouse, outside but sharing a wall with the hermitage. The elder never used it. At Panagouda, the Athonite location of his hermitage, when his health had deteriorated toward the end of his life and he needed to go out frequently at night—in cold, rain, and snow—his spiritual children began to insist on building him an outhouse just clear of the balcony to make things easier for him. He refused. "That’s where the Panaghia appeared," he said. "How can I go to the toilet there?"

The elder’s life was fragrant with deep and unaffected reverence, just as the angels in Heaven worship God day and night "with great reverence." This was clear to see from his relationship with God and from the expressions on his face when coming into contact with sacred things. He reacted to sacred objects as though they were alive.

Once, when Elder Paisios was visiting the hermitage of another monk, his hernia was bothering him. The elder of the hermitage begged him to lie down and rest a little, but Elder Paisios declined. He was only able to lie on his left side, and, if he had done that there, the bottom of his feet would have been pointing at some icons, which he thought of as irreverent.

Before entering the holy altar, he would make a prostration to the floor, remove his monastic cap, and kiss the cross on the altar-curtain; and then he would enter by the side door. During the Communion hymn at liturgy, if he intended to commune, he would make full prostrations. For a time, he had it as a rule to eat nothing for thirty-three hours before communing.

Because of his great reverence for the mystery of the priesthood, the elder never assented to ordination, even though, as he once said, "It’s been revealed to me three different times that I could become a priest." ⁽²⁾

Plainly, the elder saw reverence as a fundamental virtue for every Christian—although, rigorous as his criteria were, he considered it something rare. To the elder, reverence was greater than most of the other virtues. He often used it as a criterion. If a reverent person wrote or said or did something for which he was criticized, the elder, even before forming a clear opinion on the issue itself, would go out of his way to propose mitigating circumstances. He would say, "He’s a reverent man—I don’t believe he’d do something like that." The elder believed that this quality preserved a person from making errors, from deceptions and from falling—perhaps in the sense of the verse declaring that the Lord will carefully guard the way of those who reverence Him. (Prov 2:8).

The elder considered reverence to be extremely important in all of a Christian’s life and struggles, and especially those of a monk. A person’s reverence, he believed, acts as a steady factor in his life, affecting everything and raising his spiritual level.

He advised monks to take care to acquire reverence. "A new monk, especially, has to be reverent through and through. It helps for him to always have the Evergetinos open ⁽³⁾ and to spend time with other monks who are reverent." When a new monk asked the elder what it was that he should pay the most attention to, the elder replied, "Reverence and attention to yourself."