The Ladder Of Divine Ascent

I am fully aware, my good friends, that the struggles I have described will seem to some incredible, to others hard to believe, and will seem to some to breed despair. But to the courageous soul they will serve as a spur, and a shaft of fire; and he will go away carrying zeal in his heart.

The Ladder Of Divine Ascent by Saint John Climacus is a book intended for monks and the spiritually advanced, yet I read it as a neophyte around the time of my baptism into the Orthodox Church. Much of it jus...