O our beloved brother and father Ephrem,

Today, they take you nailed upon the cross, that you may be bread which your Teacher will make into a sacrifice from His body, which he breaks to feed those who hunger for eternal life. You come broken, and tears are your companion, since it was written about you that we must bear in our bodies the marks of the Lord Jesus (Galatians 6:17). It is not easy for a man to go from monasticism to the episcopacy. Monasticism is, at its base, a cross and the emptying out of the self. Today, as you approach the episcopacy, you find yourself high upon the cross and in the depths of self-emptying. You have devoted yourself assiduously to the canonical monastic life for many long years, advancing deeply into the interior desert. The custom is for monks, when they have reached the spiritually strictest point, to choose their own private desert, out of a desire for the most perfect asceticism and the most complete solitude in which there is no consolation except from above. But you, today, and we know you and speak from knowledge, you are not one who chooses his own interior desert. Your Teacher has chosen it for you. As though in Him I speak to you: You have enjoyed traditional monasticism enough! You have stayed in Baskinta enough! Come, I will send you into the desert of the world! As a stranger you came to the Monastery of St. Michael, and now you have many loved ones and spiritual sons there. Lest you get to be at home there and become content, I want you to start anew, in new places, as even more of a stranger, so that I can increase grace upon grace in you, before you approach Me completely and remain in Me and unto Me.