☦

☦

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.” —Albert Einstein

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” —Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.” —George Orwell

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” —William Pitt the Younger

“People are funny, they want the front of the bus, the middle of the road, and the back of the church.” —Debbie Macomber, Call Me Mrs. Miracle

“Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” —Edward Snowden

“It is through error that man tries and rises. It is through tragedy he learns. All the roads of learning begin in darkness and go out into the light.” —Hippocrates of Kos

“When the solution is simple, God is answering.” —Albert Einstein

As long then as I am disobedient and rebellious, both by denial of God and by my passions, so long Christ also is called disobedient on my account. But when all things shall be subdued unto Him on the one hand by acknowledgment of Him, and on the other by a reformation, then He Himself also will have fulfilled His submission, bringing me whom He has saved to God. For this, according to my view, is the subjection of Christ; namely, the fulfilling of the Father's Will. But as the Son subjects all to the Father, so does the Father to the Son; the One by His Work, the Other by His good pleasure, as we have already said. And thus He Who subjects presents to God that which he has subjected, making our condition His own. Of the same kind, it appears to me, is the expression, ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ It was not He who was forsaken either by the Father, or by His own Godhead, as some have thought, as if It were afraid of the Passion, and therefore withdrew Itself from Him in His Sufferings (for who compelled Him either to be born on earth at all, or to be lifted up on the Cross?) But as I said, He was in His own Person representing us. For we were the forsaken and despised before, but now by the Sufferings of Him Who could not suffer, we were taken up and saved. Similarly, He makes His own our folly and our transgressions; and says what follows in the Psalm, for it is very evident that the 22nd Psalm refers to Christ.” —St. Gregory the Theologian, On God and Christ, Oration 30, V

“The Lord calls the Holy Spirit the 'voice of a gentle breeze'. For God is breath, and the breath of the wind is shared by all.” —St. Maximus the Confessor

“‘And my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’ (John 14:23). My friends, consider the greatness of this solemn feast that commemorates God's coming as a guest into our hearts! If some rich and influential friend were to come to your home, you would promptly put it all in order for fear something there might offend your friend's eyes when he came in. Let all of us then who are preparing our inner homes for God cleanse them of anything our wrongdoing has brought into them.” —St. Gregory the Great, on Pentecost in Be Friends of God

“If from one burning lamp someone lights another, then another from that one, and so on in succession, he has light continuously. In the same way, through the Apostles ordaining their successors, and these successors ordaining others, and so on, the grace of the Holy Spirit is handed down through all generations and enlightens all who obey their shepherds and teachers.” —St. Gregory Palamas, On how the Holy Spirit was manifested and shared out at Pentecost

I know very well that many defend themselves by boasting: ‘They are so corrupt, and work all manner of evil!’ But God has commanded that, even if the priests, the pastors, and Christ-on-earth were incarnate devils, we be obedient and subject to them, not for their sakes, but for the sake of God, and out of obedience to Him.” —Catherine of Siena, ‘St. Catherine of Siena’, SCS, pp. 201-202, p. 222 (‘Canonized’ by the RC ‘Church’ in 1461)

“In the history of the human race there have been three principal falls: that of Adam, that of Judas, and that of the pope.” —St. Justin Popovich

“Do not fear sorrows, but fear the stubbornness of heretics who try to separate a man from Christ, which is why Christ commanded us to consider them as pagans and pharisees.” —St. Anatoly of Optina

“This is how you have union with the Roman Catholics and Protestants: you baptize them.” —Bishop Luke of Syracuse

“Modern man lives on the dregs of Christianity, on Christian experience digested and turned into ‘ideas’ for mass consumption. Hence the parody of Christianity is to be seen in modern ideas like ‘equality’, ‘brotherhood’, ‘charity.’ … And Christian messianism - the coming Kingdom which is not of this world (Jon 18:36) - has been perverted into the coming Kingdom in this world that practically everyone believes in today. Even those who see through the delusion of idealism… fall prey to the second idea, the idea that Truth can somehow be realized in this world, in the coming age of the ‘spirit,’ or in the relation of ‘man with man.’ But this world cannot hold the Truth in its fullness, any more than it could tolerate the presence in it of the God-Man; for man is called upon to be more than man, he is called to deification, and this can only happen fully in the ‘other world’ - which, though it constantly impinges on this world, never does so more than partially, giving us warnings and indications of what is to come. This world must end, man as we know him must die, must be crucified before that ‘other’ world can come into being.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina

“Let not us, who would be Christians, expect anything else from it than to be crucified. For to be Christian is to be crucified, in this time and in any time since Christ came for the first time. His life is the example – and warning – to us all. We must be crucified personally, mystically; for through crucifixion is the only path to resurrection. If we would rise with Christ, we must first be humbled with Him – even to the ultimate humiliation, being devoured and spit forth by the uncomprehending world. And we must be crucified outwardly, in the eyes of the world; for Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, and the world cannot bear it, even a single representative of it, even for a single moment. The world can only accept Antichrist, now or at any time. No wonder then, that it is hard to be a Christian – it is not hard, it is impossible. No one can knowingly accept a way of life which, the more truly it is lived, lead the more surely to one’s own destruction. And that is why we constantly rebel, try to make life easier, try to be half-Christian, try to make the best of both worlds. We must ultimately choose – our felicity lies in one world or the other, not in both. God give us the strength to pursue the path to crucifixion; there is no other way to be Christian.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina, from his journal as printed in the biography Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works by Hieromonk Damascene

“One who merely knows these truths in the mind will be helpless to resist the temptations of those times, and many who recognize the Antichrist when he comes will nonetheless worship him – only the power of Christ given to the heart will have strength to resist him.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina

“A lukewarm clergy lulls the people to sleep, leaves them in their former condition so they won't be upset. ‘Look’, they say. ‘By all means don't say that there'll be a war, or the Second Coming, that one must prepare oneself for death. We must not make people alarmed!’

“You have grown soft. So the worthless have risen up against the honourable, the disreputable against the renowned, the foolish against the wise, the young against the aged. Righteousness and peace are far from you, inasmuch as you have abandoned the fear of God and become blind in faith.” —St. Clement of Rome

“In our evil time, when the servants of the coming Antichrist are putting forth all their efforts so as to undermine and replace authentic Orthodoxy with a false ‘Orthodoxy’ - an Orthodoxy only in name, there have appeared not a few ‘pastors’ also who bear only the name of Orthodox but deny the authentic power and spirit of true Orthodoxy. Precisely such false pastors filled up the ranks of the (Soviet) ‘Living Church’ and the ‘Renovationist Church’ clergy in our Russia.

Εveryone today seeks happiness on earth, and they think this is ‘Christianity’; true Orthodox Christians know that the age of persecutions, which began again under the Bolsheviks, is still with us, and that only by much sorrow and tribulation are we made fit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina

“Brothers and sisters! Let us aspire towards ascetic labor, in which is expressed precisely the essence of our Orthodox Christian faith, which is the labor of imitating Christ in bearing the cross and self-crucifixion – a faith of labor and, laboring lawfully as the Word of God teaches, let us suffer all things for the Truth, not moving away from it, as do many because of their poverty of spirit or self-interest. And let us remember well: where there is no labor, where there is no steadfastness in the faith – there is neither Orthodoxy nor true faith in God and in His Christ. Amen.” —Archbishop Averky (Taushev) of Syracuse

“The servants of Antichrist more than anything else strive to force God out of the life of men, so that men, satisfied with their material comfort, might not feel any need to turn to God in prayer, might not remember God, but might live as though He did not exist. Therefore, the whole order of today's life in the so-called ‘free’ countries, where there is no open bloody persecution against faith, where everyone has the right to believe as he wishes, is an even greater danger for the soul of a Christian (than open persecution), for it chains him entirely to the earth, compelling him to forget about heaven. The whole of contemporary ‘culture’, directed to purely earthly attainments and the frantic whirlpool of life bound up with it, keeps a man in a constant state of emptiness and distraction which gives no opportunity for one to go at least a little deeper into his soul, and so the spiritual life in him gradually dies out.” —Archbishop Averky (Taushev) of Syracuse, True Orthodoxy and the Contemporary World

“They have built a church career for themselves on a false but attractive premise: that the chief danger to the Church today is lack of strictness. No – the chief danger is something much deeper – the loss of the savor of Orthodoxy, a movement in which they themselves are participating, even in their ‘strictness.’… ‘Strictness’ will not save us if we don't have any more the feeling and taste of Orthodoxy.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina

“Certainly it is the time for me to show that demons dwell in the synagogue, not only in the place itself but also in the souls of the Jews. As Christ said: ‘When an unclean spirit is gone out, he walks through dry places seeking rest. If he does not find it he says: I shall return to my house. And coming he finds it empty, swept, and garnished. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself and they enter into him and the last state of that man is made worse than the first. So shall it be also to this generation.’ Do you see that demons dwell in their souls and that these demons are more dangerous than the ones of old? And this is very reasonable.” —St. John Chrysostom, Against the Jews (Adversus Judeos)

“So the godlessness of the Jews and the pagans is on a par. But the Jews practice a deceit which is more dangerous. In their synagogue stands an invisible altar of deceit on which they sacrifice not sheep and calves, but the souls of men.

“Orthodoxy can't be comfortable unless it is fake.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina

“It is a commandment of the Lord that we should not be silent when the Faith is in peril. So, when it is a matter of the Faith, one cannot say, ‘Who am I? A priest, a ruler, a soldier, a farmer, a poor man? I have no say or concern in this matter.’ Alas! The stones shall cry out, and you remain silent and unconcerned?” —St. Theodore the Studite

“In all the Eastern Churches, candles are lit even in the daytime when one is to read the Gospels, in truth not to dispel the darkness, but as a sign of joy…in order under that factual light to feel that Light of which we read in the Psalms (119:105): Thy word is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my path.” —St. Jerome, Works, part IV, 2nd ed., Kiev, 1900, pp.301-302

“The candles lit before icons of saints reflect their ardent love for God for Whose sake they gave up everything that man prizes in life, including their very lives, as did the holy apostles, martyrs and others. These candles also mean that these saints are lamps burning for us and providing light for us by their own saintly living, their virtues and their ardent intercession for us before God through their constant prayers by day and night. The burning candles also stand for our ardent zeal and the sincere sacrifice we make out of reverence and gratitude to them for their solicitude on our behalf before God.” —St. John of Kronstadt

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“If you die before you die, than when you die, you will not die.” —written on a cell wall, St. Paul's Monastery, Mt. Athos

“And so it is incumbent upon us to strive, rather, to correct our faults and to improve our behavior.” —St. John Cassian

“If the grace of God doesn't enlighten man, though you say many words, they won't be beneficial. The person listens to you for a moment, but soon after returns to that which holds him captive. If, however, grace works immediately, together with your words, then a change is effected at that moment, corresponding to the person's predisposition. And from that moment on, his life is changed. This happens with those who haven't hardened their hearing and conscience.” —Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Precious Vessels of the Holy Spirit

“Pride is trying to imagine a world and live in it. Humility receives the world as God created it.” —St. Sophrony of Essex

“We suffer because we have no humility and we do not love our brother. From love of our brother comes the love of God. People do not learn humility, and because of their pride cannot receive the grace of the Holy Spirit, and therefor the whole world suffers.” —St. Silouan the Athonite

“When you get bitter and annoyed, even if only in thought, you ruin the spiritual atmosphere. You stop the Holy Spirit from working and you allow the devil to increase evil. You should always pray, love and forgive, rejecting each and every bad thought within you.” —St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia

“When you are praying alone, and your spirit is dejected, and you are wearied and oppressed by your loneliness, remember then, as always, that God the Trinity looks upon you with eyes brighter than the sun; also all the angels, your own Guardian Angel, and all the Saints of God.” —St. John of Kronstadt

“In advising against being carried away by artificial practices such as Transcendental Meditation I am but repeating the age-old message of the Church … The way of the Fathers requires firm faith and long patience, whereas our contemporaries want to seize every spiritual gift, including even direct contemplation of the Absolute God, by force and speedily, and will often draw a parallel between prayer in the Name of Jesus and yoga or Transcendental Meditation and the like. I must stress the danger of such errors … He is deluded who endeavors to divest himself mentally of all that is transitory and relative in order to cross some invisible threshold, to realize his eternal origin, his identity with the Source of all that exists, in order to return and merge with him, the nameless transpersonal Absolute. Such exercises have enabled many to rise to suprarational contemplation of being, to experience a certain mystical trepidation, to know the state of silence of mind, when mind goes beyond the boundaries of time and space. In such like states man may feel the peacefulness of being withdrawn from the continually changing phenomena of the visible world, may even have a certain experience of eternity. But the God of Truth, the Living God, is not in all this.

“Blessed is the mind that prays, worships God without imagination, for Christ had no imagination, being God. Adam lost his paradise after falling into imagination, because he imagined, at the instigation of Lucifer, that if he tasted from the forbidden tree, he would never die. The Holy Fathers say that the greatest disease and temptation during prayer is the imagination of the mind, which they called the ‘soul cuttlefish with eight tentacles’ or ‘octopus’. Imagination is also called the ‘bridge for demons’. During the prayer offered from the heart, it is most difficult to preserve the imagination; it is even harder than keeping the mind away from thoughts. Let's not forget that everything limited, represented is not God. In the meantime, if we stop at the images, we are being deceived and we can neither pass through the narrow gate to the heart nor reach God.” —Archimandrite Cleopas (Ilie) of Romania

“It is sometimes well during prayer to say a few words of your own, breathing fervent faith and love to the Lord. Yes, let us not always converse with God in the words of others, not always remain children in faith and hope; we must also show our own mind, indite a good matter from our own heart also. Moreover, we grow too accustomed to the words of others and grow cold in prayer. And how pleasing this lipsing of our own is, coming from a believing, loving, and thankful heart. It is impossible to explain this; it is only needful to say that when you are praying to God with your own words the soul trembles with joy, it becomes wholly inflamed, vivified, and beatified. You will utter few words, but you will experience such blessedness as you would not have obtained saying the longest most touching prayers of others, pronounced out of habit and insincerely.” —St. John of Kronstadt

“Chastisement through the trials imposed on us is a spiritual rod, teaching us humility when in our foolishness we think too much of ourselves.” —St. Thalassios the Libyan

“Sometimes men are tested by pleasure, sometimes by distress or by physical suffering. By means of His prescriptions the Physician of souls administers the remedy according to the cause of the passions lying hidden in the soul.” —St. Maximus the Confessor, Philokalia

“If you want, or rather intend, to take a splinter out of another person, then do not hack at it with a stick instead of a lancet, for you will only drive it in deeper.” —St. John Climacus

“Christians, above all men, are forbidden to correct the stumblings of sinners by force… it is necessary to make a man better not by force but by persuasion. God gives the crown to those who are kept from evil, not by force, but by choice.” —St. John Chrysostom

“Pride is denial of God,

“True fasting lies in rejecting evil, holding one's tongue, suppressing one's hatred, and banishing one's lust, evil words, lying, and betrayal of vows.” —St. Basil the Great

“Many fast with body, but do not fast with soul: many fast from food and drink, but do not fast from evil thoughts, actions and words, and what is the benefit of it?! Many fast a day and two more, but from anger, resentment and vengeance will not fast; many refrain from wine, meat and fish, but with their tongue they eat people similar to themselves, and what is the benefit of it?! There are those who do not reach for food with their hands, but provide them for bribery, embezzlement and robbery, and what is the benefit of it?! True and true fasting is abstaining from every evil. If you want, Christian, to benefit from your fasting, fast carnally, fast mentally, and fast always!

“Modern men have faith in machines, in material well-being, in the substantiality of all that seems obvious to common sense; this is a petty faith, the faith of petty men. The Christian has faith in God and the world to come, in the insubstantiality of all that is obvious, in the passing of this world and the coming of the new, transfigured world; if there is a faith worthy of men, it is surely this.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina, The Orthodox Word, No. 128, 1986

“I think it needs to be pointed out with utmost charity that the religion of compromise is self-deception and that there exist today only two absolutely irreconcilable alternatives for man: faith in the world and the religion of self, whose fruit is death; and the faith in Christ the Son of God, in Whom alone is eternal life.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina

“A Christian…is not his own master; he puts his time at God's disposal.” —St. Ignatius of Antioch

“Do not seek the perfection of the Law in human virtues, for it is not found perfect in them. Its perfection is hidden in the Cross of Christ.” —St. Mark the Ascetic

“He [Novatian] struck the womb of his wife with his heel and produced a hurried an abortion, thereby causing parricide.” —St. Cyprian of Carthage, Epistle 52 To Cornelius

“Sometimes their sadistic licentiousness goes so far that they procure poison to produce infertility, and when this is of no avail, they find one means or another to destroy the unborn and flush it from the mother's womb. For they desire to see their offspring perish before it is alive or, if it has already been granted life, they seek to kill it within the mother's body before it is born.” —St. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Book One, Ch. 16

“The rich women, to avoid dividing the inheritance among many, kill their own unborn in the womb and with lethal extracts terminate their own offspring while yet in the womb.” —St. Ambrose, On the Hexaemeron

“For every argument there is a counter-argument, but who can argue against life?” —St. Gregory Palamas, Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts

—Teresa of Calcutta

“Each child with special needs such as this does not come into the world in order to make our lives difficult and make us suffer. They each come into this world for a reason and have their secret inner voice. It remains to us to offer love; to ‘bear one another's burdens’; to experience a collective humbling – to realize, that is, that we are not as powerful and important as we think; and to try to lighten that person's burden and understand their language… These children are better at speaking the language of God.” —Metropolitan Nikolaos of Mesogaia and Labreotiki, When God is Not There, pg. 48

“O God, grant us a deeper sense of fellowship with all living things, our little brothers and sisters to whom in common with us you have given this earth as home. We recall with regret that in the past we have acted high-handedly and cruelly in exercising our domain over them. Thus, the voice of the earth which should have risen to you in song has turned into a groan of travail. May we realize that all these creatures also live for themselves and for you - not for us alone. They too love the goodness of life, as we do, and serve you better in their way than we do in ours. Amen.” —St. Basil the Great

“We follow the ways of wolves, the habits of tigers: or, rather we are worse than they. To them nature has assigned that they should be thus fed, while God has honoured us with rational speech and a sense of equity. And yet we are become worse than the wild beast.” —St. John Chrysostom

“We, therefore, so long as we are beset by the corruptions of the flesh, in no wise behold the brightness of the Divine Power, as it abides unchangeable in itself, in that the eye of our weakness cannot endure that which shines above us with intolerable lustre from the ray of His Eternal Being. And so when the Almighty shews Himself to us by the chinks of contemplation, He does not speak to us, but whispers, in that though He does not fully develope Himself, yet something of Himself He does reveal to the mind of man. But then He no longer whispers at all, but speaks, when His appearance is manifested to us in certainty. It is hence that Truth saith in the Gospel, ‘I shall shew you plainly of the Father’ (John 16, 25). Hence John saith, ‘For we shall see Him as He is’ (1 John 3, 2). Hence Paul saith, ‘Then shall I know even as also I am known’ (1 Cor. 13, 12). Now in this present time, the Divine whispering has as many veins for our ears as the works of creation, which the Divine Being Himself is Lord of; for while we view all things that are created, we are lifted up in admiration of the Creator. For as water that flows in a slender stream is sought by being bored for through veins, with a view to increase it, and as it pours forth the more copiously, in proportion as it finds the veins more open, so we, whilst we heedfully gather the knowledge of the Divine Being from the contemplation of His creation, as it were open to ourselves the ‘veins of His whispering’, in that by the things that we see have been made, we are led to marvel at the excellency of the Maker, and by the objects that are in public view, that issues forth to us, which is hidden in concealment. For He bursts out to us in a kind of sound as it were, whilst He displays His works to be considered by us, wherein He betokens Himself in a measure, in that He shews how Incomprehensible He is. Therefore, because we cannot take thought of Him as He deserves, we hear not His voice, yea, scarcely His whispering. For because we are not equal to form a full and perfect estimate of the very things that are created, it is rightly said, Mine ear as it were by stealth received the veins of whispering; in that being cast forth from the delights of paradise, and visited with the punishment of blindness, we scarcely take in ‘the veins of whispering’; since His very marvellous works themselves we consider but hastily and slightly. But we must bear in mind, that in proportion as the soul being lifted up contemplates His Excellency, so being held back it shrinks from His Righteous Perfectness.” —St. Gregory the Great (Gregory the Dialogist), Book V, Sec. 52, Morals on the Book of Job

“Look at the world around you. It supplies all your bodily needs. It feasts your eyes with its beauty. And its glory reflects the glory of God, so it feasts your soul also. Look at the plants and the trees. Can you count all the different species? Can you describe all the different shapes of the leaves, the color and fragrances of the flowers? Look, too, at the animals and the insects. Are you not enthralled by their different sizes and shapes, by the different colors and textures of their skin and fur, by the different ways in which they move about and gather food? And the wonder why God has created all this. Has he created the marvelous universe just to supply our needs and to feast our eyes and souls? or is there some other purpose in it all? The answer is that he has created all things--for their own sake. Each creature has its own purpose and destiny, which God in his infinite wisdom and love has planned. Do not try to understand God's plans; the human mind is hardly better than that of an ant in discerning the ways of God. Simply accept all his plans and rejoice in them.” —St. John Chrysostom, On Living Simply, pg 54