If your relationships with others and with God adequately feed your need to love and be loved, you will both see through and despise what lust has to offer.
Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
Category: BEST OF
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Perhaps we even lash out at others around us because we feel impotent shaking our fists at God. Often the real culprit in cases of wrath at the wrong object is our excessive expectations of what we deserve or the sort of treatment we are due.
Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung -
By directing its power toward destruction of this support on which the sinner’s selfishness has established itself and rests, divine, salvific grace carries out the following to awaken the sinner from his slumber: He who is enslaved by pleasing the flesh shall fall ill, and by weakening the flesh, shall give the spirit freedom and power to come to its senses and become sober. He who is preoccupied with his own attractiveness and strength shall be deprived of this attractiveness and kept in a state of utter exhaustion. He who finds refuge in his own power and strength shall be subject to slavery and humiliation. He who relies greatly on wealth shall have it taken from him. He who shows off great learnedness shall be put to shame. He who relies on solid personal connections shall have them cut off. He who counts on the permanence of the order established around him shall have it destroyed by the death of people he knows or the loss of essential material possessions. Is there any way to sober up those kept in the bonds of indifference through outward happiness other than by sorrows and grief? Isn’t our life filled with misfortunes so that it may assist with the divine intention of keeping us sober?
Each destruction of the supports of indifferent self-indulgence constitutes a turning point in life, which, because it is always unexpected, operates in an overwhelming and salvific manner. The sense that one’s life is in danger operates strongest of all in this respect. This sense weakens all bonds and kills selfishness at the very root; the person does not know where to run. The sense of total abandonment is of the same character and special circumstance. Both sense leave a person alone with himself. From himself, the most miserable of creatures, he immediately turns to God.
—St. Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation
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I don’t know of a single person who after meeting Father Raphael did not afterwards decisively change and turn back to the spiritual life. This is even though, to be honest, Father Raphael could not even manage to utter the simplest of sermons.
Everyday Saints and Other Stories
Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov -
Make progress, and, before all else, endeavour to be consistent with yourself. And when you would find out whether you have accomplished anything, consider whether you desire the same things today that you desired yesterday. A shifting of the will indicates that the mind is at sea, heading in various directions, according to the course of the wind.
—Seneca, Letters from a Stoic -
It shows much more courage to remain dry and sober when the mob is drunk and vomiting; but it shows greater self-control to refuse to withdraw oneself and to do what the crowd does, but in a different way,—thus neither making oneself conspicuous nor becoming one of the crowd. For one may keep holiday without extravagance.
—Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
SO GOOD QUOTES 