But if they depart from such strict obedience they will fail completely in the spiritual life and in every form of virtue.
—St Theodoros the Great, Ascetic A Century of Spiritual Texts
Category: BEST OF
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While visiting the University of Notre Dame, where I had been a teacher for a few years, I met an older experienced professor who had spent most of his life there. And while we strolled over the beautiful campus, he said with a certain melancholy in his voice, “You know,… my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.”
—Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out
“Anyone who complains about the people surrounding him suffers because of his own fault, because he did not understand: those who are near him are exactly what he needs.”
— Archimandrite Emilian (Vafidis)
When we receive visits from our brethren, we should not consider this an irksome interruption of our stillness, lest we cut ourselves off from the law of love. Nor should we receive them as if we were doing them a favor, but rather as if it is we ourselves who are receiving a favor; and because we are indebted to them, we should beg them cheerfully to enjoy our hospitality.
—St Theodoros the Great, Ascetic A Century of Spiritual Texts -
When the soul desires to seek after a variety of foods, then it is time to afflict it with bread and water that it may learn to be grateful for a mere morsel of bread. For satiety desires a variety of dishes, but hunger thinks itself happy to get its fill of nothing more than bread.
— Evagrius Ponticus, Evagrius Ponticus: The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer
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If you fall under discipline, know for sure that this is a great profit, for God chastises the soul that has forgotten its weakness and has been puffed up by its talents and success. This is carried on until it realizes its weakness, especially when God does not provide in tribulation a way of escape. He besieges the soul from all sides and embitters it with inward and outward humiliation, whether by sin or by scandal, until it abhors itself, curses its own intelligence, and disowns its counsel. Finally, it surrenders itself to God, feeling crushed and lowly. At such a time, it becomes easy for man to hate himself. He even wishes it to be hated by everybody. This is the way of true humility. It leads to total surrender to divine plan. It ends up with freeing one’s soul from the tyranny of the ego, with its deception, its stubbornness, and its vanity.
—Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life -
There will be a storm of issues. Worries will surround you, and maintaining your Christian life will not be easy. But don’t worry. God will help you. Do what is within your power. Can you pray for five minutes a day? Then pray. And if you can’t manage five minutes, pray for two. The rest is God’s affair. Contrary to our expectations, there is no ‘must.’ Such a word does not exist within the Christian life. The idea that something ‘must’ be, or ‘must’ take place, is a product of the intellect,…a logical conclusion….But the word ‘must’ has never moved anyone to do anything. On the contrary, it makes you feel like a slave and discourages you from moving forward.
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In a short time, a man can cut off ten such desires. He takes a little walk and sees something. His thoughts say to him, ‘Go over there and investigate,’ and he says to his thoughts, ‘No! I won’t,’ and he cuts off his desire. Again, he finds someone gossiping, and his thoughts say to him, ‘You go and have a word with them,’ and he cuts off his desires and does not speak. Or again his thoughts say to him, ‘Go up and ask the cook what’s cooking?’ and he does not go, but cuts off his desire. Then he sees something else, and his thoughts say to him, ‘Go down and ask, who brought it?’ and he does not ask. A man denying himself in this way comes little by little to form a habit of it, so that from denying himself in little things, he begins to deny himself in great without the least trouble. Finally, he comes not have any of these extraneous desires, but whatever happens to him he is satisfied with it, as if it were the very thing he wanted. And so, not desiring to satisfy his own desires, he finds himself always doing what he wants to. For not having his own special fancies, he fancies every single thing that happens to him. Thus, he is found, as we said, to be without special attachments, and from this state of tranquility he comes to the state of holy indifference.
—Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings -
The Christian concept of parents as being the delegates of God carries with it the inference that they are to be treated with peculiar respect. Children incur the guilt of grievous sin who strike their parents, or even raise their hands to do so, or who give them well-founded reason for great sorrow. The same is to be said of those who put their parents in a violent rage, who curse them or revile them, or refuse to recognize them.
Delany, J. (1911). Parents. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
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“In mourning, I have learned that every version of myself must grieve her loss.”
“That sense of longing now extends to feeling outside of my body. Someone recently told me that losing your mother is primal. It is the deepest loss.”
“I had not been vigilant on either occasion and I had missed something. I had missed everything.”
“She had brought me into this world and I was helping her out of it.”
What My Mother Didnt Talk About
Karolina Waclawiak -
“…and it was said that Rossetti never got over his wife’s death, because he thought he had not been perfectly kind to her during the last years of her life, and that she might have lived longer if he had been more kindly. His friends repudiate that, and say it is not true; but if it was not true of Rossetti, it is true of many people.
The sin of neglect, the sin of inattention, the sin of absorption in self, these have wrought a great sorrow in the lives of some, and they never rise out of the dust after.”
The Gift of Suffering
by F.B. Meyer
SO GOOD QUOTES 