Category: DESPONDENCY

  • We must learn to live each day, each hour, yes, each minute as a new beginning, as a unique opportunity to make everything new. Imagine that we could live each moment as a moment pregnant with new life. Imagine that we could live each day as a day full of promises. Imagine that we could walk through the new year always listening to the voice saying to us: “I have a gift for you and can’t wait for you to see it!” Imagine.

    Is it possible that our imagination can lead us to the truth of our lives? Yes, it can! The problem is that we allow our past, which becomes longer and longer each year, to say to us: “You know it all; you have seen it all, be realistic; the future will just be a repeat of the past. Try to survive it as best you can.” There are many cunning foxes jumping on our shoulders and whispering in our ears the great lie: “There is nothing new under the sun… don’t let yourself be fooled.”

    When we listen to these foxes, they eventually prove themselves right: our new year, our new day, our new hour become flat, boring, dull, and without anything new.

    So what are we to do? First, we must send the foxes back to where they belong: in their foxholes. And then we must open our minds and our hearts to the voice that resounds through the valleys and hills of our life saying: “Let me show you where I live among my people. My name is ‘God-with-you.’ I will wipe all the tears from your eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone” (Revelation 21:2–5).

    —Henri Nouwen

  • The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else.

    —Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

  • Our Good Lord has made man’s life very sweet (in its proper sense – the spiritual one) but some of us turn it into hell with our miseries, by not having discarded the secular mentality so that we can confront matters spiritually. That is how we strive to “sweeten” our life (in the wrong sense) and we never want to die; instead, the more the years pass by, the more the “oh’s” of our agony increase, filling our soul with stress.

    In other words, some of us poor wretches reach such a point, that we actually strive to retain the soul inside our 100-year-old, exhausted, intravenously-supported flesh and insist that “life is sweet” while we tremble lest we die. Whereas, for one who is dead from a secular aspect but resurrected spiritually, there is absolutely no agony, fear and stress – ever – because he even awaits death joyously, knowing he will be going to Christ and will be rejoicing for living once again, as he will be living near Christ and feeling a part of the joy of Paradise while still on earth and even asking himself if there is a greater joy in Paradise than the one he is feeling here on earth.

    —St Paisios

  • “Therefore, let us be careful of slothfulness and negligence. These are the worst demons that exist. They make you fall apart, they tear you to shreds, and you cannot even pick up a prayer rope. I am telling you this from personal experience. If one is not careful, he will reach a point where, upon seeing the prayer rope, he will wonder how he is going to take it in his hands. However, when he stands up straight and says ‘I am going to get up; I am going to stand; I will put my feet together and begin praying’. Then you will see how quickly the demons of sloth, indolence, and depression will leave”

    —Blessed Gerondissa Makrina Vassopoulou

  • “How are things going?” “Oh, I can’t complain…” The greatest complaint of all.—

    Infinite Resignation
    Eugene Thacker

  • If everything is going well, you’ve obviously overlooked something…

    Infinite Resignation
    Eugene Thacker

  • “When you give God time in your weariness, He will recompense you and lift the weariness away from you”

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III

  • “Sometimes I feel like I’m slowly floating away. I’m constantly looking for something to grab on to so I don’t lose myself.”

    —Kasie West, Pivot Point

  • The Fire Within
    Directed by Louis Malle • 1963 • France

  • Saint Luke associated sorrows with the personal Cross which we have to shoulder in our life and which distinguishes the way of Christ from other ways of living. He says, typically, in one of his sermons: ‘Our life, the life of each person, is sorrow and pain. All these sorrows in our social and family life are our Cross. A failed marriage, an unfortunate choice of profession, don’t they bring us pain and sorrow? Shouldn’t people who’ve suffered these calamities have to bear them bravely? Serious illnesses, contempt, dishonour, loss of personal wealth, jealousy between spouses, slander and, in general, all the wickedness that people do to us, aren’t they all our Cross? That’s exactly what our Cross is, the Cross of the vast majority of people. These are the sorrows that afflict people and we have to bear them, even though most people don’t want to. But even people who hate Christ and refuse to follow His way, they, too, have to shoulder their own Cross of pain. What’s the difference between them and Christians? The difference is that Christians shoulder the Cross with patience and don’t complain against God. Humbly, with eyes cast down, they bear it to the end of their lives, following the Lord Jesus Christ. They do it for Christ and His Gospel, they do it for fervent love of Him, but the whole of their thought is caught up in the Gospel teaching.

    —St. Luke the Surgeon