Some people use trickery. If they are at odds with someone standing in the first row in church, they stand five rows back, so that when the deacon says to greet one another, they are too far to greet one another. However, you can deceive yourself and your father of confession, but it is impossible to deceive our Lord. When the deacon says “greet one another” that includes not only those in your same bench in church, but every person in your life, whether they are present at church or not; you should be able to greet that person with a holy kiss.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, Inner Healing
Category: FORGIVENESS & REPENTANCE
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Many people say, “I do not like to confront because confrontation causes problems,” but when our life is Bible-based, we realize that it is impossible for our Lord Jesus Christ to give us a commandment that would cause problems. If confrontation causes problems, then we must examine if the fault is in not knowing how to confront.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, Inner Healing -
You must remember that you are a sinner. Always have that knowledge when you evaluate anyone else. I’m a sinner, they’re a sinner. Who am I to say my sin is better than theirs?
—Fr. Seraphim Holland -
If you’re struggling to forgive someone, God will help you and you will eventually achieve that goal.
If you’re not struggling to forgive them – or even worse, you’re justifying – then you’re in a bad place. A dangerous place.
—Fr. Seraphim Holland -
Such persons must labor, each one in his degree, for his own correction, and you must labor to bear with their weaknesses. You know from experience the bitterness of the work of correction; strive then to find means to make it less bitter to others. You have not an eager zeal to correct, but a sensitiveness that easily shuts up your heart.
François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
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Long-suffering and readiness to forgive curb anger; love and compassion wither it.
—St. Thalassios the Libyan, On Love, Self-control and Life
in Accordance with the Intellect -
When you forgive someone, you stop punishing them in your mind. It means that you stop rehearsing in your mind how much they hurt you.
—Fr. Michael Gillis -
“Refusing to forgive is a way of clinging to my rights and getting my due now because I really do not believe that God can do better for me. If I truly trust that God can and will bring good out of every situation, then I am free to let go and forgive with a peaceful heart.”
All That I Have Is Yours: 100 Meditations with St. Pope Kyrillos VI on the Spiritual Life
Fr. Kyrillos Ibrahim -
This virtue is related to the opening up of our heart, to an increase in its capacity. Other people’s faults have to find room, there has to be space for whatever they’ve done to our detriment, even their excuses, never mind whether we find these sufficient or true. All their weaknesses have to fit in.
It’s often such a struggle to accept others as they are. Because we demand that they be as we want them to be. But it’s not like that. They’ve done us some harm, wittingly or unwittingly, They’ve got some strange habit or other.
They may have been brought up differently from us, they may have certain external habits which jar, certain weaknesses, certain expressions of fallen, sinful human nature, just as we most certainly have, too. So God calls upon us to open our heart and to put our fellow human beings inside, as they are, so that we can love them as our brothers and sisters.—
—Metropolitan Nikolaos (Hatzinikolaou) of Mesogaia and Lavreotiki
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Even if our mother or father or brother or sister or spouse or friend couldn’t love us in every way we might have liked, Père Thomas began to show me that each one did reflect an aspect of God’s love, and when taken together they reflected the fullness of God in a way I had often missed in focusing on what each one was not able to offer.
—Henri Nouwen, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life
However bad it may be at home, anyway they are your father and mother, and not enemies, strangers. Once a year at least, they’ll show their love of you.
—Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Remember people’s love for you and their good past with you, whenever you are fought by doubts of their sincerity and whenever you see them erring against you, for then their past love will intercede for them and your anger will subside.
I felt miserable because I had failed so many times in the past to respond to her help, to accept the warmth and love she tried to give me. Another wave of loneliness overcame me as I considered the times when I fought her, hated her, and pushed her away from me.
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This was my mother; the word “mother” brings on a flow of feeling and past experiences and years of living together, loving together, and hating, too. The fighting and conflicts do not seem important anymore, the arguments and intense pains and emotions that clouded the relationship have evaporated. This was my mother, and I realize the uniqueness of our relationship.
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In her dying, I was able to become open to myself and to my mother, to claim our relationship, to look back upon the past in quick moments while at her bedside and realize the times she did give me warmth and love, and the times when pain and emotional conflict blocked the giving and the receiving.
—Clark E. Moustakas, Loneliness
Even if some people are foul and have reached the extremes of evil, often they have done one or two or three good things…. We ought to suspect the same also in the case of good people. Just as the most worthless people often do something good, so those who are earnest and virtuous often fail completely in some other respect.
—St. John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty
SO GOOD QUOTES 