Category: FORGIVENESS & REPENTANCE

  • If you want to change and eliminate the problems which you have encountered because of your upbringing, enter into a loving relationship with God and others [in your life], and these problems will be resolved. When I learn how to love God, and train myself to love my brother, I will change and become conformed to the image of His Son.

    —H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Develop Your Personality

  • If you are suffering from a trial, which you are going through because of [your] upbringing and education, and if you endure this suffering with your true self and you expose it to the light of the grace of Christ, then Scripture says to you, “That you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”(James 1:4) The following will take place: your true self will grow and become complete and lacking nothing, through this suffering.

    As for the grumbling soul, which is not joyful, but is always complaining about its upbringing in such a home, it will neither grow nor be healed.

    —H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Develop Your Personality

  • Being a human means accepting promises from other people and trusting that other people will be good to you. When that is too much to bear, it is always possible to retreat into the thought, “I’ll live for my own comfort, for my own revenge, for my own anger, and I just won’t be a member of society anymore.” That really means, “I won’t be a human being anymore.”

    You see people doing that today where they feel that society has let them down, and they can’t ask anything of it, and they can’t put their hopes on anything outside themselves. You see them actually retreating to a life in which they think only of their own satisfaction, and maybe the satisfaction of their revenge against society. But the life that no longer trusts another human being and no longer forms ties to the political community is not a human life any longer.

    Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on How to Live with Our Human Fragility

  • I’ve seen lives changed on the sick bed, monsters turn into babies on the sick bed—monsters—people that no one can talk to, and they’re babies, holding the hands of their loved ones, saying, “Forgive me, I know I was difficult. I’m sorry—you endured a lot from me. I caused you a lot of pain, and I was a monster, and I was a terrible person, and I hope God can forgive me.”

    —Fr. Paul Girguis

  • 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.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III

  • When we keep talking about the past, it’s a way to manipulate and control others.

    —Fr. Mina Dimitri

  • If you get into the habit, whenever someone else bothers you, of asking, Lord Jesus Christ, forgive me and show me my sin, you’ll be surprised at the adjustments in yourself that can be made to neutralize the problem.

    —Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

  • Therefore, let us not lay blame for the sins we have committed either on our birth or on anyone else, but only on ourselves.

    —Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

  • He who refuses to pardon, how often has he begged it for himself?

    —Seneca, On Anger

  • For he who is angry on account of the things which have been done to him, and demands satisfaction would not be able to obtain the praise of forbearance; but when a man dismisses the consideration of all past evils, although they are many and painful, but is compelled to take steps for self-defense from fear of the future and by way of providing for his own security, no one would deprive him of the rewards of moderation. 

    Nevertheless, David did not act even thus, but found a novel and strange form of moral wisdom. And neither the remembrance of things past, nor the fear of things to come, nor the instigation of the captain, nor the solitude of the place, nor the facility for slaying, nor anything else incited him to kill; but he spared the man who was his enemy and had given him pain, just as if he was some benefactor and had done him much good. What kind of indulgence then shall we have if we are mindful of past transgressions and avenge ourselves on those who have given us pain, whereas that innocent man who had undergone such great sufferings and expected more and worse evils to befall him in consequence of saving his enemy, is seen to spare him, so as to prefer incurring danger himself and to live in fear and trembling, rather than put to a just death the man who would cause him endless troubles?

    His moral wisdom then we may perceive, not only from the fact that he did not slay Saul when there was so strong a compulsion, but also that he did not utter an irreverent word against him, although he who was insulted would not have heard him. Yet we often speak evil of friends when they are absent, he on the contrary not even of the enemy who had done him such great wrong. His moral wisdom then we may perceive from these things, but his lovingkindness and tender care from what he did after these things. For when he had cut off the fringe of Saul’s garment and had taken away the bottle of water, he withdrew afar off and stood and shouted and exhibited these things to him whose life he had preserved, doing so not with a view to display and ostentation, but desiring to convince him by his deeds that he suspected him without a cause as his enemy, and aiming therefore at winning him into friendship. Nevertheless, when he had even thus failed to persuade him, and could have laid hands on him, he again chose rather to be an exile from his country and to sojourn in a strange land and suffer distress every day in procuring necessary food than to remain at home and vex his adversary. What spirit could be kinder than his? He was indeed justified in saying, “Lord remember David and all his meekness” (Ps. 131:1).

    Saint John Chrysostom
    If Thine Enemy Hunger, Feed Him
    Homilies on Profitable Subjects