Never react to what people say. React to what they mean.
—George J. Thompson and Jerry B. Jenkins, Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion
Category: FORGIVENESS & REPENTANCE
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He talks about healing a wound, and does not stop irritating it. He complains of sickness, and does not stop eating what is harmful. He prays against it, and immediately goes and does it. And when he has done it, he is angry with himself; and the wretched man is not ashamed of his own words. “I am doing wrong,” he cries, and eagerly continues to do so. His mouth prays against his passion, and his body struggles for it. He philosophizes about death, but he behaves as if he were immortal. He groans over the separation of soul and body, but drowses along as if he were eternal. He talks of temperance and self-control, but he lives for gluttony. He reads about the judgment and begins to smile. He reads about vainglory, and is vainglorious while actually reading. He repeats what he has learned about vigil, and drops asleep on the spot. He praises prayer, but runs from it as from the plague. He blesses obedience, but he is the first to disobey. He praises detachment, but he is not ashamed to be spiteful and to fight for a rag. When angered he gets bitter, and he is angered again at his bitterness; and he does not feel that after one defeat he is suffering another. Having overeaten he repents, and a little later again gives way to it. He blesses silence, and praises it with a spate of words. He teaches meekness, and during the actual teaching frequently gets angry. Having woken from passion he sighs, and shaking his head, he again yields to passion. He condemns laughter, and lectures on mourning with a smile on his face. Before others he blames himself for being vainglorious, and in blaming himself is only angling for glory for himself. He looks people in the face with passion, and talks about chastity. While frequenting the world, he praises the solitary life, without realizing that he shames himself. He extols almsgivers, and reviles beggars. All the time he is his own accuser, and he does not want to come to his senses—I will not say cannot.
—St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent -
During your time in the community, you are testing yourself to see if you can bear with people. Do you lose your peace? Do you hate people? Or do you try to avenge oneself? If you try to isolate yourself in order not to engage in these troubles, you are likened to a person who refuses to take an exam for fear of failing. The result is that you will not graduate. The correct action is for a person to take the exam and pass. It is easy to sit alone and not make mistakes. Neither will the devil leave you; he will give you even more thoughts than people would, to the point that you will leave your cell saying, “It is better to deal with people than to deal with this mental warfare.” Take the test and succeed.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us
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Community interactions provide an opportunity for you to try yourself, overcome your weaknesses, and gain virtues. One time, a monk went to the abbot of the monastery asking to be released to go to another monastery. The abbot asked if anyone troubled him, to which he responded, “No, but I need to go attain virtues. Here, no one wrongs me, that I may forgive him; no one offends me, that I may pardon him; no one persecutes me, that I may endure him. So, where will I attain these virtues? I need to go to a place where I can attain virtues.” If you remain steadfast, and the community troubles come to you, then say, “Yes, this is where I will attain virtues.” If someone upsets you, say, “Yes, God sent you to me so that I can attain the virtue of endurance.”
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us
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As I began to work on getting my own life back on track, I relegated time with my mother to every other Sunday and holidays, holding her (and our relationship) at arm’s length. What seemed at the time to be self-care and boundaries was also a mixture of avoidance and burden—but I didn’t truly know this until a Tuesday afternoon one day in November.
She’d called me the night before and I’d ignored it; she was lonely and called me a lot, and I’d decided that I couldn’t always stop what I was doing to answer. But the next day I got a call at work from my brother, telling me to come home at once. When I got there I found that she’d died in her sleep the night before.
I checked the voicemail that she’d left me. In it she’d asked me to come over and see a movie with her.
The guilt caved me in.
The following weeks and months were a blur. I was beside myself with grief, regret, and the illogical thinking that can come with loss: Maybe if I’d come over that night she wouldn’t have died. Maybe if I’d been around more, called more, or been a better daughter, maybe that would have changed things.
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Sometimes when we have been overcome by pride or impatience, and we want to improve our rough and bearish manners, we complain that we require solitude, as if we should find the virtue of patience there where nobody provokes us: and we apologize for our carelessness, and say that the reason of our disturbance does not spring from our own impatience, but from the fault of our brethren. And while we lay the blame of our fault on others, we shall never be able to reach the goal of patience and perfection.
—St. John Cassian, Institutes, Book VIII, Chapter XVI. Of the Spirit of Anger. -
“There is nothing more freeing in life than when a friend forgives you. There is nothing that feels quite as liberating as knowing you’ve wronged someone that you love so much and, feeling it — feeling it in your chest — and they graciously forgive you. They graciously let it go. It’s the most liberal. It’s it feels like you were in jail and you were taken out of jail. It feels like, it feels like you were in despair, and they lifted you out of their despair. And it’s a unique position where only they have right, only the friend you’ve wronged has the ability to graciously forgive you. So let’s do that with our friends. Let’s model the good behavior. Let’s do this. Let’s do this with our friends.”
—Fr. Mark Eskandar -
Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen, to. the doctor.
—C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity -
Humility is not losing your true personhood. It is losing the false self that is exhausting you.
—Fr. Elijah Estafanous -
When it comes to a question of our forgiving other people, it is partly the same and partly different. It is the same because, here also, forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does. They think that if you ask them to forgive someone who has cheated or bullied them you are trying to make out that there was really no cheating or no bullying. But if that were so, there would be nothing to forgive. They keep on replying, “But I tell you the man broke a most solemn promise.” Exactly: that is precisely what you have to forgive. (This doesn’t mean that you must necessarily believe his next promise. It does mean that you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart-every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out.) The difference between this situation and the one in which you are asking God’s forgiveness is this. In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s we do not accept them easily enough. As regards my own sins it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are not really so good as I think; as regards other men’s since against me it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are better than I think. One must therefore begin by attending to everything which may show that the other man was not so much to blame as we thought. But even if he is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him; and even if ninety-nine per cent of his apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one per cent of guilt which is left over. To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life—to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son-how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.” We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves.
There is no hint of exceptions and God means what He says.
—C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
SO GOOD QUOTES 