The perfect person does not only try to avoid evil. Nor does he do good for fear of punishment, still less in order to qualify for the hope of a promised reward.
The perfect person does good through love.
His actions are not motivated by desire for personal benefit, so he does not have personal advantage as his aim. But as soon as he has realized the beauty of doing good, he does it with all his energies and in all that he does.
He is not interested in fame, or a good reputation, or a human or divine reward.
The rule of life for a perfect person is to be in the image and likeness of God.
—St. Clement of Alexandria, A Perfect Person’s Rule of Life
Category: LOVE
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There are two realities to which you must cling. First, God has promised that you will receive the love you have been searching for. And second, God is faithful to that promise.
So stop wandering around. Instead, come home and trust that God will bring you what you need. Your whole life you have been running about, seeking the love you desire. Now it is time to end that search. Trust that God will give you that all-fulfilling love and will give it in a human way.
The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom
Henri Nouwen -
I don’t know of a single person who after meeting Father Raphael did not afterwards decisively change and turn back to the spiritual life. This is even though, to be honest, Father Raphael could not even manage to utter the simplest of sermons.
Everyday Saints and Other Stories
Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
The hatefulness of a hated person is ‘real’—in hatred you see men as they are, you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a ‘real’ core of sexual appetite or economic association.
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From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
Instil into him an overweening asceticism and then, when you have separated his sexuality from all that might human-is it, weigh in on him with it in some much more brutal and cynical form. If, on the other hand, he is an emotional, gullible man, feed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that ‘Love’ is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, ‘noble’, romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
They are creatures of that miserable sort who loudly proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and cigarettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back door. Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis -
Better that it create in me a sense of my own responsibility before the world, which can lead me through faith in God into holiness of life, peace of soul, and joy of heart. Dostoevsky captures this concept in The Brothers Karamazov, when the Elder Zosima recounts a conversation between his dying brother Markel and his mother: “[ I] tell you, dear mother, that each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all.” . . . “How can it be . . . that you are the most guilty before everyone? There are murderers and robbers, and how have you managed to sin so that you should accuse yourself most of all?” “Dear mother, heart of my heart . . . you must know that verily each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone and everything! I do not know how to explain it to you, but I feel it so strongly that it pains me. And how could we have lived before, getting angry, and not knowing anything?” Thus he awoke every day with more and more tenderness, rejoicing and all atremble with love.
How to Be a Sinner
Peter Bouteneff
SO GOOD QUOTES 