If you are faithful in loving your relative, God will set you over loving the enemy. He will give you the grace which enables you to love your enemy.
—Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. 1
Category: LOVE
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Becoming a parent has lifted a corner of my blindfold and let me glimpse what God’s love looks like. My son, Jaden, is incapable of doing anything—anything at all—that could make me stop loving him. There is nothing he could say or do, or forget to say or not do, that would ever diminish the love I have for him in my heart. He can’t out-sin my love, just as I cannot out-sin God’s love.
—Jena Morrow, Hollow: An Unpolished Tale -
And beware you do not blindly insist that things must work out according to what you consider to be right and good. God sometimes does permit such blind insistence to be followed by the fulfilment of our ardent desires. This always leads to misery and disaster (intended to open our eyes on our folly), and happens particularly often when our desires are founded on wild passions.
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Do not misunderstand me: I am not denigrating your rule of prayer, or your reading of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. I want to leave you quite free to continue these occupations or to modify them according to your own light. But do try to remember that love of the neighbor is the first work you must strive for. And you do not even have to leave your house to find that neighbor: your husband is that neighbor; your mother is that neighbor; and so are your children.
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A home is a Christian one, when all the members of the household bear each other’s burdens, and when each one condemns only himself.
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After a careful study of your disposition, which life has encouraged you to undertake, you have at last come to see that you have never loved; nor do you know or understand anything about love.
Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina -
“Above all, what sets us a part as Christians is love. We shall be asked by God: how much did you love? Whom did you love? Did you love everyone or only some? How did you love them? Nothing can transform people the way love can. Nothing can transform your children the way love can. Nothing can transform your service the way love can. Nothing can lead others to repentance the way love can. Neither logic, nor sermons, not even miracles, can have the same transformative effect which pure Christian love has. Christian love is derived; meaning, that it is the love of Christ towards his children through you. Christian love is a grace from God above all.”
— Fr. Dawoud Lamei -
Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much. Yes, I see only too clearly how bad people are. I wish I did not see it so. It is my own sins that give me such clarity.
—Dorothy Day -
You are angry with your neighbour, your brother, and say of him: “He is such and such—a miser, malicious, proud,” or that he has done this and that, and so on. What is that to you? He sins against God, and not against you. God is his Judge, not you: unto God he shall answer for himself, not to you. Know yourself, how sinful you are yourself, what a beam you have in your own eye; how difficult it is for you to master and get the better of your own sins; how afflicted you yourself are by them; how they have ensnared you—how you wish for indulgence from others towards your own infirmities. And your brother is a man like you; therefore you must be indulgent to him as to a sinful man, similar in everything to yourself, as infirm as you; love him, then, as yourself, listening to the Lord saying: “These things I command you, that ye love one another”. [John 15.17]
—St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ
SO GOOD QUOTES 