Prayer is learning to live, without expecting to see results; it is learning to love, without hoping to see return; it is learning to be, without demanding to have. We cannot live and love and simply be, unless we are consumed by a total commitment to detachment.
In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers
Category: LOVE
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And if you feel like you don’t do very much, and you feel like there’s no way God loves you. There are some people, they’re shocked, when I hear the struggles that they have in their life, the crosses that they bear, and I tell them, “If you only knew…” like they’re waiting for me to tell them that their problem is going to go away, and I tell them “No, your crown is going to be glorious in heaven.” And you say “I’m just a normal person, Abouna, I don’t do what all these other people do, I don’t do all these great things.” You’re comparing yourself to others.
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If you have something to eat and notice your thought wanting to eat alone on account of desire and not of need, in this respect you do not regard him as yourself. Even if you only have enough for whatever you need, if you do not give him some of this, in this respect you do not regard him as yourself.“
Other Old Man” John, Letters From The Desert: A Selection of Questions and Responses (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press Popular Patristics Series) -
Where there is great love there is often little display of it.
—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra -
The litmus test of true love for God is our love for our neighbor.
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Some people ask if help is needed. And others just help. The former act as good people, and the latter are likened to Christ.
—Monk Simeon of Mt. Athos -
The criterion of my spiritual health is this: what is the state of relations between me and those with whom I live? No other criterion is higher. Family life is the measuring stick of Christian progress for those who live in the world.
―Sister Magdalen, Children in the Church Today: An Orthodox Perspective
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A Smile, A Gaze…
Love without limits employs the simplest means to establish contact between persons. Words are not needed. If they are pure and true, a smile or a gaze will suffice.
A smile, a gaze… Two means of infinite expression: a deep and silent expression of ourselves. Thereby a communion is created with those to whom we may never speak a word or whom we may never see again.
Whether or not you are known to me, I look at each of you attentively—you whom God has placed on my pathway. Silently, and in my presence, God makes of you living souls. He makes you present to me. In your eyes I behold your soul, just as my gaze conveys my soul to you.
We can, then, become immersed in other persons: “I am in you and you in me.” Between us there grows a living communion. Its heart, its ultimate fulfillment, is the Face of God, that Face we behold through the transparency of each other’s faces.
We smile at each other. That smile relaxes lips that previously were closed. It opens teeth that before were tightly clenched. A door has opened. Something has begun between us, something whose future we leave entirely in the hands of God.
You who have given me today a smile or a gaze that is both pure and true, and who have received from me a smile or gaze, pure and true (I stress these words, “pure and true”): I bless you in silence.
I pray to the Lord of Love that the wordless meeting of our souls will allow a brilliant light to illumine this day!
—Lev Gillet, Love Without Limits
SO GOOD QUOTES 