If He intends that you should be this man’s wife all hindrance will be overcome, and marry him you will. But if God does not wish it, no matter how you plan and strive for it, will be of no avail.
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.
Category: MARRIAGE
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If this marriage is agreeable to Him, your eagerness will increase after prayer.
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St. Clement continues his teaching by stressing that there is nothing praiseworthy about abstinence from marriage, unless “it arises from love to God and true chastity as a gift of God’s grace.”
—Fr. Pishoy Salama, Of All Nations: Exploring Intercultural Marriages in the Coptic Orthodox Church of the GTA -
in a world where connection feels increasingly out of reach, unrequited love offers a strange kind of relief. it doesn’t require mutual vulnerability. it gives you something to orbit and something to narrate. in the absence of real intimacy, we become devoted to the imagined kind. and we convince ourselves that longing is just as good as love.
the person you loved stays exactly as you need them to be. beautiful, distant, unfinished. and so do you. you get to remain ideal too. you never have to make room for their fears, their pettiness, their boredom. you never have to reveal yours. unrequited love allows both of you to stay fictional.
building a cathedral of what could have been
because love that doesn’t happen never dies
milkfed -
In Malachi Chapter 2, the Lord said “I hate divorce.”
…In divorce, everyone suffers—the couple and the children—and the children suffer the most.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef -
For here indeed some live celibate, others live in an honorable estate of matrimony being not much inferior to them; some have married once, others are widows in the flower of their age. For what purpose is a paradise? And wherefore its variety? Having various flowers and trees and many pearls. There are many stars, but only one sun; there are many ways of living, but only one Paradise; there are many temples, but only one mother of them all. There is the body, the eye, the finger, but all these make up but one man. There is the same distinction between the small, the great, and the less. The virgin has need of the married woman; for the virgin also is the product of marriage, that marriage may not be despised by her. The virgin is the root of marriage. Thus all things have been linked together, the small with the great, and the great with the small. The queen stood on your right hand clothed in a vesture wrought with gold, manifold in texture.
Saint John Chrysostom, On the Vanity of Riches
HOMILY TWO
After Eutropios, having been found outside the church, was taken captive -
Then there is the memory of former days, curses on those who advised the marriage, recriminations against friends who did not stop it; blame thrown on parents whether they be alive or dead, bitter outbursts against human destiny, arraigning of the whole course of nature, complaints and accusations even against the Divine government; war within the man himself, and fighting with those who would admonish; no repugnance to the most shocking words and acts. In some this state of mind continues, and their reason is more completely swallowed up by grief; and their tragedy has a sadder ending, the victim not enduring to survive the calamity.
On Virginity, Chap. 3
St. Gregory of Nyssa -
Just as when you hear a physician explaining various diseases, you understand the misery of the human frame by learning the number and the kind of sufferings it is liable to, so when you peruse the laws and read there the strange variety of crimes in marriage to which their penalties are attached, you will have a pretty accurate idea of its properties; for the law does not provide remedies for evils which do not exist, any more than a physician has a treatment for diseases which are never known.
On Virginity, Chap. 3
St. Gregory of Nyssa -
But it is time, now that we have examined on the one side the feelings of those whose lot is happy, to make a revelation of other lives, where poverty and adversity and all the other evils which men have to suffer are a fixed condition; deformities, I mean, and diseases, and all other lifelong afflictions. He whose life is contained in himself either escapes them altogether or can bear them easily, possessing a collected mind which is not distracted from itself; while he who shares himself with wife and child often has not a moment to bestow even upon regrets for his own condition, because anxiety for his dear ones fills his heart.
On Virginity, Chap. 23
St. Gregory of Nyssa
SO GOOD QUOTES 