“The very best thing you can do for your kids is to love your spouse.”
― Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier
Category: MARRIAGE
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Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.
What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.
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To marry or not?
Constantine Yiannitsiotis, someone who knew Elder Porphyrios closely for many years, relates:
A friend was facing the dilemma of marriage or celibacy. The Elder offered many prospects of salvation and so he was freed from the anxiety of the dilemma, even before he had decided one way or the other. He did this by saying, “Don’t torment yourself unfairly, by putting pressure on yourself to make the choice now. Free yourself from that persistent thought and give all your attention to how to love Christ who loves you. Everything belongs to Christ, our past as well as our present and our future, where His Providence is revealed even to the very last detail of our lives. You could have a family; you could go, wherever you like, to dedicate yourself. You could, however, do none of those things and stay at home, as you are now, again you can be saved, it is enough that you love Christ. Christ will bring about the solution that suits you most, that will speak clearly in your heart. Do not be sad, you are on Christ’s road even now.”
Ref: With Elder Porphyrios A Spiritual Child Remember (Constantine Yiannitsiotis)
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“Adultery is always a matter of choice; no amount of lust, and no passion of love, can overwhelm a person’s capacity to choose between fidelity and betrayal.”
—St. John Chrysostom, On Living Simply: The Golden Voice of John Chrysostom -
A few Sundays ago, I was speaking to a zealous young man during the coffee hour after the Liturgy. He is a married man with a pregnant wife, and he struggles to find meaning and purpose in his work and in “the way things are” in his life and his extended family. He was lamenting that he wanted to experience a life of prayer and quiet, that he thought that such a life would bring him peace and purpose. And although I generally do not assume that I know God’s will for someone else (heck, I seldom know God’s will for myself), I was able to say confidently to this young man that monasticism was not God’s will for his life. I told him that he had already chosen a path and it was on that path that he would find his salvation, not in wishing or wondering or imagining a different path.
—Fr. Michael Gillis, Muddling Through The Snirt Of This World -
It was not a question of love on my part, the idea hadn’t even crossed my mind. And love without hope is something else, something painful certainly, but something that never generates the same sense of closeness, the same sensitivity to the intonations of the other, even in the one who loves without hope, they are too lost in vain and frenetic expectation to retain even the smallest amount of lucidity, to be able to interpret any signal correctly; in short I was in a situation that had, in my life, no precedent.
The Possibility of an Island
Michel Houellebecq
SO GOOD QUOTES 