What do you think hurts more: a father who’s strict or a father who’s uninterested?
—Fr. Elijah Iskander
Category: PARENTS
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Isabelle didn’t have friends either, and, especially in the final years, she had been surrounded only by people who dreamed of taking her place. Thus we never had anyone to invite round to our sumptuous residence; no one with whom to share a glass of rioja while watching the stars. What could we do, then? We asked ourselves the question while crossing the dunes. Live? It’s precisely in this kind of situation that, crushed by the sense of their own insignificance, people decide to have children; this is how the species reproduces, although less and less, it must be said.
The Possibility of an Island
Michel Houellebecq -
And whatever quarrels there may be between them they ought not to call in their own mother to judge between them and tell tales of one another. They are their own judges. Love is a holy mystery and ought to be hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens. That makes it holier and better. They respect one another more, and much is built on respect.
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The first phase of married love will pass, it is true, but then there will come a love that is better still.
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And once they have children, the most difficult times will seem to them happy, so long as there is love and courage. Even toil will be a joy, you may deny yourself bread for your children and even that will be a joy, They will love you for it afterwards; so you are laying by for your future.
Notes from the Underground
Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
Naturally, when he comes to choose a partner, he will take to account his parents’ opinion. How often have parents felt knives piercing their hearts when their children don’t ask them about the person who will be their companion in life? A mother’s heart is sensitive, and can’t endure such a blow. The child should discuss matters with his parents, because they have a special intuition enabling them to be aware of the things which concern them.
—Archimandrite Aimilianos of Simonopetra, Mount Athos, Marriage: The Great Sacrament, A Sermon delivered in the Church of St. Nicholas, Trikala, Greece, 17 January, 1971 -
the power which, in our disordered, fallen nature, draws us towards sin, is not entirely exterminated in baptism, but it is only placed in a condition in which it has no power over us, no dominion over us, and we do not serve it. But it is still in us, it lives and acts, only not as a lord. The primacy from now on belongs to the grace of God and to the soul that consciously gives itself over to it.
—St. Theophan the Recluse, Raising Them Right: A Saint’s Advice on Raising Children p.21
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However, in making the assertion that a certain service—in this case, raising children—can in fact be prayer, I am bolstered by the testimony of contemplatives themselves. Carlo Carretto, one of the twentieth century’s best spiritual writers, spent many years in the Sahara Desert by himself praying. Yet he once confessed that he felt that his mother, who spent nearly thirty years raising children, was much more contemplative than he was, and less selfish. If that is true, and Carretto suggests that it is, the conclusion we should draw is not that there was anything wrong with his long hours of solitude in the desert, but that there was something very right about the years his mother lived an interrupted life amid the noise and demands of small children.
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For years, while she is raising small children, her time is not her own, her own needs have to be put into second place, and every time she turns around some hand is reaching out demanding something. Years of this will mature most anyone. It is because of this that she does not need, during this time, to pray for an hour a day. And it is precisely because of this that the rest of us, who do not have constant contact with small children, need to pray privately daily.
Domestic Monastery
Ronald Rolheiser -
The only really valuable religious and moral training I ever got as a child came to me from my father, not systematically, but here and there and more or less spontaneously, in the course of ordinary conversations. Father never applied himself, of set purpose, to teach me religion. But if something spiritual was on his mind, it came out more or less naturally. And this is the kind of religious teaching, or any other kind of teaching, that has the most effect. “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart, bringeth forth good fruit; and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth that which is evil. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”
—Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain -
There are those who are called the slothful in the book of Wisdom, who strew their path with thorns, who consider harmful to the soul a zeal for deeds in keeping with the commandments of God, the demurrers against the apostolic injunctions, who do not eat their own bread with dignity, but, fawning on others, make idleness the art of life. Then, there are the dreamers who consider the deceits of dreams more trustworthy than the teachings of the Gospels, calling fantasies revelations. Apart from these, there are those who stay in their own houses, and still others who consider being unsociable and brutish a virtue without recognizing the command to love and without knowing the fruit of long-suffering and humility.
James Stuart Bell, ed., Ancient Faith Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bibles, 2019), 752.
They stay in their homes and “isolate from others” and their community. One of the most dangerous things people do is isolate themselves from the church community. All of this is a big thorn that you are putting in your life that makes you lazy, that makes you not put effort, and makes you isolated, and makes the devil easy to control you and change you.
—Fr. Mina Dimitri, inspired by Gregory of Nyssa’s On Virginity, Chap. 23
They take from people (by flattery, by anger, by complaining, by manipulation). Sometimes they’re lazy, dependent fully on their family, yet they’re still yelling and disrespecting their own family.
—Fr. Mina Dimitri -
I have never treated my mother worse than I did during that period; and thus, to the boredom that oppressed me, there was added on top of everything else, a feeling of pity for her, incapable as she was of finding any explanation for my rudeness. Worse than anything, I suffered from a kind of paralysis of all my faculties, which made me mute and apathetic and dull, so that I felt as if I were buried alive inside myself, in a hermetically sealed and stifling prison.
Boredom
Alberto Moravia
SO GOOD QUOTES 