Where else can we find rest other than the church, and of course, the altar? I remember my second day as a priest. I was ordained on Sunday, and then Monday night I spent the night at St. Mary in Dallas. The next morning, we prayed the Divine Liturgy, and there was a priest visiting. I actually—please forgive me—I don’t remember his name, but I remember his advice.
After we prayed the Liturgy, I think during the Liturgy, he saw me. I didn’t have a beard, nothing, so he said to me:
“There are some things that have no solution. What are you going to do? You’re going to take it, and you’re going to put it on the altar. And that’s it.”
And I never forgot this. I wish I remembered his name, but I don’t. I remember the advice: “There are some things that only the altar can solve.”
Category: PRAYER
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One factor contributing to unclean thoughts is anxiety
coupled with lack of dependence on God; for this reason,
many students complain of domination by unclean thoughts during examination periods — their busiest time of year. In their anxiety, they try to escape from reality by resorting to unclean thoughts. A strong remedy against such thoughts is prayer, so that the Lord may grant you peace, internal joy, and reliance on Him.
From Heart to Heart
Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty -
“When you are weary of praying and do not receive, consider how often you have heard a poor man calling, and have not listened to him.”
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From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very ‘spiritual’, that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself. Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother—the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table. In time, you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling from his prayers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment’s notice from impassioned prayer for a wife’s or son’s ‘soul’ to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis -
Let us then give diligent heed to the study of the Scriptures. For if you do this the Scripture will expel your despondency and engender pleasure, extirpate vice and make virtue take root, and in the tumult of life it will save you from suffering like those who are tossed by troubled waves. The sea rages but you sail on with calm weather for you have the study of the Scriptures for your pilot; for this is the cable which the trials of life do not break asunder. Now events themselves bear witness that I lie not.
Saint John Chrysostom
HOMILY TWO, After Eutropios, having been found outside the church, was taken captive
On the Vanity of Riches -
After this do we not feel shame, and hide our faces, at seeing that righteous man for twenty years persevering and not desisting; we ourselves after a first or second petition often fainting and indignant? And yet he indeed had in large measure liberty of speech towards God, and all the same he felt no discontent at the delay of the giving, but remained patient, whereas we—laden with countless sins, living with an evil conscience, displaying no good will towards the Master—if we are not heard before having spoken, are bewildered, impatiently recoil, desist from asking. On this account we always retire with empty hands.
Who has for twenty years besought God for one thing, as this righteous man did? Or rather who for twenty months only?
Saint John Chrysostom
On the Power of Prayer and Forgiveness
Homilies on Profitable Subjects
