The monastic studies theological matters, not for educational purposes, but to benefit from them personally.
Sometimes when one studies, one seeks to teach others, considering it a buried talent if people do not benefit from this knowledge. If you learn theology for your own personal gain, this is good for you. If you study theology in order to teach others, then you will be fought with venturing outside your rite of isolation and meditation.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us
Category: TRANSCIENCE
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When one becomes preoccupied with theological books, one tries to teach everyone what one has learned, regretting the loss if no one benefits from the research you read in the spiritual books, and in the theological books. One might think, “If people do not benefit from what you learn, then what is the benefit?” So beware of being fought with the desire to teach others.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us
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But the saint is never a philosopher; he has given up merely trying to understand, and asks only to be given what is given him; he has accepted the world, and there is no longer any question of its making “sense” or not.
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After endless depression, nights without sleep, realization that the life he had entered was calamitous, without hope, he slowly became lucid, even calm. He was able to read and think. The days dawned quietly. I am through it, he thought. Like the survivor of a wreck, he took stock of himself. He touched his limbs, his face, he began the essential process of forgetting what had passed. He was in a period of contentment with daily life, of peace. He looked about himself gratefully. It was still not completely real to him, it was a kind of scenery he watched like someone on a train, some of it vivid, going by, some of it bare.
Light Years
James Salter -
In contemporary Western society, death is like white noise to a man in good health; it fills his mind when his dreams and plans fade. With age, the noise becomes increasingly insistent, like a dull roar with the occasional screech. In another age the sound meant waiting for the kingdom of God; it is now an anticipation of death. Such is life.
The Elementary Particles
Michel Houellebecq -
Then there is the question of dying, which we have carefully put far away from us, as something that is going to happen in the future – the future may be fifty years off or tomorrow. We are afraid of coming to an end, coming physically to an end and being separated from the things we have possessed, worked for, experienced – wife, husband, the house, the furniture, the little garden, the books and the poems we have written or hoped to write. And we are afraid to let all that go because we are the furniture, we are the picture that we possess; when we have the capacity to play the violin, we are that violin. Because we have identified ourselves with those things – we are all that and nothing else. Have you ever looked at it that way? You are the house – with the shutters, the bedroom, the furniture which you have very carefully polished for years, which you own – that is what you are. If you remove all that you are nothing.
And that is what you are afraid of – of being nothing. Isn’t it very strange how you spend forty years going to the office and when you stop doing these things you have heart trouble and die? You are the office, the files, the manager or the clerk or whatever your position is; you are that and nothing else. And you have a lot of ideas about God, goodness, truth, what society should be – that is all. Therein lies sorrow. To realize for yourself that you are that is great sorrow, but the greatest sorrow is that you do not realize it. To see that and find out what it means is to die.
SO GOOD QUOTES 