“Above all, what sets us a part as Christians is love. We shall be asked by God: how much did you love? Whom did you love? Did you love everyone or only some? How did you love them? Nothing can transform people the way love can. Nothing can transform your children the way love can. Nothing can transform your service the way love can. Nothing can lead others to repentance the way love can. Neither logic, nor sermons, not even miracles, can have the same transformative effect which pure Christian love has. Christian love is derived; meaning, that it is the love of Christ towards his children through you. Christian love is a grace from God above all.”
— Fr. Dawoud Lamei
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Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much. Yes, I see only too clearly how bad people are. I wish I did not see it so. It is my own sins that give me such clarity.
—Dorothy Day -
If it happens to any God-fearing person to go to sleep without having repented of the sin, or the sins, he has committed during the day, and which have tormented his soul, these torments will accompany him the whole night, until he has heartily repented of his sin, and washed his heart with tears (this is also from experience). The torments of sin will wake him up from sweet sleep, because his soul will be oppressed, bound a prisoner by sin.
—St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ -
“When harmed, insulted or persecuted by someone, do not think of the present but wait for the future, and you will find he has brought you much good, not only in this life but also in the life to come.”
—St. Mark the Ascetic -
If you happen to be wounded by succumbing to some sin through weakness, or through the faulty nature of your character (I mean here pardonable sins: an unfitting word has slipped out, you lost your temper, a bad thought flashed in your head, an unfitting desire flared up, and so on), do not lose heart and fall into sense-less turmoil. Above all do not dwell on yourself, do not say: “How could I be such as to allow and suffer it?” This is a cry of proud self-opinion. Humble yourself and, raising your eyes to the Lord, say and feel: “What else could be expected of me, O Lord, weak and faulty as I am.” Thereupon give thanks to Him that the thing has gone no further, saying: “If it were not for Thy boundless mercy, O Lord, I would not have stopped at that, but would certainly have fallen into something much worse.”
With this feeling and consciousness of yourself you must not, however, admit the self-indulgent and heedless thought that since you are what you are, you have as it were a right to behave wrongly. No, in spite of the fact that you are weak and faulty, you are accounted guilty for all the wrong things you do. For since you possess a will, all that comes forth from you is subject to it, and so everything good is counted in your favour and everything bad—to your detriment. Therefore, conscious of your general wickedness, admit yourself guilty also in the particular wicked-ness, into which you have fallen at the present moment. Judge and condemn yourself, and only, yourself; do not look around, seeking on whom you could put the blame. Neither the people around you nor the circumstances are guilty of your sin. Your bad will alone is to blame. So blame yourself.
Unseen Warfare
Lorenzo Scupoli -
She had a lasting ambivalence towards him through her life, albeit one that evolved. As she grew older, she began to realise how much of him was in her.
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Within the repentant person there is first fear, then the lightness of hope; sorrow, then comfort; terror to the point of despair, then the breath of the consolation of mercy. One thing replaces another, and this supplies or keeps a person who is in a state of corruption or parting with life in the hope, however, of receiving new life.
—St. Theophan the Recluse,The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation
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Everything, except true love, is an illusion. If a friend behaves coldly, rudely, spitefully, insolently to you, say — this is an illusion of the enemy, if a feeling of enmity, arising from your friend’s coldness and insolence, disturbs you, say: — this is an illusion of mine; but the truth is, that I love my friend, in spite of everything, and I do not wish to see evil in him, which is an illusion of the demon, and which is in me also; I will be indulgent to his faults, for they are in me also; we have — the same sinful nature. You say that your friend has sins and great defects? So have you. — You say, that you do not love him because of such and such sins and defects. Then do not love yourself either, because you have the same sins and defects as he has.
—St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ -
You are angry with your neighbour, your brother, and say of him: “He is such and such—a miser, malicious, proud,” or that he has done this and that, and so on. What is that to you? He sins against God, and not against you. God is his Judge, not you: unto God he shall answer for himself, not to you. Know yourself, how sinful you are yourself, what a beam you have in your own eye; how difficult it is for you to master and get the better of your own sins; how afflicted you yourself are by them; how they have ensnared you—how you wish for indulgence from others towards your own infirmities. And your brother is a man like you; therefore you must be indulgent to him as to a sinful man, similar in everything to yourself, as infirm as you; love him, then, as yourself, listening to the Lord saying: “These things I command you, that ye love one another”. [John 15.17]
—St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ
