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From the Holy Fathers
Wishing to show that to fulfil every commandment is a duty, whereas sonship is a gift given through His own Blood, the Lord said: “When you have done all that is commanded you, say, ‘We are useless servants, we have only done what was our duty.’“ (Luke 17:10). Thus the kingdom of heaven is not a reward for works, but a gift of grace prepared by the master for his faithful servants.
St Mark the Ascetic
...should we fall, we should not despair and so estrange ourselves from the Lord’s love. For if He so chooses, He can deal mercifully with our weakness. Only we should not cut ourselves off from Him or feel oppressed when constrained by His commandments, nor should we lose heart when we fall short of our goal... Let us always be ready to make a new start. If you fall, rise up. If you fall again, rise up again. Only do not abandon your Physician, lest you be condemned as worse than a suicide because of your despair. Wait on Him, and He will be merciful, either reforming you, or sending you trials, or through some other provision of which you are ignorant.
St Peter of Damascus
Never let anger or irritability get a grip on you,
for as scripture says:
“The angry man becomes a fool,
whereas wisdom makes its abode
in the heart of the gentle.”
Theodoros the Ascetic
The scripture says that Abraham was hospitable, and God was with him; it says that Elias loved quiet, and God was with him; it says that David was humble, and God was with him. So, whatever path you find your soul longs after in the quest for God, do that, and always watch over your heart’s integrity.”
Abba Nistero
When you stand in prayer and feel that no other joy can be compared to it, then you have indeed discovered true prayer.
Evagrios of Pontus
Blessed is that spiritual intellect that travels beyond all existent realities and comes into the endless delight of the divine beauty.
Maximus the Confessor
Take care, my brothers and sisters, for the Evil One wars against spiritual strugglers in sundry ways. He works against man with unimaginably hypocritical cleverness. Thus, before a sin is committed, the Enemy diminishes its significance in the eye of strugglers. More than any other sin, he puts before them the desire for fleshly pleasure as such a small thing that, prior to succumbing to it, it appears as insignificant to the conscience of a brother or sister as throwing a glass of cold water on the ground. When, however, the fleshly desire is fulfilled, then the Evil One greatly puffs up the sin in the conscience of the sinner, kindling in his soul numberless thoughts of despair, like black waves from Hell, so that the brother's good thoughts of repentance are submerged and he is hurled into the depths of hopelessness. Seeing from the foregoing, my brothers and sisters, the machinations of the Enemy, take care not to be duped in some misdeed, persisting in it and despairing of your salvation; rather, after rising from your fall, return to the Lord your God. And be confident that He will have compassion on you, for our Lord is tender-hearted and full of compassion, rich in mercy and long-suffering, and He does not punish those who sincerely repent, but immediately greets them with joy.
St Ephraim the Syrian
A conversation between a young man and Fr Paisios:
- Father, I would like to see you and get your advice on something.
- Have you gone to Confession? Do you have a spiritual father?
- No, father, I don’t have a spiritual father and I haven’t gone to Confession.
- Well, then you better go to Confession and then come and see me.
- Why can’t I see you, Father?
- I will explain it to you, so you can understand. Your mind is confused and troubled by the sins you have fallen into; as a result, you cannot realize the situation you are in. So, you will not be able to give me a clear picture of your problem. However, if you confess your sins, your mind will clear up and you will see things very differently.
- Father, maybe I am confused and troubled and unable to tell you exactly what is wrong with me, but you yourself can understand the nature of my problem and tell me what to do.
- Listen, even if I can see with a certain clarity what is wrong with you, you still have the problem inside you. Since your mind is troubled, you will neither understand, nor remember what I will say to you. If you go to Confession and you are tuned to the same spiritual frequency with us, then we will be able to communicate. So, go to a spiritual father for Confession and I will wait for your visit.
The Christian who has true humility realizes that God uses others to help clarify His will for each person. St Dorotheos wisely asks, “For how can we know the will of God or seek it completely if we believe only in ourselves and hold onto our own will?” When seeking God’s will we must not only turn to the Scriptures and the writings of the Holy Fathers, but we must also ask the advice of those whose experiences in the faith have taught them so much. To lean on one’s own understanding without seeking counsel is to fall into the devil’s hands: “Such people the devil likes, and he always rejoices over them, the ungoverned, those who are not subject to one who has power, under God, to help them and to give them a hand.” In short, if in humility we ask for another’s help, we allow ourselves to receive both the counsel and the encouragement needed to live the Christian life.
David Beck
The heart has a lot of power. All of its willpower must be directed towards spiritual life. We should know that it overflows with joy for everything it is doing, only when it is done out of gratefulness and love and not as an obligation or duty.... There is great joy, when there is a desire for self-sacrifice.
Fr Paisios
Our Lord’s message demands of us change. Throughout the Gospels Jesus makes it clear that those who will follow Him are going to have to change the way they live; He will not let them follow Him and remain as they were. He is very clear that He is God, and as God He intends to make demands on His followers. They cannot follow Him and merely add Him to their life as it already is; in following Him the very structure and fabric of their life will be challenged and changed....
We need to love God more than anything or anyone. The love of God must consume our souls, so that we can say with the psalmist, “Whom have I in heaven but You?... And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You... My flesh and my heart fail;... but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” (Ps 73:25-26)
Fr John Mack
Love every man as yourself- that is, do not wish him anything that you do not wish for yourself; think, feel, for him, just as you would think and feel for your own self; do not wish to see in him anything that you do not wish to see in yourself; do not let your memory cherish any evil done to you by others, just as you would wish that the evil done by yourself should be forgotten by others; do not deliberately imagine in yourself or in others anything wicked or impure; believe others to be as well-disposed as yourself, unless you see clearly that they are ill-disposed; do unto them as you would to yourself, and not otherwise, and you will find in your heart great peace and blessedness. He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him.
To love your neighbour as yourself, to sympathize with him in his joy and his sorrow, to feed, to clothe him, if he is in need of food and clothing; to breathe, so to say, the same air with him- look upon all this as the same thing as feeding and warming yourself, and do not count these as virtues or as works of love to your neighbour, lest you grow proud of them. For we are members of one another.
St John of Kronstadt
The wreaths, or wedding crowns, are symbols of Christ’s presence. More specifically, they are symbols of martyrdom. Husband and wife wear crowns to show that they are ready to become martyrs for Christ. To say that “I am married” means that I live and die for Christ. “I am married” means that I desire and thirst for Christ. Crowns are also signs of royalty, and thus husband and wife are king and queen, and their home is a kingdom, a kingdom of the Church, and extension of the Church. The wreaths also symbolize the final victory which will be attained in the kingdom of heaven. When the priest takes the wreaths he says to Christ, “Take their crowns to your kingdom.” And so marriage is a road: it starts out from earth and ends in heaven. It is a joining together, a bond with Christ, who assures us that He will lead us to heaven, to be with Him always. Marriage is a bridge leading from earth to heaven. It is as if the sacrament is saying: “Above and beyond love, above and beyond your husband, your wife, above the everyday events, remember that you are destined for heaven, that you have set out on a road which will take you there without fail.” The bride and the groom give their hands to one another, and the priest takes hold of them both, and leads them round the table, dancing and singing. Marriage is a movement, a progression, a journey which will end in heaven, in eternity.
Fr Aimilianos
May God grant us grace to learn obedience and to see its fruits. May God grant us the grace to be obedient children to our father confessor.
It is a very difficult thing to be a father confessor today. Many times father confessors don’t say anything, because they know it will not be received. They’re quiet, even though they know the medicine that will heal the soul, because they know there is no spirit of obedience. And so many people are not healed because they are not obedient. The spiritual fathers and the father confessors weep over the obstinate hearts of their children. They weep over children who fight back and argue, instead of saying, “With your blessing.”
May our cold obstinate hearts break. May we face what is being said, and in honesty admit that we are rebellious. And may we come to ourselves and be willing to obey, so that we will live to see the miracles of obedience- the flowering of our cold hearts and the bearing of the fruit of the Spirit in our lives.
Fr. John Mack
Doing God’s work at home is the same for clergy and laity. It consists in parents loving each other and caring for their children in the obvious ways: spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and physically. It consists in children honouring their parents with proper obedience, respect and care.
The first of one’s neighbours to be loved are the members of one’s own natural household. “Charity begins in the home” is an apostolic teaching. “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim 5:8).
While some who call themselves Christians may sin by failing to care for their own flesh and blood- being rude and negligent at home while acting politely and kindly to those outside- others may sin by idolizing their families- including their countries, nations, and churches- and by failing to care seriously for anyone other than “their own.” Such communities can assume ultimate value in people’s lives and become objects of idolatrous worship. It is imperative to remember the radical teaching of Christ that “he who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and he who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Mat 10:37-38).
Fr Thomas Hopko
What was Jesus doing before He was transfigured? Luke 9:28-29 says that he went up on the mountain to pray, and as He was praying, He was transfigured before them. St Gregory Palamas says that Jesus did not need to pray to be transfigured, because Jesus was God. We are not told that Jesus prayed because it was necessary for Him. We are told that the Transfiguration took place while He was praying because it is necessary for us. If we wish to see the things of heaven, then we must be men and women who pray. And not just men and women who pray say 5 minutes of prayer in the morning and then go on with the rest of our life until we’re beat and tired, and then say 5 minutes of prayer before we fall back into bed. That’s not what we mean. St Paul says, “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). Every second of the day must be prayer. You can receive Holy Communion without tasting that the Lord is good, because if you receive Holy Communion without prayer, then your body and soul have not received the grace of God. To taste heavenly food, we must pray. To hear angels, we must pray. To feel the presence of God and the saints, we must pray. We must work and labour in prayer so that we can fulfil the purpose of our existence.
Fr John Mack
Sometimes God allows for a relative or a fellow worker to cause us problems in order to exercise our patience and humbleness; however, instead of being grateful for the chance God gives us, we react and refuse to be cured. It is like refusing to pay the doctor who is giving us a shot when we are sick.
Our duty and concern must be how to please God and our fellow man; we should not be preoccupied with our needs, as God will take care of them. There is a silent spiritual agreement between God and man. He will look after us, while we will concentrate on how to live our lives according to His will. “Cast all your anxieties on Him, for he cares for you.”
Father Paisios of Mount Athos
The devil cunningly induces us- instead of arousing us against himself- to notice our neighbours’ sins, to make us spiteful and angry with others, and to awaken our contempt towards them, thus keeping us in enmity with them, and with the Lord God Himself. Therefore, we must despise the sins themselves, and not our brother, who commits them at the devil’s prompting, through infirmity and habit; we must pity him, and gently and lovingly instruct him, as one who forgets himself, or who is sick, as a prisoner and the slave of his sin.
St John of Kronstadt
The righteous Christian does not practice good acts for his own benefit, i.e. in order to be rewarded or to avoid hell and gain paradise, but rather because he prefers good to evil. Everything else is a natural consequence of the good that fills our soul without having asked for it. This way, good has dignity; otherwise, it originates from the cheap attitude of “give and take.”
Fr Paisios
Doing the will of God is a discipline in the best sense of the word. It is also a test of our loyalty, of our fidelity to Christ. It is by doing in every detail, at every moment, to the utmost of our power, as perfectly as we can, with the greatest moral integrity, using our intelligence, our imagination, our will, our skill, our experience, that we can gradually learn to be strictly, earnestly obedient to the Lord God. Unless we do this our discipleship is an illusion. Αnd if our life of discipline is a set of self-imposed rules in which we delight, which makes us proud and self-satisfied, it will leave us nowhere, because the essential momentum of our discipleship is the ability in this process of silence and listening, to reject our self, to allow the Lord Christ to be our mind, our will and our heart. Unless we renounce ourselves and accept his life in place of our life, unless we aim at what St Paul defines as “it is no longer I but Christ who lives in me”, we shall never be either disciplined or disciples.”
Archbishop Anthony Bloom
Value by its effects that greatest miracle of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, manifested when we partake with faith of his divine sacraments- Holy Communion. What is this miracle? The access of peace and life to your heart, to a heart killed by sin, which is so apparent from the uneasiness of heart and spiritual deadness that often precedes Communion. Never consider it from habit as anything ordinary or unimportant: by such thoughts you will incur the wrath of God, and you will not enjoy peace nor feel renewed life after Communion. By having lively and heart-felt gratitude for the holy and life-giving sacrament you will obtain Life from the Lord, and your faith will increase more and more.
St John of Konstadt
A psychologist once asked 3,000 persons, “What are you living for?” He was startled to find that most of them were simply enduring the present while they waited for something better in the future. Actors doing small parts were waiting for the “big chance”. People in business were thinking of their present jobs as drudgery, a mere marking of time, until fate opened the door to something better. One middle aged mother said, “I only hope that my nerves can stand the ordeal until my husband retires and the children get homes of their own, and then I can get a little rest.” When this all happened, this same mother was a very unhappy person. She looked back to the time when she was busy and the house full of children as the happiest period of her life… “Behold, now is the acceptable time, behold now is the day of salvation.” (2 Cor. 6:2) Now– not tomorrow– is the time to live. Now– not tomorrow– is the time to be saved, to be made whole. Our time on earth is limited. Every moment is unique and unrepeatable. Tomorrow is not ours, today is. Now is the time to do the compassionate act. Now is the time to say the word of forgiveness– before our time runs out. Now is the most glorious period of life. God’s time is always now.
Fr Anthony Coniaris
The Lord, before His incarnation, let man experience all the bitterness of sin, all his powerlessness to eradicate it; and when all longed for a deliverer, then He appeared, the all-wise and all-powerful healer and helper. When men hungered and thirsted after righteousness as it grew weaker, then the everlasting righteousness came.... This is indeed the miracle of miracles; this reveals the infinite mercy, wisdom, and omnipotence of the Lord towards His creatures, that He Himself, the Lord of all, the infinite, the unbounded, was pleased and was able to become man that we might be saved, that the Word, by whom all things were made, was made flesh and dwelt among us, living with men, and made like unto man in everything, sin alone excepted.
St John of Kronstadt
You keep writing about your troubles and your inner disorder. Realise that it cannot be otherwise in the temporal life, and do not try to find out from whom and through whom they come, for they do not come without God’s permission. If not even a hair of our head will perish, how much more sure is God’s protection of man. It is also said: “By your endurance you will gain your lives.” (Luke 21:18-19) I have already written to you before that there is just one way to deal with sorrows: prayer and patience. At a time of trouble wait for peace, and when there is peace prepare for trouble. In this temporal life peaceful and troubled times alternate. Even the holy men of God were not free from these changes. But you want to find some new path in order to escape hard experiences. This cannot be. You haven’t had abuse hurled at you or been struck on the cheeks, have you? Just remember the patience of the God incarnate: the blows on the cheeks, the hitting on the head with a stick, the spitting in his face and many kinds of ridicule. And he endured all this for the sake of our salvation. But we do not want, for the sake of our own salvation, to suffer even small annoyances.
Father John, a Russian monk
Hallowed Be Thy Name. We sanctify the name of the Father in grace who is in heaven by mortifying earthly lust, of course, and by purifying ourselves from corrupting passions, since sanctification is the total immobility and mortification of sensual lust. Arrived at that point, we quiet down the indecent howling of anger which no longer has, to excite it and persuade it to be carried over to familiar pleasures, the lust which is already mortified by a holiness conformed to reason. Indeed, anger, as a natural ally of lust, ceases to rage once it sees that lust is mortified.
Maximus the Confessor, Commentary on the Our Father
A basic condition for the spiritual life is that we should understand that, on our own, we can do absolutely nothing. No matter how hard we try, the spiritual life is something that someone else gives to us. And the “someone else” is the Spirit of God, the Comforter, the “treasury of good things and the giver of life”, the treasury from which all the riches of spirituality come forth, the source from which the spiritual life emerges and overflows. Of course, sometimes we get confused, and think that to be spiritual means to be a “good person”: not to steal, not to kill, not to go to bad places or with bad friends, to go to Church on Sunday, to read spiritual books, and so on. But no, this is not the spiritual life. A spiritual person, a true Christian, is someone whose entire life is sworn to God. Initially by means of his baptism, and later, in his heart, such a person swears an oath to God, to live for God, and to remain with God forever. A spiritual person is an athlete who has burst into life, who stands out from the crowds of human beings, and runs with all the speed of his soul to heaven. A spiritual person is one who with shining eyes and chest thrust forward, has set his course and races to heaven. He is not a “good man”. A spiritual person knows that, in order to succeed, he needs strong wings: the wings of the Holy Spirit.A spiritual person must therefore do everything possible to attract, to win over, the Spirit of God, because only the Holy Spirit, God himself, has the gifts of the spiritual life. According to St Gregory of Nyssa, the “distribution of the royal gifts” of the Holy Spirit takes place in the Church through the Sacraments.
Fr Aimilianos of Simonopetra
Do not say: “I do not know what is right, therefore I am not to blame when I fail to do it.” For if you did all the good about which you do know, what you should do next would then become clear to you, as if you were passing through a house from one room to another. It is not helpful to know what comes later before you have done what comes first. For knowledge without action “puffs up”, but “loves edifies”, because it “patiently accepts all things” (1 Cor. 8:1; 13:7).
Mark the Ascetic in Philokalia, volume 1
St Luke tells us that the Transfiguration took place while Jesus was praying. Is it not in periods of prayer that we are most likely to witness the glory of God? Is it not prayer that produces an inner change in man which becomes reflected in a transfigured life?
Fr Anthony Coniaris
St Silouan declared that the Spirit brought him through torments of doubt to the firm conviction that “Jesus Christ is God.” This Spirit, who bestows the gift of faith, fills every aspect of our life and leads us progressively toward the twin goals of Knowledge of God and Love of Enemies. If we can know anything at all of God, and even enter into the most intimate communion with Him, it is only because God grants us this mystical knowledge by His Spirit, who dwells within the temple of the heart. If we can love even our enemy, it is only with the compassion and mercy of God Himself, who infuses our heart with the transforming grace of the Spirit. This is a grace that lifts us above our passions- corrupted feelings of victimization and shame, of anxiety and defensive rage- and enables us, in the power of the Spirit, to embrace with love even those who hate us, who threaten us, and who, on a purely human level, inspire our contempt and loathing...One of the greatest and most illuminating gifts we receive from the Spirit is recognition and acceptance of the fact that we are often our own worst enemy. It is that burdensome fact that can lead us to make enemies even of those who are closest to us. Little irritations can transform an insignificant incident into a household drama that creates tension, alienation and rejection. The ascetic life is made up of struggles against just these kinds of temptations. There needs to be a change of heart that only God can accomplish. “The Lord’s love,” Silouan declares, “is made known in no other wise than through the Holy Spirit.”
Taken from the book Longing for God, by Fr John Breck
