SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“Someone begins to lose faith when his mind lacks the knowledge of God. A very common excuse, “How can I believe in God if there is so much evil in the world?” shows that the person in question knows very little or even practically nothing about the true faith. Evil appeared in people’s lives with sin, and the cause of injustice, betrayal, murder and other horrors is precisely sin. Let’s recall the First Epistle of the Apostle John the Evangelist: We know that we are of God,

“It’s critical that we understand the uniqueness of the traditional Christian message about the death and resurrection of Jesus. This is why, when the gospel message was first preached, most people found it unbelievable—it was preposterous, like nothing they’d ever heard before. And even now, it is unbelievable to most people for exactly the same reason. That God could truly become man, that there could be a resurrection from the dead, and that said resurrection should begin

“…we are content to say that God has no place in our lives. We think we want to be left alone to figure it out for ourselves. We have all seen how well this is working out!...Devotion to God’s will is the peaceful and restful haven in all temptations and sorrows, while reliance on one’s own powers is destructive.” (Reverend Christopher T. Metropulos, D. Min, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov) “The spiritual disease of the last times is the weakening of our will and determination. It

“I am so cautious when it comes to a certain strain of Christian thought that glorifies suffering as a good in itself. Too often, I have heard people say to other grieved people that God is ‘using’ their suffering to accomplish some end, as if it were a hammer with which he intended to nail them into godly place. This is the instrumentalist view of suffering: that it’s somehow a pragmatic necessity in God’s plan, something he intends in order to accomplish his ends. If you’ve

“Understood accurately, asceticism is about Beauty; it’s about attempting to be the sort of artists who won’t betray what they have seen of the beautiful. For example, we don’t fast in order to be good, but rather so that our devotion, our eros for Christ’s Beauty, will be absolute. Moral effort only matters when it expands that ascetic effort into the arena of Goodness. Moral struggle has to be an amplification of asceticism, never a substitute. It has to be the working out

“Do we refuse to forgive? God, too, will refuse to forgive us. As we treat our neighbors, so also does God treat us. The forgiveness or unforgiveness of your sins, then, and hence also your salvation or destruction, depend on you yourself. For without forgiveness of sins there is no salvation. You can see for yourself how serious it is…Our Lord Jesus gives us the teaching regarding forgiveness. He tells us that forgiveness is an integral part of the kingdom of heaven, and the

“What Is purity of heart? What is it? A pure heart is, first of all, one and whole. It overcomes all the contradictions between the soul, the spirit and the body, between the mind, the will and the emotions. Full agreement between the will of God and the will of man reigns in it. All its thoughts, desires and feelings are harmoniously directed towards a single goal—the fulfillment of Christ’s commandments. In such a heart there is no place for hostility, hypocrisy, double-min

“ On the day of Christ’s birth, the regular events of human history began to be penetrated by eternal events: the Incarnation, the redemption on the Cross, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the sitting at the Father’s right hand…the Nativity was not properly the beginning of the Life of Christ, but rather a bodily extension of His eternal spiritual presence. His Incarnation was only the means for His entry into the world in order to carry out the strategy designed by God f

“Our modernity thirsts for fun and is quite refined at coming up with ways to amuse ourselves. But having fun doesn’t mean having joy. Fun is often just the feverish fluttering of the wings of a soul stricken by despair. Joy lives by the invincible certainty that its object can never be forcibly taken away—not today, not tomorrow, never. Modernity has lost faith in the very possibility of such joy. Thus, we must remind it all the more insistently that such joy is possible in

“…for the Fathers, water is not merely water: It is chaos and destruction, the power of floods and tsunamis, and the abode of monsters; and it is also life and regeneration, rebirth in Christ, and even the Holy Spirit, who pours forth like a fountain from the Father…The noetic life that inherits the Kingdom (that which is birthed in us at Baptism) both hears the wind and sees where it comes from. It enters the gates of hell and walks in paradise. It mines the treasures buried