SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“…the Lord calls people to Himself in many different ways. Even a path of protest, mistakes, and wandering, if it is sincere, can lead to Christ…the Church does not reject anyone who sincerely seeks salvation. There is no sin or spiritual blindness that the Lord cannot lead a person out of, if they truly want to come to Him. But it is also a warning: a “comfortable God” is not God, “freedom without obedience” is not freedom, and “love without the cross” is not love. Only thos

“The further you move away from God, the closer you get to the devil. The Holy Fathers speak about this very clearly. There’s mathematical precision in this: When you depart from God, you lose the sense of the Divine presence, Divine consolation, Divine energy, and you find yourself as if exposed and vulnerable to the devil’s influence.” (Metropolitan Athanasios) “Sin is, in fact, an energy that has not been rightly directed and that requires redirection. For example, a perso

“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

“I once confessed to an experienced priest that sinful thoughts were torturing me, and this is what he advised me: “Think of the thoughts...

“...God comes into our lives when we invite Him with all our being, opening the gates of our heart from the inside. He will not come...

“All truth is God’s truth, wherever it is found. This is explicated well by both St. Basil…and also by St. Justin Martyr in his doctrine...

“Sin remains an affront to the holy God. It alienates us from God again as if Christ had not reconciled us to our Creator. So it puts us...

“The abstraction that we call “thinking,” etc., in the contemporary world is a diminishment of what it means to be human. We have learned...

“ ‘So let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not grudgingly or of necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver. (2 Corinthians 9:7)....

“ ‘And we labor, working with our own hands. Being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we endure’ (1 Corinthians 4:12). The apostles...