SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“As has been frequently noted in the spiritual realm – if you only read those parts of the Scripture which you like or agree with then you are not listening to God but only to yourself. To correct, improve or sharpen our thinking, we have to allow ourselves to be challenged by God…In the Gospel we find that the apostles’ perfection also grew; it did not appear overnight. It all started with something small, with “hearing” about Christ and an inspiration that carried them away

“Our faith is called Christianity because Christ is at its center. We look to Him, we strive towards Him, and we become like Him…Christ proclaimed the God Whose love we do not need to earn, because God is Love…Christ proclaimed God and showed us in Himself a true man, called to be the image and likeness of God. St. Gregory Palamas says that “God assumes human nature to show to what extent it is free from sin and so pure that it was possible to unite it with Himself in hyposta

“The Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Hebrews contains these powerful words: ‘Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever’ (Heb. 13:8). God’s love has not gone anywhere from us—it is we who have grown spiritually poor; but grace in the world is no less today than it was in the days of the apostles. We often look for the root of our problems in external things, forgetting that a ship does not sink because of the water around it, but because of the water that gets

“Each time we read or hear the holy gospels we are encountering God. The gospels stand in a place of preeminence in the life of the Church. We believe in the Bible and revere it as the inspired word of God. But we put the gospels even higher than the rest of the Bible. As you see the gospel book sits alone, wrapped in gold (gold plating) on the Holy Altar table. Why? Because the gospels reveal God to us clearly and completely. The gospels are the eyewitness accounts of the li

“…let’s take a look into the mysterious depths of human existence. The whole tragedy of our fallen world is rooted in one source—our “I,” in which we have since childhood habitually locked up everything, turning our soul into an impenetrable fortress. But authentic Christianity begins at the place where a person makes a great existential breakthrough; where he overcomes the pull of his egocentrism and turns to meet God. At this crosspoint of the vertical of the soul reaching

“….the Lord honors our intentions and desires. He blesses our good intentions and desires and multiplies them for us. He waits to see a little effort, and He overwhelms us with spiritual riches that we can’t comprehend. We make a bit of effort to pray, and the Lord begins to help us pray. We make a bit of effort to study and learn about Jesus Christ and He himself grants us true wisdom. We make an effort to obey the commandments and the teaching of the Lord, and we find grace

“The enemy of mankind tries in every way to trouble our consciousness and our lives, ultimately to suffocate our souls with pride and malice. We, as Christians, must understand this and wage spiritual warfare, armed with sobriety, prayer, fasting, humility, meekness, and love for Christ.” (Priest Tarasiy Borozenets) “We have to learn, figuratively speaking, to rise above the clouds. When a plane rises above the clouds, it enters a field of sunlight, where everything is so bea

“In our everyday speech, the words “to listen” and “to hear” are often used as synonyms. But in a spiritual sense, there is a vast difference between them—one that brings either salvation or condemnation. Listening is a process. You can stand in church, listening to the reading of the Epistle or the Gospel, and even understand the meaning of the words with your mind—yet remain deaf in your heart. External listening without inner acceptance is like looking in a mirror, walking

“The gospels give us our meaning and our identity and every other identity that we have comes second to our identity as Christians. When we begin to compromise our identity in Christ, when we begin to compromise the way that we live and we begin to live a life of rebellion against the teaching of Christ and His Church then we find that our foundation cracks and before long we find ourselves on the outside looking in, completely unable to understand the Christian faith. We bec

“We are all familiar with that state when someone says: “I feel God, but very far from myself.” And each one of us very often feels God as somewhat distant from us. And yet how we would love to be closer to God, to draw closer to Christ the Savior, to be near Him. This happens because we pray little, pray incorrectly, or do not pray at all. If prayer—the thread connecting us to God—breaks, then our communication with the Creator of the universe ceases. And without prayer, as