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Receptive

“The Holy Spirit, one of the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity comes to abide in us, God’s people, if we are receptive to having the Spirit abide in us…We make ourselves receptive to God through humility, love and by following Christ’s commandments to love God and neighbor. God is revealed to us through those in whom the Spirit abides. In God’s Holy Ones we find God’s holiness. Humans are capable of being God-bearers, of being a light to the world as is our God.” (Fr. Ted Bob

Information

“In our information age, many resources are readily available for us to seek the Lord—too many. A story from the desert fathers gives good advice…wandering from book to book, spiritual advisor to spiritual advisor, or church father to church father is a form of groping for the truth. A tree cannot grow and bear fruit if one keeps digging it up and planting it somewhere else.” (Fr. Basil) “Embracing God and His Kingdom requires more than processing information—even information

Lies and Lying

“Jesus says the devil is the father of lies and when he lies, the devil is speaking according to his nature. No wonder lying and deceit were thought of as being evil… We distort God’s gift of speech whenever we use words to lie, cheat, and deceive…Lie with words, and you can lie about anything, anyone, anywhere; you can rewrite facts past, present and future. Human speech allows deception to transcend space and time…To tell a lie is to create one’s own reality... To tell the

Holy Spirit

“Many people make the serious error of thinking of the Holy Spirit as only some kind of vague principle or influence. On the contrary, the Holy Spirit is as much a person (individual existence of a conscious being) as the Father and the Son.” (Foundation Study Bible, Ephesians 4:3) “Everything begins from our faith in Christ and accepting His word. When we make His commandments the unique law of our life, then we gradually acquire a certain mystical depth. We become mystical,

Weakness

“Virtue may be defined as the conscious union of human weakness with divine strength’...To explain, Maximus says that if we rely on our own capability as if our natural powers are our strength, we confuse our human works with virtue. On the other hand, if we “do not make an effort” to receive divine help and “transcend human weakness” with the power of God, we will fall short of virtue.” (St. Maximus the Confessor, Fr. Basil) “God who alone judges the great events of history

Cross

“The crucified Christ is the fullness of the revelation of God. There is no further revelation to be made known, no unveiling of a wrath to come. The crucified Christ is what the wrath of God looks like…Christ is moving towards His end, the consummation of the Incarnation. As He is increasingly revealed, everything around Him is revealed as well. Things are shown to be more clearly what they are. Those who hate Him, begin to be revealed as plotters and murderers. What was onc

Compassion

“We see the ultimate magnitude and power of that compassion in the Cross of Christ. But as our baptism into the dying and rising of Christ symbolizes, our rescue from sin and corruption is not accomplished when we merely stand at the foot of the Cross and watch. It is achieved when we participate in the Lord’s sufferings.” (Fr. Basil) “…the bright-sadness — of which the fathers and the mothers speak. Even in the dryness of our desert journey, we are offered a sustaining taste

Inner and Outer Self

“You see the greatness of Job’s external wealth; but his internal wealth was even greater. The visible riches were splendid, but the invisible riches were even more splendid because they last; visible riches grow old, lose their value and continually collapse into the most pitiful corruption and destruction.” (St. Hesychius of Jerusalem) “…there is an inversely proportionate relationship between virtue and the law: the more virtuous someone is—that is, the more they have an i

Purpose

“Each of us is born into this world with an instinctive desire to find meaning and purpose in our lives…I say, as do all Christian men, that it is a divine purpose that rules, and not fate…Many people have accepted that life must be meaningless on the basis of the secular worldview, but hardly any of them live consistently with that belief. People who believe life has no meaning or purpose and that objective truth is a delusion will actually take on convincing you that it is

Children and Parents

“This is a strong reason why Christian theology resists and rejects conceptions of childhood that conceive of it as either an ephemeral stage of human existence or that deny its universal status. When we become adults and parents, we do not simply leave behind the office of child like the crab that sheds its first shell for a second and a third. Through the whole of our lives, we naturally continue to relate to our parents as their children. We also find it needful to “rememb

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