SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“A conference participant once asked the speaker, "What is the best way for a father to love his children?" The speaker replied, "The best way for a father to love his children is to love their mother." I reflect often upon that superbly accurate statement. And I think the reverse is equally true: the best way a mother can love her children is to love their father. More than anything else in the world, children need a loving family and parents who support each other, even if

“…God Himself takes on human form to reveal man’s vocation and meaning as divine. From this moment onward man is free. Nothing stands over him, for the very world is his as a gift from God to fulfill his divine destiny….Tragically, too many people do not hear this voice of Jesus as the voice of Love Incarnate calling us to repent, to sacrifice, to have sacrificial love in order to have the greatest joy, to have our deepest desires fulfilled, to find our true selves, to fulfil

“But Holy Scripture speaks sufficiently simply—it speaks about how man accepted evil…, accepted evil according to his freedom, which God had given to him. God did not limit man’s freedom, but where there is choice there is always freedom, and if there is no choice, there is no freedom. Man according to his own personal freedom, as we see, in violation of the family hierarchy, transgresses God’s commandment, goes outside of God’s commandments…The limits of freedom really were

“Why was the entire dispensation of history and work of Christ necessary? Could not God simply have saved humankind by fiat?...The solution God has provided is to heal our nature from the inside out. By joining His divine, eternal life to human flesh, Jesus Christ has overcome the power of death; hence mortality will be abandoned in the grave when the universal resurrection dawns. If this explanation is not sufficient for the inquirer, ‘Say something like this to reasonable p

“Mankind is carried away by other aspirations and goals, created for its own detriment and ruin. There are people who don’t pray at all, who don’t feel the need for it, who don’t understand the point of praying and don’t believe in the possibility of being heard by God; and many people do pray, but rarely and always reluctantly, with compulsion and difficulty. Thus, there are very few people who live by fervent, strong, sincere, noetic, and unceasing prayer, according to the

“An evil person is not someone who is nothing but evil, someone with no redeeming features or virtues whatsoever. An evil person is not a...

“Christ seeks to examine within the heart of each believer. Have we embraced forgiveness of others truly? Have we embraced it in the same...

“Christ then appears through shut doors in the midst of them and tells them one thing: ‘Peace be with you.’ For these to be the first...

“…Chrysostom understands original sin not in terms of inherited or personal guilt but in terms of an inherited mortality that causes...

“…sin lies in the direction of the will…A person sins when he looks upon his life as if it belonged only to him…It is necessary for...