SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“…the goal of the Christian life is the acquisition of love for God and others. The Lord Himself speaks of only two commandments, upon which hang all the Law and the Prophets. These are: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind and Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself (Matt. 22:37, 39). Christ didn’t say these are just two of ten or twenty other commandments, but rather: On these two commandments hang all the Law and

“God is free and cannot be expected to behave in a predictable manner (known to us). We can expect certain things according to His promise, but even those things remain largely hidden. For example, we can trust that He is always at all times and in all things working for our salvation, our true communion with Him and healing from the ravages of our brokenness. But we are creatures who dream of being gods, though entering by a false door. Rather than being raised up and confor

“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

“Everyone is familiar with that “voice in the head.” By this, I mean the negative voice. It is mean, judgmental, angry, jealous, envious, salacious, just bad. Sometimes it goes quiet. Sometimes it is so overwhelming that it drowns everything else out. One simple question we can ask: “Who’s doing the talking?”… The voice in our head, the self-talk, is not the voice of a demon. However, it has a very dark origin and is utterly contrary to our well-being. It is the voice of the

“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

“ 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

“The challenge today is not so much that people don’t believe in God; it’s that they don’t believe in a personal God. There is more of a sense that God is “something up there” as opposed to “someone who is here…Without ceasing to be “up there”, God is now also “down here” among us, saving His world from the inside out.” (Sacramental Living Ministries, Fr. Lawrence Farley) “Sky is a thirteenth-century borrowing from Old Norse, referring to the clouds or the region where the cl