SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“Do you feel anxiety? ‘No. But why do I have this uneasiness?’ Blessed child, there is restful restlessness and there is also restless rest. Good restlessness always needs to be within us, but not anxiety. When one struggles properly, he is never satisfied with himself.” (St. Paisios) “Anxiety can be a frightening feeling, but it is also the feeling of fear itself. Those two truths are at the core of what can make our anxiety much worse by snowballing into something that gets

“We complicate our lives terribly by our thoughts and desires…the fact that we have desires is not the problem; our problem is that our desires have become twisted out of shape and need fixing…The more we have struggled to take even small steps toward the healing of our souls, the more our disordered desires and spiritual maladies have reared their ugly heads.” (Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Fr. Lawrence Farley, Fr. Philip LeMasters) “…we are what we want. Our wants and longin

“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

“Because the Scriptures have a specific, God-given meaning (2 Peter 1:20, 21), it is impossible to truly understand them apart from the Church, for apostolic interpretation is held in the consciousness of the Church.” (Orthodox Study Bible, Acts 8:30-31) “…to assert the "centrality" – even "sufficiency" – of Scripture does not mean a self-sufficiency. As Father Georges Florovsky writes, "We cannot assert that Scripture is self-sufficient; and this not because it is incomplete

“…if God is all-good and all-powerful, then there shouldn’t be evil. But there is evil. Therefore, this God must not exist. This sort of skeptical argument could only take hold within the modern moral order…and its epistemic confidence…Before looking at the nature of good and evil, it is worth seeing the problem involved when choice is inserted into the conversation. What happens in that approach is that we are no longer speaking about the nature of good and evil, indeed, bot

“Most believers go through times of spiritual emptiness. They feel that they are in a spiritual “black hole.”  Their heart feels hollow. They keep going but they are running on an empty tank…Emptiness of spirit has many causes, such as disappointment, grief, lack of spiritual nourishment, burnout, and depression. Then too, the feeling of being spiritually worn out and exhausted is a sign that we have taken on too much and that we have tried to carry heavy burdens by our own p

“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

“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

“What lies hidden in the designs of God I confess I do not know—I am only a man—but this I know with full certainty, that, whatever it is, it is more just, more wise, and more solidly based on incomparable perfection than all the judgments of people….God’s will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces, the intrinsically good.” (St. Augustine, C.S. Lewis) “The story of Isaac blessing his son Jacob illustrates the intense meanin

“In his disobedience and expulsion from Paradise, man lost the grace of the Holy Spirit (My Spirit shall not remain)…Without the grace of the Holy Spirit, man is easily overcome by the devil, for his willpower alone is incapable of resisting the devil's temptations. Furthermore, his will was weakened through his disobedience and expulsion from Paradise. But he willfully refused God's helping grace (every intent . . . was only evil continually)…Nevertheless, His grace was alwa