SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple (Lk 14.26). This is the extreme and terrifying warning against all passionate attachments stronger and more powerful than one’s passionate attachment to Christ alone. And the greatest passion of all which keeps one from the love of God and the love of one’s neighbor is the sinful passion for oneself. Sinful sel

“…we often lightly pronounce sentence and form an idea about someone based upon… not even the knowledge of different facts of his biography, but much more often upon hearsay, conjecture, and our own opinions supported by nothing, yet influencing us so powerfully that we consider our opinions the sole and precise truth about one or another person. But this is not at all correct—not in 99 cases out of 100, but in all 100 cases. Therefore, if we speak about a negative, disagreea

“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

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

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

“For all of us who feel the burden of having failed Christ at some point in our lives, we have the example of the Apostle Peter, who...

“So we see dramatized in Genesis the bitter “fruit” of an approach to the interpretation of spiritual realities that attempts to be...

“If a man were to see himself in a mirror in a fit of anger, of rage, he’d be horrified and wouldn’t recognize himself with such a...

“I once confessed to an experienced priest that sinful thoughts were torturing me, and this is what he advised me: “Think of the thoughts...

“What were God’s first words, having become man, in His peaching? ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!’ There are no hopeless...