SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“In order not to humble yourself before the evil world you must humble yourself before Christ. Otherwise, your pride will tear your heart into pieces. Humility is the path to mental and physical normality and health…Humility (no matter before what) makes a person able to believe in something that is above him and thus allows him to find a point of support and of reference, meaning, purpose and the coordinates of life. Those who humble themselves before “this world” acquire fa

“And in order for the soul to develop, repentance is vital. Because a person remains in a state of spiritual death and separation from God, and the Savior comes to him to save him. Repentance is the action of someone who understands his existence as needing salvation. That is, when a person laments and weeps, he testifies that he needs a Savior, salvation, help and protection; he needs a Redeemer—Someone Who will forgive and heal him. Repentance brings a person to such a stat

“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

“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

“…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...