“The Lord is always waiting for us to unite ourselves with Him in love, but instead we drift further and further away from Him…So many people these days are drifting. The currents of society are carrying them one way and then another. Subtle and almost irresistible…The thing about drifting is that we don’t notice it. We aren’t aware that we are being carried along unless we have some fixed point to orient ourselves. But our society provides no such marker. It offers us fashions, styles, trends, and fads that give us a momentary direction in life. But they are constantly changing, and they enslave us to inconstancy.” (Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Fr. Basil)
“You know – growing up Christian – growing up in the Church is like having it all, all the time. It gets so comfortable....And so little by little, we stop paying attention to God in our lives. We outgrow our need for the Church, for God. We become self-satisfied, and forget how much our God loves us. It all becomes routine. And soon we start drifting away from God, from Church, and eventually we find ourselves outsiders, only busy about this world, and we lose sight of spiritual values.” (Fr. John Zeyack)
“How does apostasy happen?...apostasy occurs as a process, as a kind of drifting away. That is why the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews writes, “We must pay the closer attention to what we have heard lest we drift away from it” (Heb. 2:1). Apostasy is a matter of drifting, of slow retreat from the way of life to which we have been committed. It will be helpful to mark the stages of this drift, so that we can avoid it.” (Fr. Lawrence Farley)
“…the greatest distraction machine is not the TV, Facebook, or even the smartphone. The greatest distraction machine is the human brain itself…A number of years ago the NSF estimated that our brains produce as many as 12,000 to 50,000 thoughts per day. . . . What’s disturbing about these 50,000 thoughts per day is that the vast majority of them are pure nonsense. We often dwell in the past or the future, obsessing about mistakes we might have made, battling guilt, planning ahead or worrying. We are constantly drifting into fantasy, fiction and negativity. Consequently, an absolute minuscule number of our thoughts are actually focused on what is truly important and real: the present moment… “Again and again in peace, let us pray to the Lord” (Little Litany). Again I was asked, “Why is there so much repetition in our prayers?” And again I responded the way I always had before - our worship includes certain themes and terms that bear repeating, because they remind us to pay attention to something significant on the way, or else to waft us upwards into the rarefied spiritual atmosphere of the Kingdom, lest we drift back down to the temporal and mundane area where we more normally spend our mental time.” (Robin Phillips, Fr. Vladimir Berzonsky)
“We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief [in God] nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?” (C.S. Lewis)
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