“With God, everything doesn’t find an immediate solution, as if by magic. But, people do have the sense of the presence of God, of his love, of the grace of the Holy Spirit, of consolation and of hope. So, they can maintain their courage in their everyday difficulties. They can live in the world and not be led astray by every profane and shameful thing. Unshakeable faith will bring optimism. Real love will foster charity and alms-giving. And in this way people’s wounded hearts will be warmed…Those who still follow false gods or make gods of people involved in politics, the arts or the sciences are destined to be thoroughly deceived. Without God, every crisis will overwhelm them and make them suffer from terrible delusions and many hardships.” (Elder Moisis the Athonite)
“The Lord does not desire the death of a sinner, and on him who repents He bestows the grace of the Holy Spirit, which gives peace to the soul and freedom for the mind and heart to dwell in God. When the Holy Spirit forgives us our sins we receive freedom to pray to God with an undistracted mind. Then the soul can freely contemplate God and live serene and joyous in him. And this is true freedom. But without God there can be no freedom, for the enemy agitates the soul with evil thoughts.” (St. Silouan the Anthonite)
“The New Testament occasionally makes comments about “lawlessness.” St. John equates sin and lawlessness (1Jn 3:4). When our communion with God is disrupted, lawlessness is the result. That is to say, the inner law, the natural compass of our well-being, begins to malfunction. We lose our direction. Our actions (even intended “good” actions) can become corrupted and serve only to destroy our lives. That this takes place on a cultural level is deeply alarming. Historically, cultures serve as something of a hedge around our lives. They cannot make us good, but they encourage us towards the good and turn us away from evil. Today, this is decreasingly true.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“A life of work without the liberation of communion with God is slavery. The struggle for excessive wealth is an incurable, tormenting disease. Fear of the future can stimulate greed, miserliness, hoarding. And God can be easily forgotten…Desire is transformed into lust when we exclude God from the picture. Without God, the natural powers of our soul become corrupt…God made the world, forming our very flesh and our eyes, yet sin turns even our natural desires into lust.” (Monk Moses, Dynamis 2/6/2014)
“My dear brothers and sisters, if we feel ‘existentially happy’, comfortable and at ease in this present world, then why would we seek to find a happiness that we don’t understand, that we don’t know we’ve lost, why would we even feel that we’re missing something? If we don’t feel exiled and estranged from communion with God, then why would we strive at all and where would we actually return to? Perhaps we should long for the lost joy on the opposite bank of real life, so that we can experience and confess that which was said by an Orthodox monk: ‘I believe in you, Lord, because outside you there’s nothing for me’. Amen.” (Archimandrite Nikanor Karayannis)
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