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Prayer, fasting, vigils, and all other Christian practices, however good they may be in themselves, certainly do not constitute the aim of our Christian life: they are but the indispensable means of attaining that aim. For the true aim of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God. As for fasts, vigils, prayer and almsgiving, and other good works done in the name of Christ, they are only the means of acquiring the Holy Spirit of God. Note well that it is only good works done in the name of Christ that bring us the fruits of the Spirit.
~St. Seraphim of Sarov




In order for one to understand the Saints and Fathers of the [Orthodox] Church, it is not sufficient to merely read them. The Saints spoke and wrote after having lived the mysteries of God. They personally experienced the mysteries.

In order for one to understand them, he too must have progressed to a certain degree of initiation into the mysteries of God by personally tasting, smelling, and seeing. You can read the books of the Saints and become very well versed in them with a ‘cerebral’ knowledge without even minutely tasting that which the Saints tasted who wrote these books through their personal experience.

In order to understand the Saints essentially, not intellectually, you must have the proper experience for all that they say; you must have tasted, at least in part, of the same things as they. You must have lived in the fervent environment of Orthodoxy; you must grown in it… A Whole new world must be born in a Westerner’s heart in order for him to understand something of Orthodoxy.
~Alexandar Kalomiros, Against False Union, 1959



The mysteries of our Faith are unknown and not understandable to those who are not repenting.
~Archpriest Nicholas Deputatov, ‘Awareness of God’ in the Orthodox Word Magazine, July-August 1976

 

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Tuesday
27Oct2009

Abba Zosimos the Cilician said...

…When I was a young man, I left Mt. Sinai and went to Ammoniac to stay there in a cell. There I found an elder dressed in a short-sleeved shirt of palm-fibre. When the elder saw me, before greeting me, he said, “Why have you come here, Zosimos? Get away from here. You cannot stay in this place.” I thought he knew me. I made a prostration before him saying, “Of your charity, elder, whence do you know me?” He said to me, “Two days ago, a being appeared to me who said, ‘A monk is coming to you whose name is Zosimos. Do not allow him to stay here. It is my will to entrust him the church of the Egyptian Babylon (Old Cairo).’ He fell silent and left me, going about a stone’s throw from me. There he spent some two hours in prayer. Then he came back to me and kissed me on the forehead, saying, “Naturally, child, you are welcome, for God has brought you here to bury my body.” I asked him, “How many years have you been here, abba?” “I am completing my forty-fifth year,” he replied. It looked to me as though his face were of fire. He said to me, “Peace be with you, child; pray for me.” And with that, the servant of the Lord lay down and fell asleep. I dug a grave and buried him. Two days later I went on my way, glorifying God.

John Moschus, Leimonarion (The Spiritual Meadow) 123 

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