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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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Wednesday
11Mar2009

We went...

DateMar 11, 2009 | |

… – my master Sophronius the sophist and I, before he renounced the world – to Alexandria to see abba Palladius, a pious man and servant of God, having his monastery at Lithazomene, and we asked him to speak to us a word of edification. The elder said to us, “Children, the time that remains to us is short. Let us struggle for a little and labor, in order that we might have the enjoyment of very great things in eternity. Look at the martyrs, look at the holy men, look at the ascetics; see how courageously they persevered. We will forever wonder at the endurance of those whose remembrances have been preserved from time past.”

John Moschus, Leimonarion (The Spiritual Meadow) 69
St. Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, 634-638 author of the Life of St. Mary of Egypt and of the Miracles of Sts. Cyrus and John commemorated 11 March

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