face to Face

We ought daily to renew our vows, and to kindle our heats to zeal, as if each day were the first day of our conversion, and to say, “Help me, O God, in my good resolutions, and in Thy holy service, and grant that this day I may make a good beginning, for hitherto I have done nothing!

- Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ

If you have made a rule to read so many prayers (whether they be long or short, fulfill the reading of all of them well), read the prayers with all conscientiousness, and do not do God’s work with your heart divided in tow, so that only one half belongs to Him and the remaining half to your own flesh… for every insincere prayer removes your heart from God and sets it in opposition to you yourself, whilst every earnest prayer draws your heart nearer to God and makes it perpetually godly. Thus, be assured, if you hurry over your prayers, to give rest to your body, you will lose both spiritual and bodily rest.

Oh! by what labour, sweat, and tears is the approach of our heart to God gained! Is it possible that we should again make our prayers (when careless) the means of our estrangement from God, and that God should not be jealous of this? For He pities us and our former labours, and He desires that we should again unfailingly turn to Him with our whole hearts. He wishes that we should always belong to Him.

- Saint John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ

Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

The passions are usually understood in this negative sense in Orthodox writings, but some elders explore the idea that they are, at root, positive impulses that have been disfigured and misdirected. Anger, for example, can be turned into zeal for the battle against sin; lust can be purified into ardent love for God and all humanity. We are designed for holiness, yet fallen; the compassionate Physician wishes his good design to be set right, not annihilated.

- Frederica Mathewes-Green (via antonyofva)

So God can use any kind of personality, any kind of person; he only made one of you, and he has a plan for what you will be. The one light of Christ is like a flame shining out through millions of lanterns. But each lantern is made of different colored glass. You are the only person God made who is exactly like you; and if you fail to be filled with the light of Christ, you will eternally deprive the kingdom of God of one particular shade of radiance. The French Philosopher Leon Bloy said: “There is only one tragedy: to fail to become a saint.

- Frederica Mathewes-Green, The Jesus Prayer, p. 167 (via antonyofva)

Pastor Richard Wurmbrand (whom we met earlier, telling of a priest he met in Romanian Communist prison), wrote of an experience he had while in the prison infirmary, seriously ill with tuberculosis. On his right was a priest named Fr. Iscu, abbot of a monastery, who had been so tortured that he was near death; on Pastor Wurmbrand’s left was the Communist officer who had tortured Fr. Iscu. In that volatile climate, a person could be powerful one day and imprisoned the next, and this officer had fallen precipitously out of favor. He had been severely tortured himself, and death was drawing near.

This fallen Communist was in terror as well as pain, and kept asking Pastor Wurmbrand to pray for him. He kept saying, “I can’t die, I have committed such terrible crimes.”

Fr. Iscu, on the other side, had been listening. After a while he called for two other prisoners to help him. Leaning on them, he slowly and painfully made his way to the officer’s bed. He sat on the bedside and reached out to caress the miserable man’s head. “I will never forget this gesture,” said Pastor Wurmbrand. “I watched a murdered man caressing his murderer!”

Fr. Iscu told the officer, “You are young; you did not know what you were doing. I love you with all my heart.” Then he said, “If I who am a sinner can love you so much, imagine Christ, who is Love Incarnate, how much He loves you! And all the Christians whom you have tortured, know that they forgive you, they love you, and Christ loves you. He wishes you to be saved much more than you wish to be saved. You wonder if your sins can be forgiven. He wishes to forgive your sins more than you wish your sins to be forgiven. He desires for you to be with Him in heaven much more than you wish to be in heaven with Him. He is Love. You only need to turn to Him and repent.” With that, the officer choked out the words of his confession with tears, and the priest, the one whom he had tortured, spoke the words of God’s forgiveness.

Pastor Wurmbrand says that both men died that night. It was Christmas Eve. “But it was not a Christmas Eve in which we simply remembered that two thousand years ago Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It was a Christmas Eve during which Jesus was born in the heart of a Communist murderer.”

- Frederica Mathewes-Green, The Jesus Prayer, p. 139-140 (via antonyofva)

God give us the strength to pursue the path of crucifixion; there is no other way to be Christian.

- Fr. Seraphim Rose (via lilianne2)