This generation treats each other as though they are actually iPods! Or, as though they were Facebook or Glee or the Warped Tour or J Crew’s fall collection. We develop our sense of identity through the material culture with which we surround ourselves, and inadvertently our friends and loved ones get the same treatment.
Rating: 9,2|Votes: 13
“I took the sack. It was heavy. I took it inside the hut and opened it… My dear children!...” the elder began to sob. “There were fresh loaves of bread in the sack. And they were still warm, absolutely hot! As if they had just taken them out of the oven. But what oven could be there?! There wasn’t a single home within fifty versts, only exiles and prisoners.
St. John of Kronstadt
Rating: 5,5|Votes: 2
This is what it means to possess all things. Truly, having nothing on earth and no passionate attachment to anything earthly, the Apostles possessed everything—all spiritual riches, all spiritual power; all spiritual consolation. They counted everything earthly as rubbish, dust, and vanishing smoke, because they had God Himself living in them, working countless miracles through them and saving through them a countless multitude of people.
Rating: 9,1|Votes: 16
In the words of St. Simeon of Thessalonica, “The forty days of the Nativity fast is an image of the fast of Moses, who having fasted for forty days and forty nights, received the words of God inscribed on stone tablets. But having fasted for forty days, we gaze upon and receive the living Word from the Virgin, inscribed not on stones, but incarnate and born, and we partake of His Divine flesh.”
The season has become so very noisy that it is harder and harder to prepare. And yet haven’t you noticed how more and more people crave something besides the chaos?
