Fr. Alexey Young
Rating: 6.9|Votes: 12
The seeds of holiness are planted within us at Baptism and Chrismation, but we must nourish these seeds by prayer, fasting, and almsgiving in imitation of Christ and His saints. The spiritual equivalent of the sun is the Holy Spirit—He acts upon us in the Sacraments, especially in Chrismation. In this way, the Church is the seedbed of holiness. We must water the seeds and pull out the weeds and thereby discover that the spiritual path is a tremendous adventure all about going home to God!
Rating: 7.6|Votes: 20
"The holy Fathers give us the antidote for going from vice to virtue. The spiritual life is a science, not an art form. Most of us aren’t so spiritually talented so we need laws and cause and effect in order to learn the spiritual life. St. John Climacus says that the antidote for pride is prayer. Identify where the pride is in your life and ask for strength against it. Human effort can do very little. We must realize that everything depends on God. In prayer we make use of God’s grace, and then we can do almost anything—we can move mountains!"
Fr. Lawrence Farley
Rating: 10|Votes: 5
Why this insistence on exclusion? The Fathers of Nicea wanted to exclude heresy from the Church for the same reason that a doctor wants to exclude cancer from the body of his patient—because if he includes the cancer in the patient’s body, the result will be the death of the patient. Cancer kills, and so does heresy. Heresy is not simply incorrect opinion, akin to getting a numerical sum wrong. Heresy is stubbornly refusing to accept the truth, in exactly the same way as someone who has been poisoned might stubbornly refuse to accept swallowing the antidote. A person who has been poisoned will die. And the good intentions of the heretic notwithstanding (for who knowingly accepts error?), the person who refuses God’s provided remedy of Christ will also die.
Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol
Rating: 10|Votes: 3
The Orthodox Church of Christ never lost the “unity of faith and the communion of the Holy Spirit” and does not accept the theory of the restoration of the unity of those “who believe in Christ,” because it believes that the unity of those who believe in Christ already exists in the unity of all of Her baptized children, between themselves and with Christ, in Her correct faith, where no heretics or schismatics are present, for which reason She prays for their return to Orthodoxy in repentance.
Rating: 9.3|Votes: 3
"One of the things happening within us is the movement of the imagination, which is one of the main obstacles to prayer and roots us in our fallenness. Spirituality must be based in actual contact with the living God, not with mere images which lead us to communion with our own ability to create religious scenarios. Even Satan can appear as an angel of light and enter into the realm of our imagination and passions."