A collection of scriptural meditations from Saints and Fathers of the Church.

Patient endurance is the soul's struggle for virtue; where there is struggle for virtue, self-indulgence is banished.

Strive with all your might to bring your interior activity into accord with God, and you will overcome exterior passions.

Half an hour of the Jesus Prayer is worth as much as three hours of deep sleep. The prolonged Jesus Prayer rests and calms us.

Ascetic exertion, at the personal, family, and parish level, particularly of prayer and fasting, is the characteristic of Orthodoxy.

Self-love -- that is, friendship for the body -- is the source of evil in the soul.

The Church is the personhood of the God-human Christ, a God-human organism and not a human organization. The Church is indivisible, as is the person of the God-human, as is the body of the God-human. For this reason it is a fundamental error to have the God-human organism of the Church divided into little national organizations. In the course of their procession down through history many local Churches have limited themselves to nationalism, to national methods and aspirations, ours being among them. The Church has adapted herself to the people when it should properly be just the reverse: the people adapting themselves to the Church. This mistake has many a time been made by our Church here. But we very well know that these were the 'tares' of our Church life, tares which the Lord will not uproot, leaving them rather to grow with the wheat until the time of harvest (Matth. 13, 29-30). We also well know (the Lord so taught us) that these tares have their origin in our primeval enemy and enemy of Christ: the devil (Matth. 13, 25-28). But we wield this knowledge in vain if it is not transformed into prayer, the prayer that in time to come Christ will safeguard us from becoming the sowers and cultivators of such tares ourselves.

Worldly virtues promote human glory, spiritual virtues the glory of God.

The person who is unaffected by the things of this world loves stillness; and he who loves no human thing loves all men.

You were commanded to keep the body as a servant, not to be unnaturally enslaved to its pleasures.

He who fears God will pay careful attention to his soul and will free himself from communion with evil.

Strive to love every man equally, and you will simultaneously expel all the passions.

He who fears God will pay careful attention to his soul and will free himself from communion with evil.

The soul's health consists in dispassion and spiritual knowledge; no slave to sensual pleasure can attain it.

Long-suffering and readiness to forgive curb anger; love and compassion wither it.

All sin is due to sensual pleasure, all forgiveness to hardship and distress.

Just as desire and rage multiply our sins, so self-control and humility erase them.

It is an insult to the intelligence to be subject to what lacks intelligence and to concern itself with shameful desires.

Break the bonds of your friendship for the body and give it only what is absolutely necessary.

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Archangel Michael Orthodox Church
5025 E. Mill Rd
Broadview Heights, Ohio 44147

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440-526-5192 (Phone)