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

Make the body serve the commandments, keeping it so far as possible free from sickness and sensual pleasure.

Spiritual freedom is release from the passions; without Christ’s mercy you cannot attain it.

Chastise your soul with the thought of death, and through remembrance of Jesus Christ concentrate your scattered intellect.

Listlessness is an apathy of soul; and a soul becomes apathetic when sick with self-indulgence.

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

Keep the commandments, and you will find peace; love God, and you will attain spiritual knowledge.

The person who listens to Christ fills himself with light; and if he imitates Christ, he reclaims himself.

Concern for one's soul means hardship and humility, for through these God forgives us all our sins.

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.

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.

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

You should not make long prayer, for it is better to pray little but often. Superfluous words are idle talk.

According to the degree to which the intellect is stripped of the passions, the Holy Spirit initiates the intellect into the mysteries of the age to be.

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

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

Love and self-control purify the soul.

If you are not willing to repent through freely choosing to suffer, unsought sufferings will providentially be imposed on you.

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Mailing Address

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

Email, Phone, and Fax

[email protected]
440-526-5192 (Phone)