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

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

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

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

Go and have pity on all, for through pity, one finds freedom of speech before God.

If you abandon God and are a slave to the passions, you cannot reap God's mercy.

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

Struggle until death to fulfill the commandments: purified through them, you will enter into life.

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

Self-control and strenuous effort curb desire; stillness and intense longing for God wither it.

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

Keep your mind from malicious thoughts of your neighbors, knowing that such thoughts are hurled by diabolical power, to keep your mind from your own sins and from seeking.

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

If you lay down rules for yourself, do not disobey yourself; for he who cheats himself is self-deluded.

Do not neglect the practice of the virtues; if you do, your spiritual knowledge will decrease, and when famine occurs you will go down into Egypt (Genesis 41:57, 46:6).

A wise man is one who pays attention to himself and is quick to separate himself from all defilement.

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

Fear of the Lord conquers desire, and distress that accords with God's will repulses sensual pleasure.

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.

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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)