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

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

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

The intellect becomes a stranger to the things of this world when its attachment to the senses has been completely sundered.

It is better to eat meat and drink wine and not to eat the flesh of one's brethren through slander.

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

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

Control your stomach, sleep, anger, and tongue, and you will not 'dash your foot against a stone.'

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.

The mission of the Church is to bring about in her members the conviction that the proper state of human personhood is composed of immortality and eternity and not of the realm of time and mortality... and the conviction that man is a wayfarer who is wending his way in the sway of time and mortality towards immortality and all eternity.

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

Spiritual reading and prayer purify the intellect, while love and self-control purify the soul's passionate aspect.

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

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

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

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.

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

We are sons of God or of Satan according to whether we conform to goodness or to evil.

Praise God continually with spiritual hymns and always remain in meditation and in this way you will be able to bear the burden of the temptations that come upon you. A traveler who is carrying a heavy load pauses from time to time and draws in deep breaths; it makes the journey easier and the burden lighter.

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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)