• Vespers: Saturdays 5PM
  • Divine Liturgy: Sundays 9:30AM
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Quotes

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

The enemy is within ourselves. An invisible war is taking place within us. If interior evil is defeated, then the external, weaker, foe will surrender.

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

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

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

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of our salvation, and its constant guardian. This it is which secures both the beginning of conversion, and the purging away of vices, and the safe retention of virtues...

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

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

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

When we turn our spirit from the contemplation of God, we become the slaves of carnal passions.

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

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

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

Temptations are sent for improvement when God delivers his righteous ones to various temptations, humiliating them for some slight and unimportant offense, or to increase their purity, in order that every uncleanliness of thought, or... dross which He sees they have harbored in secret, may be burnt away in this present life, and that so He may bring them, as it were pure gold, to the future judgment...

It is, indeed, impossible for the mind not to be troubled by thoughts, but accepting them or rejecting them is possible for everyone who makes an effort...therefore we practice the frequent reading of Scripture, so that we may be open to a spiritual point of view. For this reason we frequently chant the psalms, so that we may continually grow in compunction. For this reason we are diligent in vigils, fasting, and praying, so that the mind which has been stretched to its limits may not taste earthly things but contemplate heavenly ones. When these things cease because negligence has crept in again, then, it is inevitable that the mind, by the accumulated filth of the vices, will soon turn in a carnal direction and fall.

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

Love and self-control purify the soul.

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

In order to preserve the mind and body in a perfect condition abstinence from food is not alone sufficient: unless the other virtues of the mind as well are joined to it. And so humility must first be learned by the virtue of obedience, and grinding toil and bodily exhaustion. The madness of anger should be controlled; the downcast look of dejection be overcome; vainglory should be despised, the disdainfulness of pride trampled under foot, and the shifting and wandering thoughts of the mind restrained by continual recollection of God. And the slippery wanderings of our heart should be brought back again to the contemplation of God as often as our crafty enemy, in his endeavour to lead away the mind a captive from this consideration, creeps into the innermost recesses of the heart.

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Parish

Mailing Address

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

Email, Phone, and Fax

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