• 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.

Stint your stomach and you will certainly lock your mouth, because the tongue is strengthened by an abundance of food. Struggle with all your might against the stomach and restrain it with all sobriety. If you labor a little, the Lord will also soon work with you.

One who lives in idleness sins continually.

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.

Compunction comes when you consider how much you have grieved God Who is so good, so sweet, so merciful, so kind, and entirely full of love; Who was crucified and suffered everything for us. When you meditate on these things and other things the Lord has suffered, they bring compunction.

Just as we must beware of overeating, so too we must beware of excessive temperance or abstinence. Excessive temperance weakens the body, destroys wakefulness, coolness and freshness which are indispensable for vigilance, and which fade and weaken when the physical powers succumb and fail. If you force a weak body to labor beyond its powers, you subject your soul to double darkness, and lead it into confusion (and not relief)...

Fear God and keep His commandments both in your feelings and in your intellect. If you force yourself to keep them in your intellect, bit by bit you will attain to fulfilling them in your feelings.

It is a sin to spend time idly.

As long as the flesh is in full health, let us observe abstinence at all times and in every place. When it has been tamed (which I do not suppose is possible this side of the grave), then let us hide our accomplishment.

Those who yield themselves to idleness and apathy, even though they may be spiritual and holy, hurl themselves into unnatural subjection to passions.

The way to attain compunction is an attentive life. ‘The beginning of repentance comes from the fear of God and attention,’ as the holy martyr Boniface says.

But if you give a strong body rest and ease and idleness, all the passions dwelling in the soul are intensified. Then, even if the soul has a great desire for good, even the very thought of the good that is desired will be taken from you.

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

Ease and idleness are the destruction of the soul and they can injure her more than the demons.

Accordingly, a man will neither be puffed up through pride, nor cast down by despair, if he uses the good things divinely bestowed on him, to the glory of the Giver; withholding his desires from the things which he knows will hurt him. And so he that would preserve himself from the wickedness of envy, from the corruption of sensuality, from the unrest of anger, from the desire of revenge, will be purified by the sanctifying power of true abstinence, and will taste the joy of imperishable delights, so that by making spiritual use of them, he will learn to change earthly possessions into heavenly, not by storing what he has received, but by multiplying more and more that which he has been given.

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

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440-526-5192 (Phone)