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

Do not by any means allow yourself to open both ears to the slanderers and to draw your conclusions and decisions on the basis of what they alone have to say, and thereby judging the case in absentia without the presence of the person slandered to defend himself. Oftentimes many unjust and irrational decisions have followed from such slanderous accusations.

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.

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.

If you have spoken evil of your brother, and you are stricken with remorse, go and kneel down before him and say: 'I have spoken badly of you; let this be my surety that I will not spread this slander any further.' For detraction is death to the soul.

What is it that commends our own life? Is it miracles, or is it a life scrupulously and uprightly lived? It is rather from the latter that miracles arise, and to that they tend. For he that lives a worthy life, draws this grace upon himself; and whosoever receives such graces receives them that he may help others to amend their lives. For even Christ wrought miracles that He might the more be accepted as worthy of belief, and so might the more attract men to Himself, and by this means bring sanctity into their lives.

Do not lend your ear to the tongue of the slanderer, nor your tongue to the ear of him who likes malicious talk, speaking or listening with enjoyment to words against one's neighbor. Cut yourself off from them, lest you fall away from love of God and find yourself exiled from eternal life.

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.

But let thine apparel be plain, not for adornment, but for necessary conversing: not to minister to thy vanity, but to keep thee warm in winter, and to hide the unseemliness of the body: lest under the pretence of hiding the unseemliness, thou fall under another kind of unseemliness by thy extravagant dress.

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

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440-526-5192 (Phone)