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

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

Charity, temperance, contemplation, and prayer please God; gluttony, licentiousness, and what multiplies them, please the flesh. Therefore they who are in the flesh cannot please God. And they that are Christ’s have crucified their flesh with the passions and concupiscences.

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.

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.

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 Resurrection of the Lord is the renewal of human nature, and the renewal, re-creation and return to immortality of the first Adam who was swallowed up by death because of sin, and through death went back to the earth from which he was formed.

You are accustomed to look upon your body as upon your own inalienable property, but that is quite wrong, because your body is God's edifice.

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.

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

Break the bonds of your friendship for the body and give it only what is absolutely necessary.

As a man cannot remain unscathed who spares his enemy on the field of battle, so a man engaged in spiritual warfare cannot save his soul if he spares his body.

You were commanded to keep the body as a servant, not to be unnaturally enslaved to its pleasures.

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.

Our flesh is an unfaithful friend.

The man who pets a lion may tame it, but the man who coddles the body makes it ravenous.

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

Keep the body properly slim so that you reduce the burden of the heart's warfare, with full benefit to yourself.

Everything has already begun, and everything always begins anew for the Church, with the Resurrection of our Lord.

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

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440-526-5192 (Phone)