• 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.

If you have received from God the gift of knowledge, however limited, beware of neglecting charity and temperance. They are virtues which radically purify the soul from passions and so open the way of knowledge continually.

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

A man who has embraced poverty offers up prayer that is pure, while a man who loves possessions prays to material images.

Make the body serve the commandments, keeping it so far as possible free from sickness and sensual pleasure.

A lover of riches is never satisfied, no matter how many possessions he accumulates, but the more he acquires daily, the more his appetite increases; and a person forcibly pulled away from a stream of pure water before he has quenched his thirst feels even more thirsty. In a similar way, once one has experienced the taste of God, one can never be satisfied or have enough of it, but however much one is enriched by this wealth one still feels oneself to be poor. Christians do not set great store by their own lives, but regard themselves rather as rightly set at nought by God and as everyone’s servants.

Unless a man keeps the commandments of God, he cannot progress, even in a single virtue.

The wealth is not a possession, it is not property, it is a loan for use.

All other possessions do not really belong to the one who has them or to the one who has acquired them for they are exchanged back and forth like a game of dice. Only virtue among our possessions cannot be taken away, but remains with us when we live and when we die.

As earth thrown over it extinguishes a fire burning in a stove, so worldly cares and every kind of attachment to something, however small and insignificant, destroys the warmth of the heart which was there at first.

Almsgiving heals the soul's incensive power; fasting withers sensual desire; prayer purifies the intellect and prepares it for contemplation of created beings. For the Lord has given us commandments which correspond to the powers of the soul.

We must resist and avoid like deadly poison the desire to possess earthly goods.

How destructive to the heart is even momentary attachment for anything earthly.

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

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.

The fathers say that a man who sets store by the gold and silver he can amass does not believe that there is a God who provides for him.

Do not the angels differ from us in this respect, that they do not want so many things as we do? Therefore the less we need, the more we are on our way to them; the more we need, the more we sink down to this perishable life.

The more you love money, the more securely you close the Kingdom of God.

He who has tasted the things on high easily despises what is below. But he who has not tasted the things above finds joy in possessions.

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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)