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

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

Truth is the foundation of everything that has been created. Let truth be also the foundation of all your works (both inward and outward), and especially the foundation of your prayers. Let all your life, all your works, all your thoughts, and all your desires be founded upon truth.

No man, wise in his own opinion, because he has studied all the sciences and is learned in external wisdom, will ever penetrate God's mysteries or see them unless he first humbles himself and becomes foolish in his heart, repudiating his self-opinion together with his acquirements of learning. For a man who acts thus and follows with undaunted faith those who are wise in things Divine, is guided by them and with them enters into the city of the living God, and, taught and enlightened by the Holy Spirit, sees and knows things which no one else can see or know. Thus he becomes taught of God.

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.

Today's great enemy of truth, drawing men to perdition, is delusion.

Do not shun poverty and afflictions, these wings of buoyant prayer.

I had wasted much of my time and devoted almost all of my youth in acquiring knowledge which now appears as just foolishness before God. Then one day I awoke suddenly, as if from some deep sleep, and saw the intense light of divine truth, and realized the absolute worthlessness of all the wisdom taught by the leaders of this world. I wept many tears for the wretchedness of my life and prayed for some guidance to lead my life to faith. The first thing I did to reform my previous way of life was to mix with the poor...

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

The feeding of the needy is the purchase money of the heavenly kingdom and the free dispenser of things temporal is made the heir of things eternal.

In Christianity truth is not a philosophical concept nor is it a theory, a teaching, or a system, but rather, it is the living theanthropic hypostasis - the historical Jesus Christ (John 14:6). Before Christ men could only conjecture about the Truth since they did not possess it. With Christ as the incarnate divine Logos the eternally complete divine Truth enters into the world. For this reason the Gospel says: 'Truth came by Jesus Christ' (John 1:17).

Love the poor, and through them you will find mercy.

He who chooses maltreatment and dishonor for the sake of truth is walking on the apostolic path; he has taken up the cross and is bound in chains (cf. Mt 16:24). But when he tries to concentrate his attention on the heart without accepting these two, his intellect wanders from the path and he falls into the temptations and snares of the devil.

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.

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Broadview Heights, Ohio 44147

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