Repentance is the Mother of Life. It opens its door to us when we take flight from all things. By means of the intellects intuitions, repentance renews in ys the grace that we have lost after baptism by leading lax lives. By water and Spirit we have put on Christ, though we did not perceive His glory. Through repentance we enter into His delight by means of the knowledge of those extraordinary intuitions that replace causes to dawn within us.
He who is deprived of repentance is deprived of the delight to come. He who us close to all things is far from repentance. And he who is far from all with discernment repents in very truth.
By the love which the saints show for God on account of the things they suffer for His name’s sake (when they endure strains and do not forsake that which God loves) their hearts acquire the boldness to gaze toward Him without a veil and to beseech Him with confidence. Great is the power of bold prayer. For this reason, God allows His saints to be tried by every sorrow, then to experience anew and to prove His aid, and to understand how great a providence He has for them, for in their perils He is found to be their Redeemer.
I have said to you many times, devote yourselves to the study of Holy Scripture, the psalms and the writings of the Fathers and study them with Divine Eros. Look up every word in the dictionary and read clearly and correctly and with attention to the meaning and every last detail and punctuation. Find out how many times a word, such as for example, simplicity, occurs in the Holy Scripture. The light of Christ will flood your soul.
The good-hearted person who has no devious thoughts attracts the Grace of God. Above all – good hearted-ness and simplicity attract the grace of God. They are the pre-conditions for God to come and make His abode in us…
Simplicity and goodness, that is everything if you want to acquire divine grace.
The commanments are assimilation’s of God. They are things that have been uttered by God, and thus they are an extension of God Hinself; they come directly from Him, and to them my will must be united…
…the purpose of the commandments then, is rendering to God what belongs to to God. It is, we could say my self identification with God, my being found together with God, with what He thinks, and with what the Holy Trinity thinks together as one. The moral or ethical life which is the concrete application of God’s commandments, does not consist in, “I must do this, and not do that; this is forbidden, that is permitted.” To the contrary, morality is essentially a fullness of life in God, having as its basic element the assimilation of God’s will, and the rendering to God of all that belongs to Him, so that my work and activities are in accord with God who is still working.
The Mystical Marriage : Spiritual Life According to Saint Maximos the Confessor
When you find Christ you are satisfied, you desire nothing else, you find peace. You become a different person. You live everywhere, wherever Christ is. You live in the stars, in infinity, in heaven with the angels, with the Saints, on earth with people, with plants and animals with everyone and everything. When there is love for Christ, loneliness disappears. You are peaceable, joyous, full. Neither melancholy nor illness nor pressure, nor anxiety, nor depression, nor hell.
Christ is in all your thoughts, all your actions. You have grace and you can endure everything for Christ, and indeed with joy. Just as Ge suffered so you to can suffer unjustly. Did you choose Christ to avoid suffering? This is our religion for our soul to awake and love Christ and become holy- to give herself over to divine Eros. And so He too will love her.
Saint Porphyrios
Wounded by Love : The Life and Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios
Quite naturally then, a person is led to a state of mind, that is purely eschatological; to a mind that looks beyond this life and thinks only of the next. When someone possesses divine love, he or she no longer wishes to live in this present state of existence, but is concerned only about the future. This is because they realize that whenever the mind is drawn away and becomes preoccupied with something — with its problems, its life, or with some material thing, good or bad — but does not love God and runs the risk of forgetting Him altogether.
Saint Maximos seeks to life up the human spirit, and give it wings, so that it might soar to the heavens. This is why he uncovers for us the true meaning of life, namely that life is spiritual, it is upborne by the Holy Spirit. The wings of the Holy Spirit lift up the wings of the human spirit, freeing it from every weight and heaviness and enable it to rise upward.
Elder Aimilianos
The Mystical Marriage spiritual life according to Saint Maximos the Confessor
The life of the faithful should be filled with joy and gladness, which are among the fruits of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit Himself gives these fruits to our souls and to our communities. At the same time our life must be something that transcends the world, informed by theological thought and feeling, manifesting the experience of eternity in the place and time in which we live. We are obliged truly to be people of eternity. If we are not thinking theologically, and if our relationships are not relationships of essential contact with God, then our life will be prosaic and vain…
Elder Aemilianos of Simonopetra
The Mystical Marriage : The Spiritual Life According to Saint Maximos the Confessor
The Church is without beginning, without end, and eternal, just as the Triune God, her founder is without beginning, without end, and eternal. She is uncreated, just as God is uncreated. She existed before the ages, before the angels before the creation of the world – before the foundation of the world’ as the Apostle Paul says, ‘She is a divine institution and in her dwells the whole fullness of divinity. She an expression of the richly varied wisdom of God. She is the mystery of mysteries. She was concealed and revealed in the last of times. The Church remains unshaken because she is rooted in the wise providence of God.
Saint Porphyrios
Wounded by Love : The Life and Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios (p 87)
We shouldn’t blackmail God with our prayers. We shouldn’t ask God to release us from something, from an illness, for example, or to solve our problems, but we should ask for strength and support from Him to bear what we have to bear. Just as He knocks discretely at the door of our soul, so we should ask discretely for what we desire and if the Lord does not respond, we should cease to ask. When God does not give us something that we ask for insistently, then He has His reasons. God too, has His ‘secrets’. Since we believe in his good providence since we believe that He knows everything about our lives and that He always desires what is good, why should we not trust Him? Let us pray naturally and gently, without forcing ourself and without passion. We know that past, present and future are all known, “open and laid bare” before God. As Saint Paul says, “before Him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to His eyes.” We should not insist, such persistence does harm instead of good. We shouldn’t continue relentlessly in order to acquire what we want. Rather we should leave things to the will of God.
Because the more we pursue something, the more it runs away from us. So what is required is patience, faith and composure. And if we forget it, the Lord never forgets, and if it is for our good, He will give us what we require, when we require it.
Saint Porphyrios
Wounded by Love : The Life and Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios
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