We must begin with Thanksgiving for everything. The beginning of joy is to be content with your situation.
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Saint Ambrose of Optina
friends of Christ
A true friend is known in misfortune. he is our true friend and one who loves us who does not forsake us in misfortune.
Likewise, the true lover of Christ is he who abides with Christ in this world, and cleaves to Him in his heart, and uncomplainingly endures the Cross with Him, and desires to be with Him inseparably in the age to come.
Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk
the least cry of your soul
Let us have confidence in God, remembrance and love toward Him The Holy Mountain has shown us that the Grace of God is active everywhere Do you know what Saint John Damascene calls Divine Grace : a vault of God
There where you are sitting, where for years you have been expecting God and not found Him… He all of a sudden leaps and enters you, embraces you, kisses you and fills you with the breath of His nostrils, with His love, His being, His Trinity!!
It is as easy for God to leap and come into our lives as it is for anyone to jump.
just as He leaps on the peaks of Athos, as Ge gets into the boats, the caves, the crannies… everywhere comprehending the tears and the pains of Athonites, so He comprehends the least cry of your soul, of the souls of all of us.
Elder Aemilianos
of Simonopetra Monastery
the most divine element
Prayer is the most divine element that exists within man It transports us to God and is the means by which we are bound to Him Through prayer the communion of the Persons of the Trinity is made available to us and becomes the form of our own communication with God
Thus it is not a question of reciting this or that prayer, but rather that everything within us should become a prayer, that we should be praying in everything through all prayer
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elder Aemilianos of simonopetra monastery
the way of the spirit (p 224)
train your senses
Christians are the “real” realists. The Son of God by his Incarnation has demonstrated that the world is filled with symbols of God. These symbols that God has planted in the world testify not only to His existence, but also to the goodness of His Creation. By the example of His own life, Christ teaches us that through our senses we may commence our spiritual journey, and that He will receive us into Paradise in the full integrity of our humanity, body and soul united in communion with Him.
Vigen Guroian
the Fragrance of God
in but not of
We are not sanctified by ghe place in which we live, but by the way we live.
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Saint Iakovos
Precious Vessels of the Holy Spirit
The Lives and Counsels of Contemporary Elders of Greece
(page 95)
thanksgiving is
“I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.” – Henry David Thoreau
Father Alexander Schmemann of blessed memory says that thanksgiving and joy are the essential elements of a life in Christ and Saint John of Kronstadt says that the soul involuntarily longs to praise God. This blessed gift is already present within each us but requires tending and nurture.
To give thanksgiving is to bless and also to love, for when we give thanks we return and offer back to God what He has bestowed to us.
Gratitude is fertilizer to the soil of prayer germinating seeds of hope, patience in tribulation, and a tissue blessing tears.
Thanksgiving is Eukharistia and seeks not to be right but rather righteousness and it is yielding and forgiving; grounded in reality.
Thanksgiving is healing and the candlelight of vigil. It rejoices with those who rejoice and mourns with those who mourn (Romans 12:35). It seeks no glory but glorifies.
Offering thanks gives much peace to the present moment, and cultivates wonder at the fragrant act of a costly oil of spikenard, poured upon and anointing the feet of Jesus.
little lent
“In the earliest Christian tradition, the Cross that bore Christ is the Tree of Life that, long hidden within the earth, sprang up from the rock of Golgotha. Every tree that I plant and that I grow in my garden reminds me that the cross is my redemption, that the reward from my agony in the garden is the blossom of an everlasting rose.”
Vigen Gurioan
From the Cross Christ gave thanks.
Eukharistia.
He blessed it.
Life calls unto Life and Deep to deep leading us forward on our little Lent into Nativity.
Temperatures for many are dropping and we hope for beautiful snow and frost to blanket the earth. Give us a white Nativity! Yet do not be fooled by exterior seasons of weather – no matter how cold. For the crystalline silver-white cold of winter melts into spring before the interiorly warm hidden beating heart vigil candles of Orthodox Christian pilgrims preparing whole hearts yes, our whole beings to receive the cherished promised God-man-babe, in Whom we all live and move and have our being.
always choose kind
From kindness, people see things entirely differently.
Saint Ambrose
optina elders
gladsomelife.com 