only one thing is needed
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o ye peoples
O ye peoples of the earth, fashioned by God, know your Creator and His love for us!
Know the love of Christ, and live in peace and thereby rejoice in the Lord,
Who in His mercy waits for all men to come unto Him.
Saint Silouan
ye shall find rest
Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me; for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and my burden is light” Matt 11:29-30
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“The spirit as a force which has come from God, knows God, seeks God and in Him alone finds rest”
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saint theophan the recluse
love is made known through the Holy Spirit
“Love is made known through the Holy Spirit.” – Elder Sophrony
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“Our love is a series of concentric circles like those caused by a stone dropped into the center of a pond. The waves begin at the point of impact and they spread out until eventually they have covered the whole pond.
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Our love is like that.
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It begins in our own life, it spreads to our immediate circle, our family, and then includes an ever increasing number of friends and eventually all men, for our love should be a perfect imitation of God’s love which is all embracing, which excludes no one.”
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Father Vladimir Borichevsky
Fast Action : A Lenten Theme
lasting tranquility
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The human soul can never be satisfied with material things; we have an infinite desiring capacity, in the face of which nothing finite can ever satisfy us…
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We live in a time of rapid change, when every innovation is presented to us as progress, but before real change, real progress can take place, something must first change within us. And for this to happen, we must become completely estranged to all things earthly and human, to all human logic, to all human ways of thinking and to every so-called material good. We must be indifferent in the face of all things.
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And only then, when we have become strangers to all, can God become all things to us, as if there existed nothing else in the world for us except God.
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It is this alone than can grant us true and lasting tranquility.
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Elder Aemilianos of Simonopetra
on what is prayer
“to pray is to stand before God
with the mind in the heart and to go on standing
before Him day and night until the end of life”
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Saint Theophan the Recluse
everything is simple
“Everything is simple. Begin gradually and you will be able to do everything. Even if you are not able to do everything as you would like. Do what you are able to do. The Lord is not strict about minor details. He values diligence and purpose.”
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Saint Theophan the Recluse
heart of humus
“The sowing, germination and development of the Christian life differs in essence from the sowing, germination and development of the natural life. The difference is the result of the special character of the natural life and its relationship to our human nature. A man is not born a Christian, but becomes such after birth.
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The seed of Christ falls on a heart that is already beating.
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Since the natural man is fallen, he is opposed to the demands of Christianity. In a plant, however, the beginning of life is the stirring sprout in the seed, an awakening of dormant powers.
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The beginning of a true Christian life in man is a kind of re-creation and rebirth, an endowment of new powers and of new life.”
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Saint Theophan the Recluse
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eternal joy
God is the one who gives us joy, and we should ascribe all our joy to Him. But what about those times when my life is not joyful? In a word, I am miserable. We should pity the man who does not feel this joy and this celebration. He loves only the earth. He is in love with only rubbish and dung. He gives God his debris, and when our heart produces only rubbish, it receives very much the same in return from God.
The soul that thirsts for God, on the other hand, is continually bathed in Divine Light. The face of such a person becomes divinely luminous. You see him and you ask yourself, could this man be Christ?
Thus the Christian becomes a strange spectacle, a Christ-bearer, a God-bearer, and a Spirit bearer. He or she reveals the unsurpassable beauty of Christ. And when Christ suddenly appears, resplendent in all His beauty, He fills one with joy, gladness and sweetness… Something strange takes place within us, something which cannot be grasped by human thought And how could it be otherwise? For our “desire for God transcends our desire for the world, and thus it cannot be satisfied by anything in the world”.
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Elder Aemilianos of Simonopetra Monastery
gladness of heart
gladsomelife.com 