Love the Word of God ( Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk )

 

Love the Word of God, that is the Scriptures, handed down to us by the prophets and apostles, as God Himself. For the word of God is the word of God's mouth. If you love God, then without fail you will love the word of God also. For the word of God is God's epistle or letter to us unworthy ones, and is His supreme gift to us for the sake of our salvation. If you love the Sender, then also love the letter which is sent from Him to you. For the word of God is given by God to me, to you, and to everyone, so that everyone who desires to be saved may receive salvation through it.

You love it when an earthly king writes you a letter, and you read it with love and joy. How much more must we read the letter of the Heavenly King with love and joy.

The word of God was not given to you so that it should lay written only on paper, but so that we may use it spiritually, that we may be enlightened and guided in the true way and salvation, that our morals may be corrected, and that we may live according to its rule in this world, and that we may please God. If you wish, therefore, to be a true Christian, then without fail you must take care to live by its rule. For the word of God is a heavenly seed. It must, then, yield fruit in us after its kind, that is a holy and heavenly life, otherwise it will accuse us on the day of the fearful Judgement of Christ. Live, therefore, as the word of God teaches, and then correct yourself. Do not pry idly into the mysteries.

Of the mystery of the All-Holy Trinity, the Most-Holy Eucharist, and other such things that are not revealed to us in the holy word of God, do not inquire idly, lest you fall into the snare of the devil and be tangled in it, and not be able to escape from thence, and so perish. For that which requires faith alone transcends our reasoning, and it is very dangerous to pry into these things. Keep yourself, then, from prying into things which are above you. Believe in all things as the Holy Scriptures teach, and as the Holy Church believes and establishes in accordance with it.


Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk

How do you know whether you are living according to the will of God? ( Saint Silouan the Athonite )

How do you know whether you are living according to the will of God?

Here is a sign: if you long for some thing, then you have not submitted to the will of God, even though you may think that you live according to His will. Whoever lives according to the will of God does not concern himself with anything. And if he needs some thing, then he submits himself and that thing to God; and if he does not receive it, then he remains content as though he had received it. 

The soul which has submitted to the will of God, fears nothing: neither storm nor bandits; nothing. And whatever should happen, it says, "It is God’s will." If the body is ill, the soul thinks, "Then I am in need of this illness, otherwise God would not have given it to me." And so the body and the soul remain at peace.

Saint Silouan the Athonite

Repent my brother, Repent ! ( St. John Maximovitch )

 When we are immersed in sins, and our mind is occupied solely with worldly cares, we do not notice the state of our soul. We are indifferent to who we are inwardly, and we persist along a false path without being aware of it.

But then a ray of God's Light penetrates our soul. And what filth we see in ourselves! How much untruth, how much falsehood! How hideous many of our actions prove to be, which we fancied to be so wonderful. And it becomes clear to us which is the true path.

If we then recognize our spiritual nothingness, our sinfulness, and earnestly desire our amendment - we are near to salvation. From the depths of our soul we shall cry out to God: "Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy according to Thy mercy!" "Forgive me and save me!" "Grant me to see my own faults and not to judge my brother!"

St.John Maximovitch

Saint Catherine and the Smart Impious

What are we to make of Saint Catherine? We know really very little about her. Even her name is a mystery. According to some, she was originally called Damiani (by a happy coincidence the present Archbishop of Sinai and Abbot of the Monastery of Saint Katherine is called Damianos), although Rufinus claims that she was called Dorothea. At some stage, she became known as Katherine, but what this means is anyone’s guess. It has been derived from the Greek Hecate, or from καθαρός (katharos), meaning “pure” (as well as from Armenian and Arabic).


Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai, 13th Century

This confusion is central to one part of our argument. Her name in Greek is Αἰκατερίνα, so it is impossible that it derives from Hecate. The Greek system of diacritics was more than likely introduced in Alexandria (where Saint Katherine was born) and has “breathings” or signs of aspiration. To put it simply, there is no ‘H’ in Aikaterina (though there is in Hypatia, of whom more later). Likewise, it cannot derive from “katharos”. Greeks are perfectly capable of saying ‘th’, so the name would have ‘th’ rather than ‘t’ in the middle (in Greek). Apart from this, katharina would make absolutely no sense grammatically. If it means “pure”, the name would be “Kathari”; if it means “purified” it would be “Kekatharmeni”. The point I would like to make here is that it is generally agreed that the young girl’s name was Aikaterina and that speculating and inventing implausible etymologies serves no purpose. The same is true of her Life.

The traditional narrative states that Katherine was the beautiful daughter of the pagan Costus (or Cestus) and Sabinella, who governed Alexandria. She was highly intelligent and diligently studied the arts and sciences, especially philosophy. Having decided to remain a virgin, she announced that she would only marry someone who surpassed her in beauty, intelligence, wealth, and dignity, perhaps an early foreshadowing of her eventual discovery of Christ: “His beauty was more radiant than the shining of the sun, His wisdom governed all creation, His riches were spread throughout all the world”. Raised a pagan (though her mother may have been a secret Christian), she became an ardent Christian in her teenage years, having received a vision in which the the Mother of God pledged her to Christ in mystical marriage.

As a young adult, about 18 years old according to what sources we have, she upbraided the Roman Emperor Maxentius (later defeated by Saint Constantine at the battle of the Milvian Bridge) who happened to be in Alexandria at the time of a pagan feast, attempting to convince him of his error in persecuting Christians. The emperor seems to have been quite taken with her: Eusebius, writing very shortly after the events took place, says that Maxentius wanted to take the beautiful young girl into his palace as a concubine, but she refused.

The emperor then arranged for a number of the best pagan philosophers and orators in the city to argue with her, hoping that they would refute her pro-Christian arguments, but Katherine won the debate. Several of her adversaries, conquered by her eloquence, declared themselves Christians and were at once put to death. An interesting footnote here is that in the hymn to Saint Katherine in the Orthodox Church, her opponents are described as “smart”. In Modern Greek and British English this means well-dressed; in Byzantine Greek and American English it means “clever”.

Maxentius went off to inspect his troops, having first ordered that Katherine be imprisoned. When he returned, he was greatly displeased to find that some of his household had been influenced by her and had converted to Christianity. Katherine was sentenced to be tortured on a spiked wheel, which did not kill her, and she was then beheaded, in the year 305.

None of this seems out of place. We know that Maxentius was, indeed, a co-emperor at that time, that he had firm support in North Africa (his severed head was sent there after his defeat to convince his supporters that he really was dead) and that Christians were being persecuted then: Saint Dimitrios was martyred in Thessaloniki in the same year and Saint George two years earlier in Nicomedia, so the persecution was very widespread. We also know that Alexandria was a centre of learning and that Hypatia, a woman of great intellectual gifts, was killed there by a Christian mob in 415 AD. Or do we?

The actual evidence of the existence of Hypatia is no more compelling than that for Saint Katherine, yet she is accorded something akin to cult status today, with a film being made about her (Agora, starring Rachel Weisz) while Saint Katherine is “air-brushed” out of the picture. In The Penguin Book of Saints, Donald Attwater declares that the “legend” of Saint Katherine is “the most preposterous of its kind”. Well, of course it is if you read the barnacles that adhered to it over the centuries, but they do not invalidate the basic truth.

In the same vein, Christine Walsh says in her book The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Early Medieval Europe (Ashgate 2007) that: “As we have seen [!], the cult of St. Katherine of Alexandria probably originated in oral traditions from the 4th-century Diocletianic Persecutions of Christians in Alexandria. There is no evidence that Katherine herself was a historical figure and she may well have been a composite drawn from memories of women persecuted for their faith. Many aspects of her Passio are clearly legendary and conform to well-known hagiographical topoi”. What on earth does this mean?

Of course the cult of Saint Katherine originated in oral tradition. Nobody was there with a mobile phone to take a video. “And she may well have been a composite”; and she may not. “Many aspects of her Passio are clearly legendary and conform to well-known hagiographical topoi”. Does this mean that many martyrs were tortured and died for the faith? No argument with that. Read the life of Elder Païsios, a saintly figure of our own times. It could easily be rendered in a way that makes it sound “hagiographical” (“He was born to pious parents and baptized by Saint Arsenios, who foresaw his future as a monk”), but it is still true.

Another aspect worth recalling is that people express themselves differently in different ages. There is a version of the martyrdom which states that when Saint Katherine was stretched on the wheel with spikes, it was not blood which flowed but milk. It may be that some innocent- in the best sense of the word- people believed this, but most people at the time would have understood it as meaning that she was untainted. This may seem far-fetched, but in a thousand years hence, “scholars” may well be amazed that people in 2013 could talk about “the milk of human kindness”. It might also be mentioned that another modern icon, Joan of Arc, mentions Saint Katherine as having appeared to her to lend her strength, and this was a thousand years and more after the martyrdom.

In his article “The Dragon that Swallowed Saint George”, Whittall Perry says: “The ancient church authorities may have been ‘primitive’ by our lights, but they were not imbeciles”. The ancient Church authorities were scrupulous in weeding out spurious information that would injure the faith. For some reason, North Africa seems to have been a hotbed of heresy and schism. Yet the story of a young woman who dared to oppose an emperor and his minions with her learning, strength of character and faith, and triumph over them in martyrdom, was accepted as true. May her prayers be with us.

Dismissal Hymn:

Let us praise the renowned bride of Christ, Katherine the divine, protectress of Sinai, our aid and assistance. For she brilliantly silenced the clever impious by the sword of the Spirit, and now, crowned as a martyr, petitions for great mercy for all. 

 

http://pemptousia.com/2014/11/saint-katherine-and-the-smart-impious/

My heart is hard like a stone….. ( St. Paisios )

    - Elder, when I feel my heart become hard like  a stone, what should I do?

- Your problem is not a hard heart but a mind-driven heart. Your entire heart has been taken over by your mind and is now at its service. But there is still a chance for your heart to go back. Each day you must read prayers to the Theotokos. If you want your heart to get back in shape, that’s the best medicine. You do have a heart, but it has been clouded by “logic”…. Things are different in the spiritual life. What is needed is simplicity. Act with simplicity and trust in God.

- How can I become simple, Elder? – I shall have to open your head and put an old-fashioned mind in it!
You need to enter the simple world of the Saints, and get to know the spiritual science which lifts and refreshes the soul, and gets rid of headaches. “Logic” will make us suffer. For example, I say to myself, ‘This must be done in this specific manner,’ and so I go ahead and do it because it has to be done. I don’t do it with my heart but because the mind dictates it. Logic and courtesy may tell me that ‘I must surrender my seat,’ but my heart will not. Think of the difference when my heart is moved and I surrender my seat out of love. I feel such joy!

- Elder, I don’t have a heart.

- You do have a heart, but as soon as it tries to act, your mind puts a muzzle on it. You must try to acquire the logic of the heart, faith and love.

- How can I achieve this? – The first step: go down town to Thessaloniki and March barefoot in protest, so that people will say that you went mad; this way you will get rid of your mind!!! Blessed soul! You approach everything with mathematical exactness. What are you, an astronomer? If you stop thinking “logically”, you will be able to start working spiritually on yourself.

“The Holy Fathers saw everything with the spiritual, the divine eye. Patristic tests were written in the spirit of God and it was in the spirit of God that the Holy Fathers gave their interpretations. Today this spirit is lacking and Patristic texts are hard to understand. People see everything with secular eyes and cannot see beyond that; they do not have the breadth of spirit that results form faith and love.”

St. Paisios

Christians should spend the eves of feast days in prayer... ( St. John Maximovitch )

The holy canons dictate that Christians should spend the eves of feast days in prayer and with reverence in preparation for participation or attendance at the Divine Liturgy.

 

 If all Orthodox Christians are called to this, then this pertains all the more to those who take an active part in the church services itself. Their participation in diversions on the eve of a feast day is especially sinful. 

 

In view of the above, those who attend a dance or similar form of entertainment and diversion may not participate in the choir the next day, may not serve in the altar, enter the altar or stand on the cliros.

St. John Maximovitch

The priest is not the representative of God on earth, he is the servant of God!

During his traditional pilgrimage to Mount Athos on his birthday, Metropolitan Kyiv Onuphre met the abbott of Dochiariou, Archimandrite Gregory (Zoumis), in his monastery. He is one of the most respected Athonite fathers, known largely beyond Mount Athos. 

 

Archimandrite Gregory said, "We pastors are poor and the people are obedient! Thank you [i.e. Metropolitan Onuphre] because, by your simplicity, your humble clothes, you show the way of God. We, those who wear the cassock, must be attentive. The cassock is a cross. It is the standard of Christ. Christ left no other standard, except the cassock. Love it, monks, priests and bishops! It's not fair that the bishop wears cufflinks, while people are poor, they save on bread. And never those who wear the cassock believe that they are the representatives of God on the earth! The pope believed he was the representative of God on earth - and the West drowned. 

 

Many times I have heard the priests say, "I am the representative of God on earth! You are not the representative, but the servant of God here on earth. Each time, when you ordain priests, say: from this day on, you are not the representative of God on earth, but His servant. 

 

How horrible, when priests consider themselves the representatives of God on earth! Would I be a representative of God on earth? My face, my presence, do they agree with that? Of course not ! I am a servant, a bad servant, a bad worker of His vineyard. 

 

The old Amphiloque of Patmos said: "Every night, think: today, I may have scandalized someone! Perhaps, my life has made someone leave the Church! That's the control we have to do all of us wearing the cassock. Let us spiritually fight as confessors and not as holders of power.

It is one thing to belief that God exists and another to know Him. ( St. Silouan the Athonite )

No matter how much we may study, it is not possible to come to know God unless we live according to His commandments, for God is not know by science, but by the Holy Spirit. 

Many philosophers and learned men came to the belief that God exists, but they did not know God. It is one thing to belief that God exists and another to know Him. 

If someone has come to know God by the Holy Spirit, his soul will burn with love for God day and night, and his soul cannot be bound to any earthly thing. 

St. Silouan the Athonite

A Prayer to Archangel Michael

O Lord God, Great and Eternal King! Send, O Lord, Thy Archangel Michael to help Thy servant (name), and to deliver me from all my enemies, visible and invisible.
O Archangel Michael, angel of the Lord and vanquisher of demons! Suppress all my combatants, make them meek as sheep, and disperse them like dust before the wind.


O great Michael, Archangel of the Lord, six-winged high prince, leader of the heavenly host, the Cherubim and the Seraphim! O kind Archangel Michael, be my helper in all offenses, sorrows and woes, in the desert, at the crossroads, be a safe haven on rivers and seas. Deliver me, O great Archangel Michael, from all the temptations of the demons, when they hear me, thy sinful servant (name), praying to thee, and calling upon thee, and entreating thy holy name: hasten to assist me and heed my prayer.

O great Archangel Michael! Vanquish all my opponents by the power of the Holy and Life-giving Heavenly Cross of the Lord, by the prayers of the Most-holy Theotokos and the holy apostles, the holy prophet of God Elias, Saint Nicholas the wonder worker, Saint Andrew the fool-for-Christ, the holy great martyrs Nikitas and Eustace, the venerable fathers and holy hierarchs, martyrs, and all the heavenly host. Amen.

Whosoever reads this ancient prayer – on that day will he be touched neither by the devil, nor by any evil man, nor will any temptation seduce his heart. If he should pass from this life – hell will not take in his soul.

We call ourselves Orthodox Christians, but we don’t live Orthodox lives.. ( St. Paisios )

“Give thanks to God for everything. Try to be manly. Pull yourself together a bit. Do you know what Christians are suffering in other countries? There are such difficulties in Russia! But here many exhibit indifference. There’s not enough disposition to kindness, love of devotion. You see, if we don’t begin to make war against evil, to expose those who tempt believers, then the evil will grow larger. If we throw aside fear then the faithful will be emboldened a bit. And those who wage war against the Church will have a harder time. 

In the past our nation lived spiritually, so God blessed her, and the saints helped us in miraculous fashion. And we were victorious against our enemies, who always outnumbered us. Today we continue to call ourselves Orthodox Christians, but we don’t live Orthodox lives.”

St. Paisios