“A donkey going round and round in a mill cannot step out of the circle to which it is tethered.” This is how St. Hesychios describes the state of awareness that is held prisoner to inner chatter. Although we may feel perfectly at home with going around and around and around in circles of inner chatter, he says that this actually blinds us to something deeper: “with our inner eye blinded, we cannot perceive holiness
Who is Unaware of the Stream? You would be a blasphemer if you were to say that every believer receives and possesses the Spirit without knowing or recognizing the fact. Yes, you would! You would be accusing Christ of lying when he said: ‘The water that I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ and again: ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ [John
The great penitential Canon of St. Andrew of Crete conceals within it great neptic wealth. Let’s bring to mind some of its precious gems: Instead of the visible Eve, I have the Eve of the mind: the passionate thought in my flesh, showing me what seems sweet; yet whenever I taste from it, I find it bitter (34). Thou hast heard O – my soul, be watchful! – how Ishmael was driven out as the
Give Yourself to Christ I was worried and he counseled me. “Didn’t I tell you on another occasion that when you completely open your heart to the Lord, without reservations, the Lord will enter it and make it incapable of sinning? Did you understand? You become incapable of evil. When the Lord loves us in the depths of our heart He brings meekness and kindness. Even if we wish to get angry, to do harm
The word solitude can be misleading. It suggests being alone by yourself in an isolated place. When we think about solitaries, our mind easily evokes images of monks or hermits who live in remote places secluded from the noise of the busy world. In fact, the words solitude and solitary are derived from the Latin word solus, which means alone, and during the ages many men and women who wanted to live a spiritual life
IT follows from this that prayer is your first and incomparably most important means of fighting. Learn to pray, and you vanquish all the evil powers that could imaginably assail you. Prayer is one wing, faith the other, that lifts us heavenward. With only one wing no one can fly: prayer without faith as meaningless as faith without prayer. But if your faith is very weak, you can profitably cry: Lord, give me faith! Such
By Saint John Maximovitch of San Francisco and Shanghai Watch, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. (I Cor. 16:13). The Apostle gives Christians this important counsel to bring their attention to the danger of this world, to summon them to frequent examination of their hearts, because without this one can easily bring to ruin the purity and ardor of one’s faith and unnoticeably cross over to the side of evil
By Katherine Johnson Tremendous power lies hidden in the smallness of a single word. Seemingly insignificant, a word holds within itself the power to encourage or to unleash the demon of despair. All of creation came into being by the Word. It seems God’s creative example holds within itself the greatest model for the human tongue. I suppose that’s why I find myself in a constant struggle with my words. As an Orthodox writer I
We could say that the Lord’s entire Sermon on the Mount (18) is a neptic homily where our Theanthropic Saviour pinpoints for us the root of the passions, but at the same time He plants the root of the true spiritual life. This is where the work of watchfulness is to be found: where the finest pulsations of the heart are, the beats which move and direct everything: thoughts, words, memories, feelings, actions, and deeds.
Whoever engages in inner warfare needs at every moment four things: humility, the greatest vigilance, the will to resist and prayer. It is a matter of dominating, with God’s help, the “Ethiopians of thought”, thrusting them out by the door of the heart, and crushing at once those who dash your little ones against the rocks (Psalm 137: 9). Humility is a prerequisite, for the proud man is once and for all shut out. Vigilance
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