Ecclesiastical Corner
Message from Archbishop Elpidophoros
Every time you enter this Church, and you participate in some manner of fellowship or education, there is a single purpose behind it. For you to be illumined from within by the Light of Christ. But we must be pure about our motives and sincere in our desires. As the Lord Himself solemnly warns: “The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is clear and pure, your whole body will glow with light; but if your eye is flawed and evil, then your whole body will be in the dark. And if the light that is in you is darkness, O what darkness there will be![†]
Wisdom of the Fathers
The sign that thou lovest God, is this, that thou lovest thy fellow; and if thou hatest thy fellow, thy hatred is towards God. For it is blasphemy if thou prayest before God while thou art wroth. For thy heart also convicts thee, that in vain thou multipliest words: thy conscience rightly judges that in thy prayers thou profitest nought.
St. Ephraim the Syrian
ON ADMONITION AND REPENTANCE.
'God is love', and he who seeks to establish its bounds is like a blind man attempting to count the grains of sand in the deeps of the sea. In quality, love is the likeness of God, as far as this is possible to mortals; in action, it is intoxication of the soul; in its properties, it is the source of faith, the abyss of long-suffering, the sea of humility. Love is real renunciation of every contrary thought, for it 'thinketh no evil' (I Cor. 13:5). Love, passionlessness and sonship differ only in name. As light, fire and flame are combined in one single action, so it is with these three.
Monks Callistus and Ignatius
Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart
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