Showing posts with label -Archimandrite Seraphim (Aleksiev). Show all posts
Showing posts with label -Archimandrite Seraphim (Aleksiev). Show all posts

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Archimandrite Seraphim (Aleksiev): On those who think they have no great sins


 Those who think that they do not have any great sins are actually blind. They must pray to God to enable them to perceive their sins and to save themselves from the extremely fatal spiritual delusion that they do not have any particular sins. Even if their sins are as small as specks of dust, if they are not cleaned with constant Confession, they pile up and dirty the room of the heart so that the high heavenly Guest cannot enter there.
The small sins are often more dangerous than the greatest crimes, because the latter weigh heavily on the conscience and insist on being atoned for, confessed, settled, erased, while the small sins do not weigh too much on the soul, but they have that perilous property of making it insensitive to the grace of God and indifferent to salvation. Fewer people have perished from ferocious wild beasts than have from small microbes, invisible to the naked eye. By being considered insignificant, the small sins are usually passed by without any attention. They are easily forgotten, but they create in man the most terrible habit - the habit of sinning, of dulling his moral consciousness.
+Archimandrite Seraphim (Aleksiev), from The Forgotten Medicine, The Mystery of Repentance, Chapter 4, Objections to Confession

Sunday, August 30, 2020

Archimandrite Seraphim (Aleksiev): Sin is the greatest evil

It is in vain that some unenlightened people seek the greatest evil for man somewhere else, rather than in sin. Some consider disease to be the greatest evil, other - poverty, and others - death. But neither disease, nor poverty, nor death, nor any other earthly disaster can be such a great evil for us as sin is. These earthly misfortunes do not separate us from God is we are seeking Him sincerely, but on the contrary, they bring us closer to Him....
But sin is the most wretched poverty of the heart - poverty blocking the treasure of grace. Sin is a deadly sickness of the soul, a sickness which deprives us both of the joys of earth and the joys of heaven. Sin is a terrible and most lamentable spiritual death which separates us eternally from the joy of the heavenly inhabitants in paradise and buries us in the darkness of hell.
+Archimandrite Seraphim (Aleksiev), from The Forgotten Medicine, The Mystery of Repentance.