St. Paisios of Mount Athos: On overcoming bad habits

 Geronda, can a bad habit be broken immediately?

First of all, man must realize that such a habit is harmful to him, and then he must be willing to struggle to break the habit. One must have a lot of willpower in order to be able to break a bad habit al at once. Just as the rope rubs against the edge of the well and over the years forms a small groove that holds the rope in place, every habit forms a groove in the heart, making them difficult to get rid of. This is why we must be very careful not to develop bad habits, because it takes a lot of humility and great willpower to overcome them. Father Tychon on the Holy Mountain used to say, "my child, a good habit equals virtue; a bad habit equals passions."

In any case, I have found that when a man while struggling, continues to make the same mistakes and does not change, the reason is usually egoism, self-love and self-interest. Humility and love are missing, thus blocking divine intervention. The person himself does not allow God to help him. If, for example, God helps him overcome a particular passion, such a person will selfishly take credit for it and assume that it was his own achievement, without any help from God.

+St. Paisios of Mount Athos, from Spiritual Counsels volume 3, Spiritual Struggle, part 3 chapter 1.

St. Polycarp of Smyrna: Faith is the Mother of us all

 Faith is the mother of us all; it is the well-spring of hope and it is preceded by love of God, of Christ and of neighbor. Whoever dwells in these virtues has fulfilled the precepts of Righteousness, for whoever has charity is far from all sin.

+St. Polycarp of Smyrna, from Epistle to the Philippians, in Ante Nicene Fathers volume 1.

St. Paisios of Mount Athos: If we are scandalized, the evil is within us.

 If we are scandalized, the evil is within us; not outside. When you feel scandalized, you should ask yourself, "How many do I scandalize? In God's name, shouldn't I tolerate my brother or sister? How does God tolerate me with all the things I do?" Think of Go, of Panaghia¹, the Angels, who look upon all the people of earth - as if standing on a balcony nd looking down on a plaza - they see some stealing, others fighting, still others sinning carnally, and so on. How does God tolerate them all? How is it that He can tolerate all the evil and all the sin on earth, and we cannot tolerate even one brother or sister?

+St. Paisios of Mount Athos, from Spiritual Counsels II Spiritual Awakening, Chapter 3, To the Pure All Things are Pure.
¹Literaly "all holy", a title for the Mother of God.

St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite: Acquisition and Loss of Grace in Baptism

 No sooner are we baptized than the soul shines brighter than the sun, being purified by the Holy Spirit. And not only to we see the glory of God but we also receive from it a certain splendor just as a piece of silver in the rays of the sun reflects those very rays which it receives. But what a pity! It is only right to sigh here bitterly! For this glory which is ineffable and awesome remains within us only one or two days.¹ For we extinguish it, being led astray by the winter of worldly cares, the dense clouds of which block out its rays. For the care pertaining to living are indeed a heavy winter and even more sullen than winter.

+St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite, from A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, Chapter 1, The Attributes of the Mind and the Body
¹At the time this was written, most people were still being baptized as adults.

Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom): Our state before God.

 In the prayer which we recite, or not, after meals, We say to God that we thank him for all his earthly gifts, and ask him to grant us also the gifts of the Kingdom. Doesn’t it mean that, at that moment, we realize that everything we have, our very being, our life, is of God, and yet that we treat it as part of a created material world, a world that, in our mind, in our imagination, in our illusion, we see as something God has made and then left adrift? And then we ask God: ‘Make it into thy Kingdom, all that is my life, all that is the world around me, make it, O Lord, into thy Kingdom.’

Is that not what we should do all the time, transform everything of this created and fallen world into God’s realm? But it isn’t what we do. We take what God makes, what God gives, and we take it away like the Prodigal Son, until one day we feel hungry. Why? Because these gifts, which we received, were stolen as it were from God when we snatched them from him by saying to him: ‘Die now, because I can’t Wait until you are dead to enjoy the fruits of your Work, of your sacrifice, of your love. Die now.’

We go away and we spend them. But what happens? As long as we are rich with what God gave us, we are surrounded with people who want to take from us what we possess, exactly on the same terms as we have behaved to God. As long as we are in possession of things, others are around us like parasites. The moment when We have nothing else to give, when we have spent What God has given us and are spent ourselves, deprived of everything, we are of no interest to people and they turn away from us. Is this the moment for which we must wait in order to realize what we have done? Alas, very often it is the

moment. It is a moment when we realize that we have condemned God to death, that he has actually died on the cross for us, and that we have accepted his sacrifice in order to be redeemed.

We are not, though, redeemed mechanically by the death of Christ. We are only redeemed if we integrate ourselves into his death and eternal life. We have rejected and lost what God gave us, perhaps not completely, because otherwise we could not even think of God and repent, but we have rejected so much, and, now, what can we do? We can remember that there was a time when we lived in the Father’s house, when there was love, when there was not this desperate loneliness of rejection. And we can start on our way back.

But we do not only sin against God in this direct way of renouncing him and taking his gifts. We sin against him also by discarding and despising his gifts, as when, from time to time, people say, ‘I wish I could die, because life is too heavy.' We also sin against God through the way in which we behave towards people and treat them. God has loved every one of us into existence, into life, and he has died so that every one of us can recapture the life We have discarded and lost. Every one is loved, and the measure of divine love is the death of Christ upon the cross, his descent into hell, to join for ever those who have been rejected. This is God’s measure of love of our neighbor. How do we treat our neighbor? Do we treat him as someone whom God has put in our charge? Do we treat him as someone for whom we care, who matters to us, who has been put in our path for us to do for him all, all we can

- or do we, on the contrary, treat him with cruelty, coldness and indifference?

Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom), from Coming Closer to Christ, Chapter 2, Confession as Encounter with God.

St. Peter the Egyptian: A servant of passion cannot be called a servant of God

 For as long as one is dominated by a passion, he cannot be called a servant of God, because he is a slave of the passion he serves, and he cannot, therefore, teach others how to free themselves from it.

+St. Peter the Egyptian, from The Synaxarion, Volume 3, in his entry for January 27

St. Mark the Ascetic: Enduring Sorrows which are the result of Sins

 If you wish to bring to God a blameless confession, then do not call to mind the images of previous sins, but courageously endure all the sorrows that come upon you as a result of these sins. Sorrows come as retribution for previous sins, the heaviness of each retribution depending on the heaviness of the sin. He who is wise and knows the truth confesses to God not by calling to mind his committed sins, but by enduring the sorrows that come as a result of those sins. If he rejects suffering and dishonor, he will not bring repentance even if he does other good deeds, for vanity and lack of suffering serve sin, even when the ascetic does good deeds.

+St. Mark the Ascetic, from On Those Who Think they are made Righteous by Works, in The Philokalia Volume 1, #193, 197,150-156

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

Abbess Thaisia: When we are treated unkindly

 You write: "I notice that some of the sisters treat me unkindly, and at this I become disturbed."  Many "unskilled" souls, those not "made perfect in the love of Christ" (cf 1 John 4:18) suffer from this infirmity.... As fire sometimes kindles into a mighty blaze from a little spark which was not extinguished in time, so also from a small spark of distrust and unkindness a whole flame of enmity breaks out, devouring many years of labor in virtue. If in fact a sister, through her weakness, shows you negligible kindness, then before blaming her for this look in your own heart, examine your own attitude toward her. Perhaps an attentive and impartial self-examination will prove to you that you yourself gave cause for this, and therefore are guilty in all. Strive to preserve in your heart absolute peace towards everyone, according to the word of the Apostle: "If it be possible, as much as lies in you, live peaceably with all men" (Rom 12:18). This inner peace of your own soul serves as the best pledge or security that others will have peace and love towards you; and there is nothing higher or more honorable than love, as also the Apostle affirms, calling love "the fulfillment of (all) law" (Rom 13:8) and "the bond of perfectness" (Col 3:14), in the presence of which "the peace of God settles in our hearts" (cf. Philip 4:7).

+Abbess Thaisia, from Letters to a Beginner On Giving One's Life to God, Letter #5 On Mutual Love.

St. Peter of Damascus: That one should not despair

 Even if you are not what you should be, you should not despair. It is bad enough that you have sinned; why in addition do you wrong God by regarding Him in your ignorance to be powerless? Is He, who for your sake created the great universe that you behold, incapable of saving your soul? And if you say that this fact, as well as His incarnation, only makes your condemnation worse, then repent; and He will receive your repentance as He accepted that of the prodigal son (cf Luke 15:20) and the prostitute (cf Luke 7:37-50). But if repentance is too much for you, and you sin out of habit even when you do not want to, show humility like the publican (cf Luke 18:13): this is enough to ensure your salvation. For he who sins without repenting, yet does not despair, must of necessity regard himself as the lowest of creatures, and will not dare to judge or censure anyone. Rather, he will marvel at God's compassion, and will be full of gratitude towards his Benefactor, and so may receive many other blessings as well. Even if he subject to the devil in that he sins, yet from fear of God he disobeys the enemy when the latter tries to make him despair. Because of this he has his portion with God, for he is grateful, gives thanks and is patient, fears God, does not judge so that he may not be judged. All these are crucial qualities. It is as St. John Chrysostom says about Gehenna: it is almost of greater benefit to us than the kingdom of heaven, since because of it many may enter the kingdom of heaven, while few enter for the sake of the kingdom itself; and if they do enter it, it is by virtue of God's compassion. Gehenna pursues us with fear, the kingdom embraces us with love, and through them both we are saved by God's grace.

+St. Peter of Damascus, from The Philokalia, Volume 3

Origen: That sins should be revealed

 "That the thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed"(Luke 2:35). There were evil thoughts in men, and they were revealed for this reason, that being brought into the open they might be destroyed, slain and put to death, and case to be, and that He who died for us might kill them. For while these thoughts were hidden and not brought into the open they could not be utterly done to death. Hence if we have sinned we also ought to say, "I have made my sins known to Thee, and I have not hidden my wickedness. I have said I will declare my unrighteousness to the Lord against myself." For if we do this and reveal our sins not only to God but also to those who can heal our wounds and sins, our wickedness will be wiped out by Him who says, "I will wipe out your wickedness like a cloud."
+Origen, from Homily on Luke 17, in The Early Christian Fathers

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.

Fr. Alexander Schemann: Hunger for God

The "original" sin is not primarily that man has "disobeyed" God; the sin is that he ceased to be hungry for Him and for Him alone, ceased to see his whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God. The sin was not that man neglected his religious duties. The sin was that he thought of God in terms of religion, that is, opposing him to life. The only real fall of man is his non-eucharistic life in a non-eucharistic world. The fall is not that he preferred world to God, distorted the balance between the spiritual and material, but that he made the world material whereas he was to have transformed it into "life in God", filled it with meaning and spirit.
+Fr. Alexander Schemann, from For the Life of the World, chapter 1, #4.

Fr. John Chryssavgis: Assuming blame for your own sins

Assuming the blame for your own sins is by no means identical to avoiding confrontation with others. It means refusing to be victimized. It implies freedom and control over one's life. If you are not in control of what you do, then someone else is in control of your life and you are dis-empowered from any action at all. The first step in personal change can only come from within. Assuming responsibility for your life, and doing something about it, is the beginning of a truly creative and meaningful life. In any case, these desert dwellers knew very well that, even if we have not directly committed a particular wrong, nevertheless our actions - and especially our attitudes - may in fact contribute to the general conditions that allow particular wrongs to occur. We all influence one another's spiritual choices. We are all involved in one another's spiritual growth.
+Fr. John Chryssavgis, In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Chapter 5: The Struggle against Demons

St. Anthimus the Georgian: Motivation for sin

Man sins in three ways: form weakness, from ignorance, and from an evil will. Sin committed from weakness is against God the Father, since the Father is called Almighty. Sin committed from ignorance is against the Son, since the Son of God is called Wisdom. Sin committed from an evil will is against the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit is called Good.

The Lord will more easily forgive a man who sins from weakness or from ignorance, if he will repent. For David says, "The sins of my youth and my ignorance, O Lord, remember not" (. But whoever sins from an evil will against the Holy Spirit will not easily be forgiven by God. For the Lord says:

+St. Anthimus the Georgian, Works and Teachings, #49-50, in Romanian Patericon Volume 1, by Archimandrite Ioanichie B

How difficult is our approach to God, especially in the case of some of us, when everything - even nature, heredity, and the entire composition of man - builds up a wall between him and God.
The kind of man we most often encounter presents a combination of three traits: (1) pride - faith in his own strength, delight in his own creation; (2) a passionate love of earthly life; and (3) the absence of any sense of sin. How can such men approach God? As they now are, they are hopelessly isolated from God; they do not even feel the need of Him. And this is precisely the kind of personality that is developed in the conditions of modern life, through education, literature and so on. The idea of God is erased from the soul What catastrophes are required, before such a man can be reborn!
+Father Alexander Elchaninov, from The Diary of a Russian Priest, Fragments of a Diary.

St. Joseph the Hesychast: Who has conquered the devil?

Who has conquered the devil? He who knows his own weaknesses, passions, and shortcomings. Whoever is afraid of knowing himself remains far from knowledge, and he doesn't love anything else except seeing faults in others and judging them. He doesn't see gifts in other people, but only shortcomings. And he doesn't see his own shortcomings, but only his gifts. This is truly the sickness that plagues us men of the eighth millenium (Ps 24:18, LXX): we fail to recognize one another's gifts.

+ St. Joseph the Hesychast from Monastic Wisdom, The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast.