Remember ...

The Apostolic reading for today is from St. Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians 8:7-15:


Brothers and sisters, as you excel in everything in faith, in utterance, in knowledge, in all earnestness, and in your love for us, see that you excel in this ... gracious work also.

I say this not as a command, but to prove by the earnestness of others that your love also is genuine. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. And in this matter I give my advice: it is best for you now to complete what a year ago you began not only to do but to desire, so that your readiness in desiring it may be matched by your completing it out of what you have. For if the readiness is there, it is acceptable according to what a man has, not according to what he has not. I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of equality your abundance at the present time should supply their want, so that their abundance may supply your want, that there may be equality. As it is written,
 
"He who gathered much has nothing over, and he who gathered little had no lack."

The torn cloak ...

One day a soldier asked an elder whether God grants pardon to sinners. The elder answered, "Tell me, my good friend, if your cloak is torn , do you throw it away?" The soldier replied, "No, I mend it and continue to use it." The elder concluded, "If you take good care of your cloak, will not God be merciful to his own image?"

- Sayings of the Desert Fathers (In T. Merton, p. 113)

Christ rejoices to see such a couple

How sweet the yoke that joins two of the faithful 

in the same hope, the same law, the same service!

Both are brethren in the service of the same Lord.

They are truly two in one and the same flesh.

And where the flesh is one, the spirit is one.

Together they pray ... 

instructing, encouraging and supporting each other in turn.

They are equal in the Church of God, 

equal at God's banquet, 

they share equally troubles, persecutions and consolations.

They hide nothing from each other,

they never avoid each other's company, 

they never cause each other pain.

Christ rejoices to see such a couple 

and He gives them His peace.

Where they are, there He is himself.

-- TERTULLION To his Wife.

Όλα τα' χω μα δεν έχω πια το ταίρι μου

Sad heart ... open your eyes!

See! 

The Lord is our mirror:

open your eyes,

look into it,

learn what your faces are like!

The difficult love ... agony

Spiritual progress has no other test or expression than our ability to love:

• Unselfish;
• Founded on respect;
• a service;
• Disinterested affection that does not ask to be paid in return.

but most of all

• a sympathy, an empathy, that takes us out of ourselves.

This empathy enabling us to "feel with" the other person and indeed to feel him or her.

Love gives us the ability to discover in the other person an inward nature as mysterious and deep as our own, but different and willed to be so by God.

That love which is agape discovers that each individual, especially that one who is suffering, is a sacrament of Christ, "another Christ", as St John Chrysostom says.

When perfect love has driven out fear, or fear has been transformed into love, then everything that has been saved will be a unity growing together through the one and only Fullness, and everyone will be, in one another, a unity in the perfect Dove, the Holy Spirit. - St Gregory of Nyssa.

The person without compassion is an obstacle to knowing God. 

Brother, I recommend this to you: "Let the weight of compassion in you weigh the scales down until you feel in your heart the same compassion that God has for the world." - Isaac of Nineveh

For compassion comes in the end to be united with the same compassion that God feels for the world, His 'pathos'.

Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world.

"This is the sign by which to recognise those who have arrived at perfection: even if they were to throw themselves into the fire ten times a day for the sake of others, they would not be satisfied."

The Saints are medicine ...

THE SAINT is a medicine because he is an antidote.

Indeed that is why the saint... is often a martyr;

he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote.

He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity

by exaggerating whatever the world neglects,

which is by no means always the same in every age.

Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct;
and he is not what the people want,

but rather what the people need.

This is surely the very much mistaken meaning

of those words to the first saints,

“Ye are the salt of the earth”.


~GKC: ‘St. Thomas Aquinas,’ I.

The heart of a mother (poem in Greek)

Ένα παιδί, μοναχοπαίδι αγόρι,
αγάπησε μιας μάγισσας την κόρη.
-Δεν αγαπώ εγώ, του λέει, παιδία,
μ’ αν θέλεις να σου δώσω το φιλί μου,
της μανας σου να φέρης την καρδιά
να ρίξω να την φάη το σκυλί μου

Τρέχει ο νειός, την μάνα του σκοτώνει
και την καρδιά τραβά και ξεριζώνει
και τρέχει να την πάη μα σκοντάφτει
και πέφτει ο νειός κατάχαμα με δαύτη.

Κυλάει ο γυιός και η καρδιά κυλάει
και την ακούει να κλαίη και να μιλάη.
Μιλάει η μάνα στο παιδί και λέει:
-Εχτύπησες, αγόρι μου;…και κλαίει!

- Αγγελος Βλάχος (1838-1920)