Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being.
–David Stendl-Rast (1926-
By taking one small step at a time, and by not thinking that in one big step we are going to get any place, we can walk straight to the Kingdom of Heaven — and there is no reason for any of us to fall away from that.
–Seraphim Rose (1934-1982)
Spiritual life does not mean being in the clouds while saying the Jesus Prayer or going through the various motions. It means discovering the laws of this spiritual life as they apply to one’s own position, one’s situation. This comes over the years by attentive reading of the Holy Fathers with a notebook, writing down those passages which seem most significant to us, studying them, finding how they apply to us, and, if need be, revising earlier views of them as we get a little deeper into them, finding what one Father says about something, what a second Father says about the same thing, and so on.
–Seraphim Rose (1934-1982)
To live an authentic Orthodox spiritual life, one must be faithful to the basics: daily prayer, the sacraments, the ascetical disciplines of fasting, abstinence and almsgiving, and feeding the mind and heart with holy reading. All of this must be done within the context of a lively and faithful church life and under the guidance of one’s spiritual father or confessor.
–James Deschene (Twentieth and Twenty-first Century)
Following the greeting, “The Lord be with you,” which you know so well, you heard the words, “Lift up your heart.” Now the whole life of true Christians is a matter of lifting up the heart. To lift up the heart is a duty of Christians who are such in very fact and not in name alone. To lift up the heart — what does this mean? It means that you must trust in God, not in yourself since God is so superior to you. When you trust in yourself, your heart stays fettered to the Earth, not fixed on God. So when you hear the priest say, “Lift up your heart,” you respond, “We have lifted it up to the Lord.” See to it, then, that your response rings true,
–Saint Augustine (354-430)
Keep praising God with hymns, and meditating continually, and so lighten the burden of the temptations that attack you. A traveler carrying a heavy burden stops from time to time to take deep breaths, and so makes the journey easier and the burden light.
–Abba Hyperichius (A Desert Father)
