Category Archives: quotes

That inner world and its joy.

Lent, quotes,

I’m taking a break for Lent.
This will be my last post until after Pascha,
which is April 12.

Let us understand …that what the Church wants us to do during Lent is to seek the enrichment of our spiritual and intellectual inner world, to read and to meditate upon those things which are most likely to help us recover that inner world and its joy. Of that joy, of the true vocation of man, the one that is fulfilled inside and not outside, the ‘modern world’ gives us no taste today; yet without it, without the understanding of Lent as a journey into the depth of our humanity, Lent loses its meaning.

-Father Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent

Man will not have peace in his heart until he… says,
“God and I are alone in the entire world.”
-St John of Tobolsk

This is becoming the norm.

humanity, quotes, , , ,

“People have always found ways to carve out moments of privacy in public space; this is part of what makes public space tolerable for everyone. Civil attention’s twin is civil inattention, ‘whereby one treats the other as if he has been seen but is not an object of undue curiosity,’ as Goffman described. We nod at the stranger stepping into the elevator and then return to staring at the ceiling or look up briefly from reading when other commuters get on the bus.

“Civil inattention is still a kind of acknowledgment, qualitatively different from being ‘looked at as through air.’ When we focus our attention on the glowing screens of our smartphones rather than on the people around us, never granting them even brief acknowledgment, we are not practicing civil inattention but civil disengagement. This is becoming the norm in public space.”

— Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World

The saint’s last words.

death, quotes, saints,

We Orthodox commemorate St. John Chrysostom on three separate dates, none of which is the day that he died, September 14, 407, in modern day Turkey. While in exile he was being moved to modern day Georgia when his health finally gave out. That date in September is the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross, so to avoid conflict his feast day was changed. One of the dates on which he is remembered is today, the date in 438 on which his relics were transferred from the site of his death in Comana to the city of Constantinople.

In the 19th century Archbishop Dmitry preached a homily on this occasion, from which I clipped this portion:

“The virtuous life thanks to which St. John won respect even in exile again aroused his adversaries’ hatred. They petitioned the empress for a decree by which the exiled Chrysostom was sent to a new exile—to the Pitiunt Fortress near Colchis, on the coast of the Black Sea.

“The officials received a special order to treat their prisoner more strictly and to bring him to his destination in a certain number of days despite the difficult roads. The famous pastor of Constantinople had to walk for three months, now in the unbearable heat of the sun, now in pouring rain, without rest or change of clothes.

“Such a journey completely exhausted St. John Chrysostom’s already weak health. Feeling approaching death on the way, he begged his escorts to stop, changed his wet and soiled clothes to white, communed the Holy Mysteries and departed from this world, which was unworthy of him, with the words: “Glory to God for all things!” With the words he loved and often repeated in his life and spoke about during his sufferings: “These words are a deadly blow for satan, but for the one who utters them in every trouble and misfortune they serve as an abundant source of hope and consolation. Once you pronounce them, every cloud of sorrow dissipates.”

-Archbishop Dimitry (Muretov), from a book of his sermons published in 1889

Translation of the relics of St. John Chrysostom

St. John Chrysostom is also celebrated on November 13 and January 30.
You can read more of his story here: oca