Category Archives: quotes

Hold On! and be saved by grace

church, quotes

From The Prologue of Ohrid, by St. Nikolai Velimirovich, for today’s date:

HOMILY
on saving grace — By grace ye are saved (Ephesians 2:5, 8.

Who can comprehend and acknowledge that we are saved by grace — that we are saved by God’s grace, and not by our merits and works? Who can comprehend and acknowledge that?

Only he who has comprehended and seen the bottomless pit of death and corruption in which man is engulfed by sin, and has also comprehended and seen the height of honor and glory to which man is raised in the Heavenly Kingdom, in the realm of immortality, in the house of the Living God — only such a one can comprehend and acknowledge that we are saved by grace.

A child was traveling by night. He stumbled and fell into hole after hole and pit after pit, until he finally fell into a very deep pit from which he could in no way escape by his own power. When the child gave himself over to the hands of fate and thought his end was near, there was suddenly someone standing over the pit, lowering a rope to him and telling him to grab the rope and hold firmly to it. This was the king’s son, who then took the child home, bathed him, clothed him and brought him to his court and set him beside himself.

Was this child saved by his own deed? By no means. All he did was to grab the end of the rope, and hold on. By what, then, was the child saved? By the mercy of the king’s son. In God’s relationship with men, this mercy is called grace. By grace ye are saved. The Apostle Paul repeats these words twice in a short span, that the faithful might recognize and remember them.

Brethren, let us comprehend and remember that we are saved through grace by the Lord Jesus Christ. We were in the jaws of death, but have been given life in the courts of our God.

O Lord Jesus Christ our Savior, by Thee are we saved. To Thee be glory and praise forever. Amen.

Can’t say anything good enough.

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Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything
either bad enough or good enough about life. 
–C.S. Lewis

The Christian life includes both joy and sorrow, and it seems that the intense experience of either aspect can’t adequately be described. Each of us has our own unique pain or bliss.

What comes to us on the journey is meant to be shared with and offered to our God; He’s the only one who knows our heart, without us saying a word. Christ endured shame, abuse, the Cross, and hell, for the joy that was set before Him. He does know what we are going through, and He went through worse, and the Love in the Holy Trinity is the Sun of which our happiness is only a ray.

Right now I’m walking on the sunny side of life, and I’m glad to say so here, but I won’t try to describe my giddiness. I can’t say anything good enough about Life. He is the Source, He is the Life, I know that, and I am finding His goodness and kindness in so many things: my husband’s love, the warmth of my home, the fatigue from housecleaning, the hope of the tulips I planted blooming in the Spring, the rest at night.

The photo is of a vase that was my grandmother’s, with some snippets from my garden. A bit of this and that, a unique medley that reminds me of my blessed life.

Candy: Fake, Fruity, or Drunken?

food and cooking, quotes

Fruit snacks are yummy treats. The Candy Professor thinks so, too, but she writes in The Atlantic about how the idea that they may legitimately be touted as something other than candy is under question in court. In her blog this week the professor, Samira Kawash, also treats the semiotics of candy:

“Candy as simulacrum cuts loose from the chain of origins and descent. It’s fake, and unashamed of its fakeness and therefore not in need of connecting itself to some legitimating narrative of ancestry and origin.

“So candy as fake food is more true than food that disguises its fakery. Candy, perfect post-modern food.”

And she does her own experiment to find out if gummy bears can really soak up vodka without dissolving in it.

I’ve always enjoyed this woman’s blog, but never more than this week, because I love science experiments using food, even junk food. I do like many forms of candy, but I mostly try to feed myself and my family truly nutritious food, which doesn’t include sweets. I haven’t indulged in any fruit snacks lately, but I wonder if the food police will require their being shelved with the jelly beans in the future?

By the way, candy is a topic of conversation I sometimes fall back on when talking with my grandchildren, most of whom will become engaged on some level at the mention of it. Now I have even more threads of talk with which to lead them on.

At the same time, these latest discussions are getting tangled in my mind. Are fruit snacks real? Are drunken gummies liquor or fusion cuisine? I hope I am right in this at least, that the philosophers are telling me that my sweet tooth is merely a healthy preference for honest food.

Spiders and Winds

my garden, poetry, quotes, , ,

I never think of spiders as devils, at least not the garden spiders that are so busy all over the place this fall. This one is between the cherry tomatoes and the bottlebrush. I went with my camera into the yard before the sun was very high, hoping that some of the critters had mended their nets after the rains, and I did get good shots of a few.

Then I read George MacDonald’s verse for the day, from A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul. He wrote a section of this long poem for every day of the year; the lines for October 10th use the metaphor of a spider to warn about how the devil works at entrapping us every morning. We do need to continually pray for the Holy Spirit to break our selfish crust, I know that. O Heavenly King, blow into us and fill us and make us a refreshment to everyone around.

With every morn my life afresh must break
The crust of self, gathered about me fresh;
That thy wind-spirit may rush in and shake
The darkness out of me, and rend the mesh
The spider-devils spin out of the flesh—
Eager to net the soul before it wake,
That it may slumberous lie, and listen to the snake.

-George MacDonald

I don’t like to end a post with reference to that snake, so let’s look at our situation from another angle before we finish the contemplation:

I consider no other labor as difficult as prayer. When we are ready to pray, our spiritual enemies interfere. They understand it is only by making it difficult for us to pray that they can harm us. Other things will meet with success if we keep at it, but laboring at prayer is a war that will continue until we die. 

–Abba Agathon