Wisdom

Simplify Your Life to Find Serenity and Get Closer to God

Simplify Your Life to Avoid Anxiety and Get Closer to Godby St. Paisios of Mount Athos –
The more people distance themselves from a natural, simple life and embrace luxury, the more they suffer from anxiety. And as they distance themselves from God, they naturally cannot find rest in anything they do. This is why they go around restless; they even spin around the moon – like the belt of an engine spinning around the “crazy wheel” – since earth cannot contain all their restlessness.

Worldly stress is the result of worldly happiness, of worldly pleasures and self-indulgence. Educated externally and being full of anxiety, hundreds of people (even young children) are driven to psychoanalysis and psychiatrists. New psychiatric hospitals are being built and young psychiatrists go on for post-graduate studies. Many of them do not believe in God or accept the existence of the soul. [Read more…]

To Become Like God We Must Have Knowledge of Him

To Become Like God We Must Have Knowledge of Him - St. Basil by St. Basil the Great –
Those who are idle in the pursuit of righteousness count theological terminology as secondary, together with attempts to search out the hidden meaning in this phrase or that syllable, but those conscious of our calling realize that we are to become like God, so far as this is possible for human nature.

But we cannot become like God unless we have knowledge of Him, and without lessons there will be no knowledge. Instruction begins with the proper use of speech, and syllables and words are the elements of speech. Therefore to scrutinize syllables is not a superfluous task. [Read more…]

Sense the Guiding Hand of God in Your Life, Walk in the True Path

Sense the Guiding Hand of God in Your Life, Walk in the True Pathby Alexandr Solzhenitsyn –
I have done many things in my life that conflicted with the great aims I had set for myself—and something has always set me on the true path again.

An acquaintance with Russian history might long ago have discouraged any inclination to look for the hand of justice, or for some higher cosmic meaning, in the tale of Russia’s woes, but I had learned in my years of imprisonment to sense the guiding hand, to glimpse that bright meaning beyond and above my self and my wishes.

I had not always been quick to understand the sudden upsets in my life, and often, out of bodily and spiritual weakness, had seen in them the very opposite of their true meaning and their far-off purpose. Later the true significance of what had happened would inevitably become clear to me, and I would be numb with surprise. [Read more…]

Happy Are They Who Practice Righteousness

Happy Are They Who Practice Righteousnessby Pope John Pall II (1999) –
The Psalmist refers thus to those who follow the path of the commandments and keep them to the end (cf. Ps 119:32-33). Keeping the divine law, in fact, is the basis for obtaining the gift of eternal life, that is, the happiness that never ends.

To the question of the rich young man, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” (Mt 19:16), Jesus responds: “If you would enter life, keep the commandments” (Mt 19:17). This response by Jesus is particularly important in our modern reality, in which many people live as though there were no God.

The temptation to organize the world and one’s own life without God or even in opposition to God, without his commandments and without the Gospel, is a very real temptation and threatens us too. When human life and the world are built without God, they will eventually turn against man himself. [Read more…]