Sermons & Homilies
The Mother of God truly perceived the holiness of the place she lived ... she strove to purify her heart in order that it might accord with the holiness of the place she dwelt bodily. Let us do the same.
This quintessential phrase of the Gospel of John — “come and see” — is exceedingly poignant. It occurs precisely three times in St. John’s Gospel.
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It is not his wealth which condemns the rich man but the inhumanity of his lack of compassion. “When a human feels pain - he is alive,” said Fr. Melchisedek of Optina, “but when a human feels someone else’s pain – [then] he is [truly] human.”
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It is the serpent of anger and wrathful condemnation that St. Joseph the Hesychast counsels us, in one of his letters, to suffocate through silence. When irritation and anger flare up in the soul, he says to shut the mouth of both body and soul in order that this serpent might suffocate and die.
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It was given to the Son of Thunder to make the most memorable proclamations in the whole of Scripture—In the beginning was the Word; the Word was made flesh; God is love. Volumes of theology have been written about each one of those statements, and still their force and meaning has not been exhausted, their depths have not fully been plumbed.
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