The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
truisms
Wrath is a reminder of hidden hatred, that is to say, remembrance of wrongs. Wrath is a desire for the injury of the one who has provoked you. Irascibility is the untimely blazing up of the heart. Bitterness is a movement of displeasure seated in the soul. Anger is an easily changeable movement of one’s disposition and disfiguration of soul.
St. John Climacus, “The Ladder of Divine Ascent,” (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1978), Step 8: On Freedom From Anger and On Meekness
Worldly thoughts and the cares of life have the same effect on the understanding as a veil draped over the eyes, for the understanding is the eye of the soul. So long as we leave them there, we cannot see. But when they fall away as we remember that we are to die, then we shall clearly see the true light which illumines every man as it comes into the world from on high.
St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Practical and Theological Chapters.
And when we fled, foolishly, precipitously from our gift we were not abandoned, nay, we were hounded after. The one who made us did not cease to do all things until we had we turned again to his love, allowing us to see, in the face of Christ, the gift he had for us from the beginning. All human life is gratuitous, an unnecessary grace that, in pure hearts, inspires joy.
The work of the Devil then, is to obscure life, to render the gift into a curse and to preach life as burden. Or, in a more subtle tactic, to insidiously preach life soley as a "right", removing from it the connotations of gift. An offense against life is not merely a violation of personal right but an affront to God, a rejection of love and gift; it is a ridiculous act of confusion.
From Unmitigated Nonsense
We each have things within in our soul that really don’t belong there, that keep us from the kind of enlightenment and communion with God that we could otherwise enjoy. ..... Far too often we lay in the deep slumber of sin, and while we lament what we see in us, we seem too lethargic to do much about it.
Change is hard; there is no doubt about that. But I suspect that beneath our sloth and slowness to change there exists an even deeper sin, a sin so stealthy that even though each one of us knows we have it, we ourselves scarcely understand how much of an influence it has upon us. I am speaking of the chief of all sins, the sin of pride. The kind of pride I’m talking about here is not just the vanity of thinking that we are slightly better than we really are. I’m talking about the really ugly and dirty kind of pride that deluded the devil into an attempt to set his throne of rule above even that of God Himself. It is this pride that causes us, just like the devil, to struggle against God and resist His rule.
Fr Michael Regan, sermon for Zacchaeus Sunday