Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
truisms
Morality is not exactly a secondary matter in Christianity, but it is a derivative one. Our morality should issue naturally from the plenitude of our religion; if it does not, it is either mere respectability or a matter of instinct, or else — very often — insufferable hypocrisy.
— “Diary of a Russian Priest” Fr. Alexander Elchaninov
Being good is not always the same as just being nice. As Fr. Alexander says, goodness should be the natural result of a humble heart coming into contact with the mercy of God and receives the teaching of the Church. Niceness is the kind of simple courtesy that allows us to get along when standing in line, bumping someone’s cart in the supermarket or coming up with a compliment for someone’s meatballs at the potluck. The first is a quality so close to God’s heart that Christ told the lawyer that only one could be called good and that was God. The other is, as Father E. puts it “mere respectability.”
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
Henry David Thoreau