Wise Words on Wednesday: Love & Responsibility
The greater the [sense of] responsibility for the [other] person, the more true love is there
– Pope John-Paul II, Love and Responsibility
Category: Quotation
Wise Words on Wednesday: A Skeptical World
“For the secular society of today is skeptical not merely about spiritual assumptions, but about its own secular assumptions. It has not merely broken the church window or besieged the tower of tradition; it has also kicked away the ladder of progress by which it had climbed.
The Declaration of Independence, once the charter of democracy, begins by saying that certain things are self-evident. If we were to trace the history of the American mind from Thomas Jefferson to William James, we should find that fewer and fewer things were self-evident, until at last hardly anything is self-evident.
So far from it being self-evident to the modern that men are created equal, it is not self-evident that men are created, or even that men are men.”
– G.K. Chesterton, 1926
Wise Words on Wednesday: Box Of Darkness
“Someone I love gave me a box of darkness. It took me years to understand that that too was a gift”
– Mary Oliver
Forgiveness: The hardest and easiest
Although in the West Lent begins this coming (Ash) Wednesday, in the Byzantine Church the Great Fast (“Lent”) begins tomorrow.
For the duration of the Fast, I’m going to be off social media and I’m also not going to be posting anything here at the blog. I’ll be back on April 16th, Easter Sunday…which also happens to be my birthday 🙂
If you’re looking for something to do during Lent, I’d recommend reading a book of the Bible, Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians in particular. A couple of years ago, I did a video series during Lent on that book of the Bible. You can either watch all the videos on YouTube or check in at the site’s Facebook page where I’ll be uploading the videos several times a week.
In the Byzantine Church, as part of our final preparation for Lent, tonight we celebrate “Forgiveness Vespers”. It is similar to the usual service of Vespers, but we also ask for forgiveness from each other for any hurts we have inflicted upon one another this past year. It therefore seemed appropriate to share in this final post a quotation from my spiritual father, Fr. Nicholas:
“At one and the same time, forgiving is the hardest thing in the world and the easiest. It is the hardest because we don’t want to. It is the easiest when we let Jesus do it”
– Our God Heals, Fr. Nicholas Broadbridge
Wise Words on Wednesday: The God We Discover
In [our] pain, we discover a God who invites us into a love that set fire to a bush in the desert, forced open graves, and enabled the dead to walk again
– Edith Prendergast
Wise Words on Wednesday: Keeping Up With Your Friends
Even though there is a temptation to compare yourself to celebrities and feel completely inadequate, there is a little bit of a buffer between us and them.
But this is not the case when it comes to jumping on social media and endlessly scrolling through your friends’ lives. The buffer is gone: you know these people, and you see them almost every day. The comparing and competing is no longer just a reality TV; this is your reality – and this time there is no excuse in your mind for not “keeping up”
– Sarah Swafford, Emotional Virtue
Wise Words on Wednesday: Time & Place
Imagine your relationship is like a grand and beautiful house, and in that house there is a fireplace – massive, oak, ornate and stunning. You put the firewood in the fireplace, light the match, and enjoy the warmth and romantic ambiance. The fireplace is marriage – where sex is not only safe and secure but is an incredible gift from God. The fire is our sexual hunger and intimacy; and if it is not used in its right time and setting, it will actually bring gret harm. So, imagine that beautiful house again with no fireplace in it: if you lit a fire in the middle of your living room, you would burn your whole house to the ground.
– Sarah Swafford, Emotional Virtue