In every age, not everyone betrays, not everybody deserts. Some remain faithful. Some keep up the struggle. Some don’t exchange their faith in the true God for anything worldly and secular. This, in any case, is why we have martyrs. “Abbot Georgios Kapsanis of Gregoriou”
Christians exchange their distorted intellect for that of Christ, their distorted heart for the heart and tenderness of Christ, their distorted ethos for that of Christ. “Abbot Georgios Kapsanis of Gregoriou”
All the virtues are aspects of the one, great virtue, the virtue of love. When, as a Christian, you acquire love, you’ve got all the virtues. It’s love that expels from our soul the root cause of all evil and all the passions, which, according to the Fathers, is selfishness. “Abbot Georgios Kapsanis of Gregoriou”
When marriage is no more than a physical and social fact, without becoming a ‘sacrament’, that is without passing into the Church, into the Kingdom of God and being transformed, it can neither be saved nor can it save. “Abbot Georgios Kapsanis of Gregoriou”
The passions cover Divine Grace, just as ash covers the spark. With asceticism and prayer, however, the heart is cleansed of the passions, the spark of divine grace is rekindled and the faithful feel Christ in their heart, which is the centre of their existence. “Abbot Georgios Kapsanis of Gregoriou”
The Church cures our deformation through its teaching, through the Gospel message, through asceticism, through its holy sacraments and through the pastoral care of its bishops. “Blessed Georgios Kapsanis, Proegumen of Gregoriou Monastery”
However well informed you are in terms of human wisdom, this doesn’t cure your deformity. You have to rediscover the true image of God, Christ, so that assuming the form of Christ, you’ll be healed of the deformities of the passions and of sin and thus attain your supreme goal of likeness, of glorification. “Abbot Georgios Kapsanis of Gregoriou”
In a quiet room (preferably after some spiritual reading or after lighting the lamp in front of the icons and censing), as far as possible removed from noise and concerns, when you’re free of all thought and calculation, let your intellect go down into your heart and say the prayer ‘Lord, Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, sinner that I am’. What peace and power our souls derive from this stillness in God… How it enables us, in the other hours in the day, to retain our peace, without irritability, tension and anxiety, with all our powers in harmony and […]
People who offer ‘your own from your own, in all things and for all things’ serve God truly and pleasingly. That is, people who recognize that whatever they have is a gift from God. They believe that they’ve got nothing of their own to offer. Everything’s from God and they take from that and offer it to God, together with themselves, their world and their relations with the world. They keep nothing selfishly for themselves. They offer themselves without reservation. They give everything in order to receive everything. They die in order to live. And they offer everything in Christ […]
All the virtues are aspects of the one, great virtue, the virtue of love. When, as a Christian, you acquire love, you’ve got all the virtues.
When marriage becomes a ‘sacrament’ it removes the couple and their physical marriage away from the old world, unredeemed and without God,