Laura > Laura's Quotes

“Since God knows created beings as the realizations of His will, it is not being itself but the ultimate will of God's love which unifies beings and points to the meaning of being. And precisely here is the role of the incarnation. The incarnate Christ is so identical to the ultimate will of God's love, that the meaning of created being and the purpose of history are simply the incarnate Christ. All things were made with Christ in mind, or rather at heart, and for this reason irrespective of the fall of man, the incarnation would have occurred. Christ, the incarnate Christ, is the truth, for he represents the ultimate unceasing will of the ecstatic love of God, who intends to lead created being into communion with His own life, to know Him and itself within this communion-event.”
― John D. Zizioulas

“The truth of history lies simultaneously in the substratum of created existence (since all beings are the willed realizations of God's love); in the fulfillment of the future of history (since God's love, in His will and its expressions - namely, created existence - is identifiable with the final communion of creation with the life of God); and in the incarnate Christ (since on God's part the personification of this loving will is the incarnate Christ). Whereby Christ becomes the "principle" and "end" of all things, the One who not only moves history from within its own unfolding but who also moves existence even from within the multiplicity of created things, toward the true being which is true life and true communion.”
― John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church

“When man loves as a biological hypostasis, he inevitably excludes others: the family has priority in love over "strangers," the husband lays exclusive claim to the love of his wife - facts altogether understandable and "natural" for the biological hypostasis. For a man to love someone who is not a member of his family more than his own relations constitutes a transcendence of the exclusiveness which is present in the biological hypostasis. Thus a characteristic of the ecclesial hypostasis is the capacity of the person to love without exclusiveness, and to do this not out of conformity with a moral commandment ("Love thy neighbor," etc.), but out of his "hypostatic constitution," out of the fact that his new birth from the womb of the Church has made him part of a network of relationships which transcends every exclusiveness.”
― John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church

“It was given to Abba Anthony to see a doctor in Alexandria who was simply and humbly doing what God had given him to do. His inner being stood in the presence of the Lord as he worked and prayed. According to the literature of the desert, this is the goal of our life in this world as it is set out for all Christians, a goal that the solitary monk tried to attain through his special vocation.”
― Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, The Place of the Heart: An Introduction to Orthodox Spirituality

“That this signified not a parallel co-existence of the ecclesial with the biological hypostasis but a transcendence of the latter by the former is apparent from the harshness of sayings like those which demand of Christians the abandonment - even the "hatred" - of their own relations. These sayings do not signify a simple denial. They conceal an affirmation: the Christian through baptism stands over against the world, he exists as a relationship with the world, as a person, in a manner free from the relationships created by his biological identity. This means that henceforth he can love not because the laws of biology oblige him to do so - something which inevitably colors the love of one's one relations - but unconstrained by natural laws. As an ecclesial hypostasis man thus proves that what is valid for God can also be valid for man: the nature does not determine the person; the person enables nature to exist; freedom is identified with the being of man. The result of this freedom of the person from nature, of the hypostasis from biology is that in the Church man transcends exclusivism.”
― John D. Zizoulas

“Man is free only within communion. If the Church wishes to be the place of freedom, she must continually place all the 'objects' she possesses, whatever they may be (Scripture, sacraments, ministries, etc.) within the communion-event to make them 'true' and to make her members free in regard to them as objects, as well as in them and through them as channels of communion. Christians must learn not to lean on objective 'truths' as securities for truth, but to live in an epicletic way, i.e. leaning on the communion-event in which the structure of the Church involves them. Truth liberates by placing beings in communion.”
― John D. Zizioulas

“The Holy Spirit does not intervene a posteriori within the framework of Christology, as a help in overcoming the distance between an objectively existing Christ and ourselves; he is the one who gives birth to Christ and to the whole activity of salvation, by anointing Him and making him Χριστὸς (Luke 4.13). If it is truly possible to confess Christ as the truth, this is only because of the Holy Spirit (I For. 12.3). And as a careful study of I Cor. 12 shows, for St. Paul the body of Christ is literally composed of the charismata of the Spirit (charisma = membership of the body). So we can say without risk of exaggeration that Christ exists only pneumatologically, whether in His distinct personal particularity or in His capacity as the body of the Church and the recapitulation of all things.”
― John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church

“One of the basic difficulties inherent in the Greek conception of truth is that it implies that truth can be grasped and formulated by human reason. But, as the eucharistic reveals, this human 'reason' must be understood as the element which unifies creation, and refers it to God through the hands of man, so that God may be 'all in all.' This eucharistic or priestly function of man reconnects created nature to infinite existence, and thus liberates it from slavery to necessity by letting it develop its potentialities to the maximum. If as we have insisted in this account, communion is the only way for truth to exist as life, the nature which possesses neither personhood nor communion 'groans and is in travail' in awaiting the salvation of man, who can set it within the communion-event offered in Christ. Man's responsibility is to make a eucharistic reality out of nature, i.e. to make nature, too, capable of communion. If man does this, then truth takes up its meaning for the whole cosmos, Christ becomes a cosmic Christ, and the world as a whole dwells in truth, which is none other than communion with its Creator. Truth thereby becomes the life of all that is.”
― John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church

“Culture cannot be a monolithically universal phenomenon without some kind of demonic imposition of one culture over the rest of cultures. Nor is it possible to dream of a universal "Christian culture" without denying the dialectic between history and eschatology which is so central, among other things, to the eucharist itself. Thus, if there is a transcendence of cultural divisions on a universal level - which indeed must be constantly aimed at by the Church - it can only take place via the local situations expressed in and through the particular local Churches and not through universalistic structures which imply a universal Church.”
― John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church

“A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.”
― St. Basil

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Songs given at night will bury themselves (as seeds do) in the dark in you, to shoot a shoot up come morning. Come, give them water.”
― Allison Boyd Justus, Solstice to Solstice to Solstice

“Thus the whole death is not the biological phenomenon of death but the spiritual reality whose "sting... is sin" (1 Cor. 15:56) - the rejection by man of the only true life given to him by God. "Sin entered the world and death by sin " (Rom. 5:12): there is no other life but God's life; the one who rejects it dies because life without God is death. This is the spiritual death, the one that fill the entire life with "dying" and, being separation from God, makes man's life solitude and suffering, fear and illusion, enslavement to sin and enmity, meaninglessness, lust and emptiness. It is this spiritual death that makes man's physical death truly death...”
― Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism

“The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world.”
― Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy

“The Purpose of the Eucharist lies not in the change of the bread and wine, but in the partaking of Christ, who has become our food, our life, the manifestation of the Church as the body of Christ. This is why the gifts themselves never became in the Orthodox East an object of special reverence, contemplation, and adoration, and likewise an object of special theological 'problematics': how, when, in what manner their change is accomplished.”
― Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom

“Our modern theology, which in many ways has ceased to be personal, i.e. centered on the Christian experience of "person," nevertheless - and maybe as a result of this - has become utterly individualistic. It views everything in the Church - sacraments, rites, and even the Church herself - as primarily, if not exclusively, individual "means of grace," aimed at the individual, at his individual sanctification. It has lost the very categories by which to express the Church and her life as that new reality which precisely overcomes and transcends all "individualism," transforms individuals into persons, and in which me are persons only because and inasmuch as they are united to God, and, in Him, to one another and to the whole of life.”
― Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism

“It is not a gathering of 'escapees' from the world, bitterly enjoying their escape, feeding their hate for the world. Listen to their psalms and hymns; contemplate the transparent beauty of their icons, their movements, of the entire *celebration. It is truly cosmical joy that permeates all this; it is the entire creation - its matter and its time, its sounds and colors, its words and silence - that praises and worships God and in this praise becomes again itself: the Eucharist, the sacrament of unity, the sacrament of the new creation.”
― Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism

“In the Orthodox ecclesial experience and tradition a sacrament is understood primarily as a revelation of the genuine nature of creation, of the world, which, however much it has fallen as "this world," will remain God's world, awaiting salvation, redemption, healing and transfiguration in a new earth and a new heaven. In other words, in the Orthodox experience a sacrament is primarily a revelation of the sacramentality of creation itself, for the world was created and given to man for conversion of creaturely life into participation in divine life. If in baptism water can become a "laver of regeneration," if our earthy food - bread and wine - can be transformed into partaking of the body and blood of Christ, if with oil we are granted the anointment of the Holy Spirit, if, to put it briefly, everything in the world can be identified, manifested and understood as a gift of God and participation in the new life, it is because all of creation was originally summoned and destined for the fulfillment of the divine economy - "then God will be all in all.”
― Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom

“Love is the essence of the holiness of the Church.”
― Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom

“In other words, this servant would offer God an absolutely obstruction-free "void" within the realm of the human world and history, wherein God may act as the "Creator" of a new world, his world, the way he wants it: where the impossible is daily bread, and in place of the present reality in which the barren one cannot possibly conceive, "the children of the barren one are more than those of the one that is married.”
― Paul Nadim Tarazi, The Chrysostom Bible - Isaiah: A Commentary

“Yet in the liturgical and spiritual tradition of the Church, the Church's essence as the incarnation of the Word, as the fulfilment in time and space of the divine incarnation, is realized precisely in the unbreakable link between the word and the sacrament. Thus the book of Acts can say of the Church: "the word. . .grew and multiplied" (Acts 12.24). In the sacrament we partake of Him who comes and abides with us in the word, and the mission of the Church consists precisely in announcing this good news. The word presupposes the sacrament as its fulfilment, for in the sacrament Christ the Word becomes our life.”
― Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom

“That the recollection of God’s deeds constitutes thanksgiving and praise to him is understandable. What is amazing, however, is that Old Testament psalmody also includes, in Ps. 78, teaching material (see vv. 1-4) consisting of a mere recitation of divine deeds. Since this psalm essentially ‘defines’ God and Israel for the congregation, it must be that the very act of definition became a necessary liturgical action in nascent Judaism. And it became necessary because the divine deeds and history that were to be remembered were in fact anti-deeds and anti-history, i.e. an impossibility from the human perspective. Whereas the simple appellation “God” or “Lord” was self-explanatory and thus sufficient in pre-exilic Jerusalem, where the deity was enthroned in the visible temple of a tangible nation, the anti-historical God of nascent Judaism had to be constructed time and again as a reality in the mind of the gathered congregation. This action was an absolute necessity because this congregation of Israel was itself a product of God in that it came into being against its own will. Without this definition of God there would be no congregation to begin with! Put otherwise, the recollection of the divine anti-deeds and Israel’s stubborn resistance to them was the sine qua non condition, the basis for every prayer in nascent Judaism; in such recollection lay the definition and ultimately the very presence of both Israel’s God and God’s Israel.”
― Paul Nadim Tarazi, Psalms and Wisdom

“If, then, we place an adjective of locality before wisdom - such as Chinese wisdom, Indian wisdom, Greek wisdom - we cannot mean by that a kind of wisdom valid solely in that place. It simply means that those specific wisdom sayings were developed in that area; their value, however, is universal.”
― Paul Nadim Tarazi, Psalms and Wisdom

“The incident took place at Gerar, just as was the case with Abraham in Genesis 20:1-18, during a famine, just as was the case in Genesis 12:10 with Abraham, however, Isaac was prevented from going down to Egypt by God himself, and was summoned to dwell as a ‘sojourner’ (resident alien) in the earth of Gerar (26:2-3,6)… Isaac learned the lesson and thus lived within the realm of the Law and its commandments and statutes governing the earth, and this is what will be conveyed to Israel: ‘And he (God) humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did you fathers know; that he might make you know that any human being does not live by bread alone, but any human being lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.’ (Deut 8:3) Better, then, to dwell as a sojourner (that is, without possessing the land) in the location assigned by God’s word (of command) and share it with the presumed enemy, rather than end up dying in slavery in a seemingly ‘friendly’ land of plenty.”
― Paul Nadim Tarazi, Land and Covenant

“Such richness flowing
through the branches of summer and into

the body, carried inward on the five
rivers! Disorder and astonishment

rattle your thoughts and your heart
cries for rest but don’t

succumb, there’s nothing
so sensible as sensual inundation. Joy

is a taste before
it’s anything else, and the body

can lounge for hours devouring
the important moments. Listen,

the only way
to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it

into the body first, like small
wild plums.”
― Mary Oliver, American Primitive

“I struggled so hard for a goal, without realizing that the goal is the struggle. It’s what makes me stronger, smarter, and better. Growth doesn’t come from a comfort zone, but from leaving it.”
― Max Brooks, Minecraft: The Island

“I hope what I’ve learned helps you find your way. Most of all, I hope you’ve learned that in this world of mines and crafting, the most important thing you can craft is you.”
― Max Brooks, Minecraft: The Island

“When the cyclical law of repetition suddenly stops its rotating movement, creation, freed from vanity, will not be absorbed into the impersonal Absolute of a Nirvana but will see the beginning of an eternal springtime, in which all the forces of life, triumphant over death, will come to the fulness of their unfolding, since God will be the only principle of life in all things. Then the deified will shine like stars around the only Star, Christ, with whom they will reign in the same glory of the Holy Trinity, communicated to each without measure by the Holy Spirit.”
― Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God

“Job’s attitude in accusing God is opposite to that of his friends, who, in assuming the hypocritical role of defenders of God, defended, without knowing it, Satan’s right to an unlimited dominion. Like most defenders of the status quo, in wishing to justify the legitimate character of the present condition of humanity, they gave an absolute value to the legal situation, projecting it on to the very nature of God. In this wrong perspective, the different levels of human, demonic, angelic, and divine reality, bound up in the complex and shifting economy of salvation, are telescoped together, welded together and crystallized in a single vision of a God-Necessity, comparable to the inexorable and impersonal Fate of Greek paganism. They speak solely of the God of the Law, but not the God of the Promise… But Job aimed higher than his friends, for he believed the Promise, without which the Law would have been a monstrous absurdity and the God of the Old Testament could not have been the God of Christians.”
― Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God

“This category of divine risk, which is proper to a personal God freely creating personal beings endowed with freedom, is foreign to all abstract conceptions of the divine dominion - to the rationalist theology which thinks it exalts the omnipotence of the living God in attributing to him the perfections of a lifeless God who is incapable of being subject to risk. But he who takes no risk does not love… God’s dominion must be thought of in these terms of God’s personal love...”
― Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God