[sleepybabushka]

crawling back to God only for Him to have already been carrying me

[viagginterstellari]

A ray of light - Church of Mother of God (XVII c.), Anauri, 2025

[theinwardlight]

Lyrics to an old Shaker song, taking off from Matthew 5:6. 

[orthodoxadventure]

The compassionate Mother of God also sees me and hears my prayers and sighs, and this is another comforting assurance, constantly confirmed by experience.

My Life in Christ by Saint John of Kronstadt

[allaboutmary]

In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph

[eesirachs]

god loves losers. god loves the failure to thrive, the wrist checks, the negelcted, the thin, the risky. he is tiered, he is rooting for the least of you. his charmers he lifts from nothingness; his kings turn out fruitless. he loves the fruitlessness. he licks wounds, he's into that. he recalls the forgotten. he's telling his refugees to garden in foreign kingdoms. he's telling his prophets to tie themselves in rope and remain on the ground. this god is the god of losers, lovingly, thrummingly, nostalgic like that

[orthodoxadventure]

He [Saint Sophrony] used to say, ‘To be a Christian, one must be like an artist.’ Just as artists are captivated by the subjects they paint and by the desire to portray them as perfectly as possible, so too the Christian is captivated by Christ and by a desire to attain to His endless perfection. ‘I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me His own’ [Phil. 3:12].

— Excerpt from: Christ, Our Way And Our Life

[lamp-for-my-feet]

So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.

2 Corinthians 4:18

[seraphimscorner]

"The Lenten Spring" by Father Thomas Hopko

[austerity-audacity-asceticism]

Song of Songs, 8:6-7

Stern as death is love.

[midnightsnack717]

God alone is enough.

Let nothing upset you, let nothing startle you. All things pass; God does not change. Patience wins all it seeks. Whoever has God lacks nothing: God alone is enough.

- Teresa of Avila

[orthodoxadventure]

This is why the Lord bade us to love our enemies, and the Spirit of God gives us the power to do so. And if we are weak and there is no love in us, let us fervently entreat the Lord and His Most Pure Mother, and all the Saints; and the Lord Who loves us so dearly will help us in all things: and when He lays His touch on our souls and bodies everything in us is transformed, and there is great joy in the soul that she knows her Creator and His compassion that passes all understanding.

Saint Silouan the Athonite by Archimandrite Sophrony of Essex

[orthodoxadventure]

It is true that we will never reach complete calm and prosperity; everything on earth will never seem completely favorable. We will never be fully content with what God gives us. Even if we have excess in everything, it will always seem to us that we lack something. We will always be afraid, depressed, confused, lacking in faith, and busy every minute of the day with cares and various worries, sorrows, and useless sighs until we turn sincerely to God and commit ourselves and one another completely to the will of God, as the sunflower always seeks the sun. Let us diligently examine the visible signs of God's will in our daily life and try to conform our will to it. Let the will of God be for us a guiding star in life, and let this alone be stamped in our hearts forever.

The Sunflower: Conforming the Will of Man to the Will of God by Saint John of Tobolsk (Saint John Maximovitch)

[improvisedliturgy]

My belief that God is love—that love is everything, our true destiny—sustains me. […] All awakening to love is spiritual awakening.

bell hooks, All About Love

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

…the profound prayer isn't the one that asks, the most profound prayer is the one that no longer asks…

– Clarice Lispector, from “The Disasters of Sofia,” The Complete Stories (New Directions, 2015)

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

We are childhood lovers; he is my husband and I am his

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

"Why are you still Christian?" We are not two, but one: he is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; whatever souls are made of, mine and his are made the same. What the Divine has made One, let no one drive apart. It is not I who live, but my beloved who lives in me. He is more myself than I am.

[orthodoxadventure]

The Virgin Mother, and she alone, is the frontier between created and uncreated nature. All who know God will recognize her as the one who contained Him who cannot be contained. All who sing hymns to God will praise her next after Him. She is the cause of the benefits which preceded her, the protectress of those which came after, and through her those good things which are eternal shall be received. She is the theme of the prophets, the first of the apostles, the support of the martyrs, the dais of the teachers. She is the glory of those on earth, the delight of those in heaven, the adornment of the whole creation. She is the beginning, fount and root of the hope stored up for us in heaven.

The Homilies by Saint Gregory Palamas