Sunday, March 18, 2012

On the Fourth Week of Fasting, the Fathers Said to Me:


1. It is impossible for someone who is passionate about anything earthly to arrive at the measure of divine love.

2. Love is born of dispassion.

7. The one who cares more for the body than for the soul, and for creation more than for its Maker, is no better than idolaters.

10. The mind aflame with divine love abandons attachment towards anything created, even as the sensible eye is no longer able to see the stars when the Sun is rising.

13. The one who loves God cannot help but love everyone as himself.

14. Unclean is the passionate soul, full of hatred and desire.

15. The one whose heart has even the slightest trace of hatred in it, is completely alien of the knowledge of divine love, for that love cannot bear such hate even in the slightest.

16. The one who does not love his neighbor cannot love God either.

17. Blessed is the one who can love all men equally.

25. God, being good and dispassionate by nature, loves everyone equally.

31. As the remembrance of fire does not warm the body, so does the faith devoid of any good deeds not work in the soul the enlightenment of one's conscience.

34. A clean soul is freed from passions, delighting constantly in divine love.

37. Remember Saint Stephen, the Disciple of Christ, who -like the Redeemer Himself- prayed to the Father for his executioners, asking for their forgiveness.

49. Don't defile your mind by thoughts of hatred and desire.

71. Perfect love does not divide the one nature of humanity, according to their merit, but -looking constantly upon itself- loves everyone equally.

110. If you hate some, others you neither love, nor hate, and yet others you love, but only moderately, while -finally- others you love very dearly, then know from this inequality that you are a stranger to perfect love, which loves every man equally.

Maxim Martyr, Four Hundred Chapters on Love

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