I think that I can deduce from this consuming interest in prayer (no matter how much it ebbs and flows) that part of my vocation in life is prayer. No… maybe all of my vocation is prayer and everything else I do, is at the pleasure of His good Desire for my happiness. Unfortunately this makes me a vocational slacker and looser. Pray for me, Selaphiel, that I would embrace my vocation whole heartedly, throwing my self into the fiery mouth of His all consuming Love.
“In order to enter Paradise, one must have a heart as wide as the heavens, a heart that embraces all men. If a heart excludes even just one person, it will not be accepted by the Lord because He will not be able to dwell in it. Prayer, as Fr. Sophrony says, is an endless creation; it is a school that teaches us to remain in the presence of the Lord. This effort to remain with the Lord is an exercise that finally overcomes death, which is why our prayer must be neither superficial nor mechanical.
How can God give ear to our prayer if we do not even agree with the words when we do not pay attention to their meaning? If we want God to heed our entreaty, we ourselves must first be totally present in the words we offer up to Him. It is good for our mind to be enthroned in our heart, and as we offer our thoughts to the Lord, our words will be heart-felt, and therefore pronounced attentively, one by one.
I am certain that if we resolve to pray like this, then God will be our Teacher.
…
Let us be humble. Let us have the certainty of our nothingness before God, knowing that the only thing that makes us truly human is the breath that our God and Creator has breathed into us. In every other respect we are earth, and earth is trodden underfoot.”
–The Hidden Man of the Heart by Archimandrite Zacharias, pgs. 30-31
God’s Peace,
john
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September 4, 2010 at 1:17 am
Ocean City
For a half a century I too often clearly notice that many of the Orthodox persons I know they do not practice what their church preaches still. My very religious Orthodox father used to often visit the grave site of many of his deceased friends to pray for them but my father was never known to be charitable or kind to anyone , not even to himself. He used to justify it by saying to me why should I do something good to someone else when they never did anything good to me. Many orthodox persons do honor and venerate St. John to a extreme such as my father also had often did too but I had often wondered why when my father was never willing to make the needed personal changes in his own life, to bring fruit worthy of repentances.. Maybe that was why they admired St John so much cause he did make the necessary changes. All People who are willfully disobedient to God, falsely still insist on doing their own thing and not doing it God’s way will next miss the boat, and they will not enter into heaven.. for God does not bless disobediences. Cain was a good example of this.