Saint Porfyrios Kavsolkalyvitis

 

Enjoy everything around us. Everything teaches us and brings us to God. Everything around is a drop of God’s love. The animate, the inanimate, plants and animals, birds and mountains, the sea, the sunset and the starry sky. They’re little loves, through which we come to the great love, Christ. Flowers, for example, have their own grace; they teach us through their fragrance, through their magnificence. They speak to us of God’s love. They bestow their fragrance, their beauty on sinners and on the righteous alike. If you want to be a Christian, you have to have a poetic soul, you have to become a poet… Prayer is approaching every one of God’s creatures with love and living in harmony with all of them, even the wild ones.

I thank God who’s given me so many illnesses. I often say to him: ‘Christ, your love knows no bounds’. It’s a miracle that I’m alive at all. Amongst my other illnesses, I’ve got cancer in the pituitary gland. There’s a tumor there that’s growing and putting pressure on the optic nerve. This is why I can’t see any more. I’m in terrible pain. But I pray, taking up the Cross of Christ with patience. […] I’m in a lot of pain, I’m suffering, but my illness is a very good thing. I feel it as Christ’s love…

My illness is a special favor from God, who’s inviting me to enter into the mystery of his love, and, through his grace, to try and respond. But I’m not worthy. You’ll say: ‘God’s revealed so much to you and you’re not worthy?’. But that’s what condemns me. Because all of it is God’s grace. I’ve got nothing of my own. God gave me many gifts, but I’ve fallen short. I’ve shown myself to be unworthy. But I never stopped trying even for a moment… This is why I don’t pray for God to make me well. I pray for him to make me good… Death’s a bridge that’ll take us to Christ. As soon as we close our eyes, we’ll open them in eternity. We’ll stand before Christ. In the next life we’ll experience God’s grace ‘more markedly’.

Source: pemptousia.com


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Pemptousia Partnership

Pemptousia and OCN have entered a strategic partnership to bring Orthodoxy Worldwide. Greek philosophers from Ionia considered held that there were four elements or essences (ousies) in nature: earth, water, fire and air. Aristotle added ether to this foursome, which would make it the fifth (pempto) essence, pemptousia, or quintessence. The incarnation of God the Word found fertile ground in man’s proclivity to beauty, to goodness, to truth and to the eternal. Orthodoxy has not functioned as some religion or sect. It was not the movement of the human spirit towards God but the revelation of the true God, Jesus Christ, to man. A basic precept of Orthodoxy is that of the person ­– the personhood of God and of man. Orthodoxy is not a religious philosophy or way of thinking but revelation and life standing on the foundations of divine experience; it is the transcendence of the created and the intimacy of the Uncreated. Orthodox theology is drawn to genuine beauty; it is the theology of the One “fairer than the sons of men”. So in "Pemptousia", we just want to declare this "fifth essence", the divine beaut in our life. Please note, not all Pemptousia articles have bylines. If the author is known, he or she is listed in the article above.

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