"Sobriety is a great virtue. And like all great virtues it is acquired through ascetic labor and prayer."

I don't know about you, but I’m tired, even exhausted, of only being part human.

Depression among the saints is not a state of mental illness. It is not a maladjustment to the world. On the contrary, it is a spiritual state.

What seems to be oppressive — long prayers services, modesty, fasting, and so on — is the medicine necessary to bring us back to life.

Do not fear mystery. Rather, embrace it!

Anxiety grips so many of us these days. How often I find myself awake in the black of night anxious, worried, uneasy.

One of the most beautiful characteristics of St. Makarios the Great is that he frequently wept when he spoke to others.

“I’m only human,” we so often affirm. Lord have mercy! “Only human?” What, precisely, does that mean? That I can’t, or more accurately, I don’t want to change? That all my failures, all my miseries, all my shortcomings, all my accomplishments, and all my joys are a matter of fate and destiny? This, in my mind, is the most apathetic proclamation that a human can make.

Rarely does one sit quietly for a long enough time to begin plumbing the depths of one’s soul

So many of us do not seem to realize — or perhaps in more honest terms, we suppress — the fact that if we pursue holiness and attain godliness the world will change for the better.

Life, it seems to me, is so often an exercise in waiting. How we wait and, more importantly, on Whom we wait, is what makes the difference between treading a path towards death or treading a path towards life.

It is in this very unity of the visible and the invisible, of the divine and the human that the dignity and beauty of humanity as God meant it to be can be found.