Finding Christ

“…all goodness and beauty in this world possesses an intrinsic value because it comes from God and participates in Him. Accordingly, we do not need our loves to diminish, but we need to renew and rightly order them. The Holy Spirit can help us orient our loves toward God, the proper object of all longing.” (Robin Phillips)

“It is not that we find God and then realize that God created us from nothing. Rather, it is only in finding our own nothingness and embracing it that we realize God exists. For only an encounter with nothingness takes us far enough outside our world for us to realize that there is a giver of being who does not belong to it. In seemingly making ourselves ‘nothing’, in God’s eyes we become everything God wants us to be.” (Jerome Miller, Fr. Ted Bobosh)

“God is in the silence of man’s heart, in his humility…He comes into contact with our lives in silence and intimate quiet of our hearts. This feeling is more precious than the most precious treasure: gold or a diamond of the highest cut—they mean nothing compared to the grace, the significance and the meaning that fill the life of a man who comes to realize his closeness to God. What is it? Is it another kind of life, new circumstances, time and place? Yes and no. Even in tempest and thunderstorms, in the midst of the chaos and the noise of the big cities, God is in the silence of the heart, if a man desires it. When we seek Him out and welcome Him, we come to the understanding that, “This is not just my utmost and choice possession; it is also what God wants me to have.” He expects and desires that a man hear his inner voice in order to understand his own self, made in His image, for it to become something highly desirable, precious and sought after in his life.” (Archpriest George Zavershinsky)

“…there are fruitful and unfruitful ways of seeking God. There is a difference between groping for God in the darkness of ignorance and finding God in the light of revelation. Our seeking of the Lord must have a different basis than those who construct idols, starve themselves, empty their minds by meditation, induce visions and trances, go on pilgrimages, punish themselves, create fables, or try to capture God by reason. None of these things have given their adherents a personal relationship with God as near as He is to us. No, we would know nothing of God except his power and deity (Romans 1:20) and that He is ineffable, invisible, and incomprehensible unless God had revealed Himself to us. The Lord Jesus proclaimed, “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him” (John 14:7). This is not merely a truth-claim. It does not merely prove the existence of God. It describes a way of knowing God.” (Fr. Basil)

“The gracious acts of Christ our God are the foundation of our proclamation of salvation. They are the essence of the message we call divine revelation. The human race has devoted many hours to finding the key to the ultimate reality – to finding the God from whom comes life. Our human efforts have produced the world’s wide array of religions and philosophies. Only when God deliberately reveals Himself to us in human flesh, however, do we find our way into the infallible community that joins humanity to God. This revelation occurs at God’s initiative, to His chosen witnesses.” (Dynamis 11/26/2020)

“The Apostles were not directed to make Christ’s tomb into a shrine of spiritual pilgrimage. They were rather to help people find Christ who was not to be found at the empty tomb. The emptiness of the tomb points elsewhere. We are to find Christ in His people, the Body of Christ, the Church, not in an empty tomb. We are all to be seeking the Living Christ – and He lives in the heavens, He lives with the saints, He lives with the angels, He lives in our hearts, He lives in the Scriptures, He lives in the sacraments, He lives in believers. We are to look for Christ among the living and that is where we are to direct others so they too can find Him. The implication is clear as well as daunting – people won’t find Jesus in shrines, but in the living people of God, in other words in us believers!” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)

“What are some ways we can find Christ today, in American society?...Christ is in you…He is God, and God is within you. God is in our consciences, in our hearts, in our minds. He is not something material you see outside of yourself. You find God in yourself. You descend in your personality. We are eternal, we never die, the body goes to the cemetery but the conscience, the person, is continually alive. So when you descend into yourself, your conscious is infinite. And this infinity is the temple of the Living God. Saint Paul says many times that you are the temple of the Living God because God lives within you. You find God when you know yourself, when you know who you are. If you neglect that, when you say, “I don’t have time to think about myself,” you will never find God, because God is not something material. You do not find him in a specific place. God is always with you if you want Him to be with you. You find God when you find yourself. “Who am I?” Pay attention to these verses of the Scriptures—“you are the temple of the Living God because God lives within you,” and as Jesus said, “remain in Me and I in you. I am the vine and you are the branches,” and if you do not remain in me you do not have the sap to feed yourself, and you will dry up. People who complain that they do not feel God are dry branches. They have to remain in Christ and to accept Christ by saying, “Lord, come, I am here. You created me. Open my heart because You created this heart. You created the door, enter please.” (Archimandrite Roman Braga)

“But my thoughts say to me that we can only find Christ within our shame (both the toxic and the good). We find Him within the toxic because Christ has descended into hell and purposed to meet us there. That purposeful meeting is for our healing, our liberation and re-creation whenever we dare to go there. But He is also within the good shame as we behold His wonder and His glory and accept our own emptiness in their presence. And in that moment and place, what is empty is filled – what is naked is clothed upon. The soul becomes a mirror for His glory.” (Father Stephen Freeman)

“Those looking to find Christ may enjoy our holy worship and grow to appreciate the Holy Spirit through our precious icons; however, if they don’t discover the Lord Jesus in our faces, they will go away unfulfilled. Jesus promised to be where two or three are gathered. It means that we are a family invited into His holy Family. The implications are that we belong to one another in Him, and we are to share that precious gift with all others. Salvation is not a private affair between the Lord and you. One Christian is no Christian, an ancient adage states.” (Fr. Vladimir Berzonsky)

“We have to challenge ourselves and our perceptions to truly find Christ in every person that we come across.” (OCPM)

#FrTedBobosh #ArchimandriteRomanBraga #FatherStephenFreeman #FrVladimirBerzonsky #OCPM #RobinPhillips #JeromeMiller #ArchpriestGeorgeZavershinsky #FrBasil #Dynamis