Love (Worldly)
“… together with this law of self-sacrifice, there’s another universal law—the law of self-preservation. Here the law of love is as if divided in twain: love as life for others and love as life for yourself. But these two laws aren’t mutually exclusive; they don’t destroy each other, but only limit each other and thereby equalize the life of creatures. As light and darkness, heat and cold exist side-by-side, so do the laws of self-sacrifice for the good of others and of self-preservation for the good of ourselves. We are speaking about these two laws because nowadays some teach that everything that exists is held together by one law, which they call “survival of the fittest.” Thus, they deny the meaning of the law of self-renunciation for the benefit of others; although this law, like life for others, or self-sacrifice, is of paramount importance. But when, as a result of sinful damage to their nature, people began to be guided in their lives primarily by the law of self-preservation, and therefore began to enter into a struggle for their existence and consequently began to neglect the law of self-sacrifice, the law of love…” (St. Makary Nevsky)
“It is terribly tragic when people fall into the delusion of thinking that they love God and neighbor, when in reality they are using religion to serve only themselves and perhaps others with whom they identify for some worldly reason. We do that when we narrow down the list of people who count as our neighbors to the point that we excuse ourselves from serving Christ in all who bear His image and likeness…we disregard not only them but also our Lord Himself, the God-Man born for the salvation of all. Our actions then reveal that we are not truly conforming our character to His. Instead of uniting ourselves to Christ to the point that we convey His mercy to all His living icons, we serve only ourselves with our vain imaginations of being truly religious and moral.” (Fr. Philip LeMasters)
“The world was created with love that is greater than worldly love, and believers begin to love that love, to serve it amid all that is encountered in the world, all of the trials and tests the soul faces in preparing itself for its higher, eternal existence...The Gospel states that who has been faithful over a few things will be faithful over many things. The purpose and meaning of our earthly existence is to ascend through this brief, temporal, life, to eternal life on high.” (Archbishop John Shahovskoy)
“…the world has indeed been overcome, though not destroyed; it’s still alive and still hates those who are Christ’s or who try to be so. The world, having been conquered by faith and captured in its obedience, and thus admitted into its domain, imperceptibly brought its own spirit with it and spread it within. Thus, this enemy of Christ and Christianity found itself within the bounds of Christianity itself; and having covered itself with the name of the Christian world, it acts freely and establishes a worldly Christianity for itself. It strives to transform the sons of faith back into sons of the world, to prevent the sons of the world from being reborn into true Christian life; and against those who disobey it, it arms itself with hatred, cunning, scandal, slander, contempt, and every weapon of unrighteousness.” (St. Seraphim Chichagov)
“Christ is the nexus, the crucial center point, of a chiastic exchange between the created and the Uncreated, and, in general, chiastic exchange is the very definition of love; there is no love without chiasm because love always means the willingness to make way for the other so completely that we come to be a sacrament of them, to live our own unique life in such a way that we also become the epiphany of their life to those who see us. When in Christ we die “for the life of the world,” we ourselves become the very best examples of what this world was meant to have been in Christ.” (Timothy G. Patitsas)
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