I am all the time pondering the text: "If you were of the world, the world would love his own". Our sufferings are the sign that we are Christ's; and the more we suffer, then the more we "are not of the world". Why did all the saints, following Christ, suffer so much? Contact with the world and immersion in it gives pain to Christ's followers, while only the children of this world feel no pain. This is like an infallible chemical reaction.
Other people's opinion concerning us is that mirror before which all, almost without exception, pose. A man makes himself such as he wishes others to see him. But the real man, as he is in actual fact, is not known to anyone, including often even himself, while what lives and acts is a kind of fabricated and embellished figure. This striving for deception is so great that, distorting his nature, a man will sacrifice to it even his own self something unique and inimitable, which is what each human person is.
How captivating, then, is every encounter with a person free of this sore, and how we love the complete simplicity and directness in children who have not yet entered this zone of selfawareness. Yet a conscious struggle is possible, as is a coming to simplicity from this complicatedness. In any case, to realize the presence of this evil in oneself is half the battle.
In confession, a weak memory is no justification; forgetfulness comes from inattention, lack of seriousness, staleness and insensitivity toward sin. A sin that burdens the conscience is not forgotten.
It is a general habit not to speak of sins against the Seventh Commandment ("thou shalt not commit adultery"), as if this did not concern confession this, they say, is my private life; many living in illicit liaisons do not even mention them until you ask, considering this matter quite natural.
In confession, the most important thing is the state of the penitent's soul, no matter who is hearing the confession. It is your repentance that is important, and not he who is saying something to you. With us, though, the personality of the confessor is often erroneously given the primary place.
When a feeling of anger towards someone seizes you, then image that both you and he must die in the face of this, both his fault will become insignificant and your anger wrong, no matter how formally right it was.
Illness is the most favorable time for returning to one's own heart, to God. With recovery, this possibility again recedes into the endless distance.
The constant reproach against Christians is "your faith is not evident in any way. If you really believed in such astounding, tremendous things, you would live differently".
An answer "Don't you, after all, believe in the inevitability of your death? Not only do you believe, but you know for certain. Well, so what? does this tell powerfully upon the character of your life? it does not tell in the least".
Why is reading the lives of the saints so important? Amid the endless spectrum of paths to God revealed in the various lives, we can find our own path, receive help and an indication of how to get out of the thicket of our tangled human sinfulness onto the path toward the light.