欧宝娱乐

“No act of virtue can be great if it is not followed by advantage for others. So, no matter how much time you spend fasting, no matter how much you sleep on a hard floor and eat ashes and sigh continually, if you do no good to others, you do nothing great.”
― John Chrysostom

“God is not interested in your art but, your heart.”
― Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

“O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, faintheartedness, lust of power, and idle talk.

鈥淏ut give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to your servant.

鈥淵ea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own sin and not to judge my brother, for You are blessed from all ages to all ages. Amen”
― St. Ephraim the Syrian

“A guilty suffering spirit is more open to grace than an apathetic or smug soul.' - Bread & Wine (day 5)”
― Edna Hong

“Lent is a time for discipline, for confession, for honesty, not because God is mean or fault- finding or finger-pointing but because he wants us to know the joy of being cleaned out, ready for all the good things he now has in store.”
― N.T. Wright

“At start of spring I open a trench
In the ground. I put into it
The winter鈥檚 accumulation of paper,
Pages I do not want to read
Again, useless words, fragments,
errors. And I put into it
the contents of the outhouse:
light of the suns, growth of the ground,
Finished with one of their journeys.
To the sky, to the wind, then,
and to the faithful trees, I confess
my sins: that I have not been happy
enough, considering my good luck;
have listened to too much noise,
have been inattentive to wonders,
have lusted after praise.
And then upon the gathered refuse,
of mind and body, I close the trench
folding shut again the dark,
the deathless earth. Beneath that seal
the old escapes into the new.”
― Wendell Berry, New Collected Poems

“Thus on Easter we celebrate Christ鈥檚 Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us. For each one of us received the gift of that new life and the power to accept it and to live by it. It is a gift which radically alters our attitude toward everything in this world, including death. It makes it possible for us joyfully to affirm: "Death is no more!" Oh, death is still there, to be sure and we still face it and someday it will come and take us. But it is our whole faith that by His own death Christ changed the very nature of death, made it a passage鈥攁 "passover," a "Pascha"鈥攊nto the Kingdom of God, transforming the tragedy of tragedies into the ultimate victory. "Trampling down death by death," He made us partakes of His Resurrection. This is why at the end of the Paschal Matins we say: "Christ is risen and life reigneth! Christ is risen and not one dead remains in the grave!”
― Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha

“I imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious antineighborliness of our economy, a great departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, a great departure from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And then an arrival in a new neighborhood, because it is a gift to be simple, it is a gift to be free; it is a gift to come down where we ought to be.”
― Walter Brueggemann, A Way Other Than Our Own: Devotions for Lent

“We suffer these things and they fade form memory. But daily, hourly, to give up our own possessions and especially to subordinate our own impulses and wishes to to others - these are hard, hard things; and I don't think they ever get any easier.

You can strip yourself, you can be stripped, but still you will reach out like an octopus to seek your own comfort, your untroubled time, your ease, your refreshment. It may mean books or music - the gratification of the inner sense - or it may mean food and drink, coffee and cigarettes. The one kind of giving up is no easier than the other.”
― Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

“The cross is not the suffering tied to natural existence, but the suffering tied to being Christians. The cross is never simply a matter of suffering, but a matter of suffering and rejection for the sake of Jesus Christ, not for the sake of some other arbitrary behavior or confession.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“...the liturgical traditions of the Church, all its cycles and services, exist, first of all, in order to help us recover the vision and the taste of that new life which we so easily lose and betray, so that we may repent and return to it. ... It is through her liturgical life that the Church reveals to us something of that which "the ear has not heard, the eye has not seen, and what has not yet entered the heart of man, but which God has prepared for those who love Him." And in the center of that liturgical life, as its heart and climax, as the sun whose rays penetrate everywhere, stands Pascha.”
― Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha

“...a guilty suffering spirit is more open to grace than an apathetic or smug soul. Therefore, an age without a sense of sin, in which people are not even sorry for not being sorry for their sins, is in a serious predicament. Likewise an age with a Christianity so eager to forgive that it denies the need for forgiveness. For such an age, therefore, Lent can scarcely be too long!”
― Edna Hatlestad Hong, Downward Ascent

“So often we want Jesus to manage the effects of sin without actually addressing the root issue. But Jesus loves us too much to offer only a superficial solution. He knows the hidden sins of our hearts, and He lovingly insists on dealing with those first.”
― Asheritah Ciuciu, Uncovering the Love of Jesus: A Lent Devotional

“That it is Peter, the rock of the church, who incurs guilt here immediately after his own confession to Jesus Christ and after his appointment by Jesus, means that from its very inception the church itself has taken offense at the suffering Christ. It neither wants such a Lord nor does it, as the Church of Christ, want its Lord to force upon it the law of suffering.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Lent is a much-needed mentor in an age obsessed with visible, measurable, manageable, and tweetable increase, for it invites us to walk with Jesus and His disciples through darker seasons that we would rather avoid: grief, conflict, misunderstanding, betrayal, restriction, rejection, and pain. Then Easter leads us in celebration of salvation as the stunningly satisfying fruit of Jesus鈥� sacred decrease.”
― Alicia Britt Chole, 40 Days of Decrease: A Different Kind of Hunger. A Different Kind of Fast.

“Self-denial means knowing only Christ, and no longer oneself. It means seeing only Christ, who goes ahead of us, and no longer the path that is too difficult for us鈥� . Self-denial is saying only: He goes ahead of us; hold fast to him.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“When shame overwhelms us, grace still surrounds us.”
― Todd Stocker

“Fasting is a practise that frees us from the chains of this world, allowing us to hunger more freely.for God.”
― Allene vanOirschot

“It is impossible for those who tasted Christ to fall back upon the old foolish ways ,and if he or she does, then that act of commission or omission comes within the ambit of sin and that would indubitably imply that the person is 聽crucifying Christ all over again and exposing Him to contempt , being the bearer of His name ( Christian).”
― Henrietta Newton Martin, Author- The Greatest of All Romances, Your Potters Call.

“There is no defeat in the cross. Only triumph is to be found there.”
― Paul David Tripp, Journey to the Cross: A 40-Day Lenten Devotional

“We simply forget all this鈥攕o busy are we, so immersed in our daily preoccupations鈥攁nd because we forget, we fail. And through this forgetfulness, failure, and sin, our life becomes "old" again鈥攑etty, dark and ultimately meaningless鈥攁 meaningless journey toward a meaningless end. We manage to forget even death and then, all of a sudden, in the midst of our "enjoying life" it comes to us: horrible, inescapable, senseless.”
― Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha

“The lent period of fasting should be passionately pursued .”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Calea cea lent膬 e calea cea mai sigur膬.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Sixth Station Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus

Veronica advances without fear, notwithstanding the opposition of the executioners, the shouts of the crowd. Men today have not the courage of this humble woman to go to Jesus Christ. They dare not fulfill their Christian duties; they are afraid to be seen going to Mass; they fear still more to appear at the confessional and to kneel at the holy table.

Forgive, O my Lord, all these faults that are inspired by a cowardly human fear. O God of heaven and earth, Thou who art so good, so perfect, so powerful! Ah! if cowards have been weak enough to flee with the disciples, to deny Thee with Peter, let them be touched by the example of Veronica; let them come with her, to kneel at Thy feet and to recognize Thee as Master and God.”
― Rev. P.J. Buissink, Frequent Journeys to Calvary: Various Exercises for the Way of the Cross

“The liturgical year roots our faith. It grounds the invisible, animating our lives in the visible, tactile world. It is elemental. It drapes flesh on the skeletons of our too-ghostly religiosity. It connects heaven with earth, divine with human. It allows us to access the mysteries of our faith. In its feasts and fasts we taste and see God.”
― Wendy M. Wright, The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost

“the disciples鈥� illusions of what Jesus could and should do with His power were shattered by the reality of what Jesus actually did with His power, and their personal illusions of commitment-unto-death were shattered by the reality of fear-inspired self-protection.”
― Alicia Britt Chole, 40 Days of Decrease: A Different Kind of Hunger. A Different Kind of Fast.

“Fasting is denying the flesh the fleeting pleasures of this world.聽”
― Allene vanOirschot

“Shortly upon their departure, while I was at prayer in an attempt thus to replenish our supplies, since for lack of wafers (which had been stolen and consumed) I was not able to celebrate the Mass, one of the men cut off his own hand, to eat it. Weeping, he told us that since it was frozen, it was no good for aught else. For the cold did intensify our suffering so; the harshness of our own winters and the dangers of our glaciers are, in comparison, but the mildness of the gardens of Italica. The torments of hunger and cold were now augmented by the stench of putrefying flesh from the frozen limbs, too foul to bear description here on parchment. In my weakened state, I found the strength, as per Your Grace's instructions, to exercise my extremities, and thus did I avoid having to lose any myself. Alas, several of the men did not have such fortitude, and I was obliged to amputate more than one limb with the axe, sewing up the wounds with twine. Their groans tore from my heart what little feeling the cold had left there. I forbad them to do as their comrade had done by eating the rotting flesh from which I had severed them. One of them replied that the season was not Lent, and proceeded to devour his own toes. Compassion stayed me from punishing such blasphemy.”
― Bernard du Boucheron, The Voyage of the Short Serpent

“We hope that as Christians we mature and grow and become more and more like Christ. But the church and its wisdom assumes we will fail even after our baptism. The church presumes that life is long and zeal fades not just for some of us but for all. So it has included with it's life a season in which all of us recapture our love for God and his kingdom and cast off those things that so easily entangle us.”
― Esau McCaulley, Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal

“Keep the fasts, my dear; that's supremely important! Wednesdays and Fridays, well, God will overlook that; but Lent itself, God forbid!”
― Ivan Goncharov, The Same Old Story