Jon LaFlamme

“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.” - Rumi

“The way to God lies through love of other people, and there is no other way.” - Mother Maria of Paris

“Being microcosm, man is also mediator. It is his God-given task to reconcile and harmonize the noetic and the material realms, to bring them to unity, to spiritualize the material, and to render manifest all the latent capacities of the created order.” - Kallistos Ware

“We have a culture where people bow themselves before money, before food, before the flesh, before power, before almost anything but the things of God. Our hearts are thus poisoned, and our vision becomes clouded.” - Stephen Freeman

“Self-love is hell; for, carried to its ultimate conclusion, self-love signifies the end of all joy and all meaning. Hell is not other people; hell is myself, cut off from others in self-centeredness.”

- Kallistos Ware

“There is an integral connection betweer

our love for one another and our faith in the Trinity: the first is a precondition for the second, and in its turn the second gives full strength and meaning to the first.” - Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way

“The reduction of time to a literal, linear model has been among the most reductionist occurrences in the course of Christian history and has distorted the nature of our retelation with Christ perhaps more than any other occurrence, historic, ideological, or otherwise.” - Stephen Freeman

“We should think, not of God the Manufacturer or God the Craftsman, but of God the Lover.” - Kallistos Ware

“I know that the Immovable comes down;

I know that the Invisible appears to me;

I know that he who is far outside the whole creation

Takes me within himself and hides me in his arms,

And then I find myself outside the whole world.

I, a frail, small mortal in the world,

Behold the Creator of the world, all of him, within myself;

And I know that I shall not