Quotes from Frederica Mathewes-Green

Beauty must mean something. God must know something about how beauty works on the human heart. He must have made us that way.

Thinking and talking about God is not communion with God. Only prayer is prayer.

We want a just-my-size God, fluffy and approachable, without all those picky commandments. But once we get him down to teddy-bear size we find that he is powerless. He is not able to ease our suffering or comprehend our dark confusions; he does not have strength equal to our grief. A reduced God is no God at all.

A scholar attracts by his knowledge, a wealthy man by riches, a handsome man by beauty, an artist by his skill. Only love attracts all human beings. The attraction of love is unlimited. And educated and uneducated, rich or poor, skilled or unskilled, beautiful or ugly, healthy or sick, and young or old—all want to be loved. Christ spread his love on everyone, and lovingly drew all to himself. With his great love he encompassed even the dead, long decomposed and forgotten by men.

Easter tells us of something children can't understand, because it addresses things they don't yet have to know: the weariness of life, the pain, the profound loneliness and hovering fear of meaninglessness.

Though we deserve your wrath, you instead always give us compassion.

C. S. Lewis wrote that we think at first God is going to turn us into a "decent little cottage," but as deep, wrenching changes continue to be made, we realize that he is building a palace. "He intends to come and live in it himself.

God loves us and saves us because we are his. It's difficult for us to grasp how absolute his side of the relationship is; he loves us even while we are sinners, and nothing can halt or deflect the force of his love. He is love, and his love fills the universe.

When we join ourselves to Christ, when we believe in him and follow him as Lord, his life flows into us like a transfusion of blood into a weak patient.

Christ frees us, not just from the penalty for sin, but from sin itself (John 1:29).

if the Bible was meant to say anything, it was meant to say it within a community,

Then heart and soul, body and mind, memory and will, the very breath of life itself, everything that you have and are unites in gratitude and joy, tuned like a violin string to the name of Jesus. This "descent" is a gift of the Holy Spirit, not something you can force. So you may say that you are practicing the Jesus Prayer,

Christ Ransomed, Redeemed, Delivered, and Saved us from the power of Death. As long as we cling to him, repenting of our sins and resisting them as best we can, we are saved.

Orthodox spirituality recognizes delusion as a genuine danger (plani in Greek, prelest in Russian). The sure sign of someone far gone in delusion is a refusal to consider that she might be wrong.

The Jesus Prayer teaches you how to "lean just right," combining joy, trust, penitence, and gratitude, so you can find yourself in his presence.

The love we give is often impetuous, beguiled by superficial things, and if those things alter, it could fade. Familiarity alone can be enough to exhaust our enthusiasm.

The ancient Orthodox understanding of the Cross is that Christ went heroically into the depths of Hades and destroyed its power; he rescued us and set us free. The Father forgives our sins without satisfaction, payment, or penalty. Christ offers himself to the Father as a sacrifice, not a payment.

Undoubtedly, he suffered on the Cross, but icons don't depict him in agony. They show him as our rescuer, the great hero of our salvation story.

when we're suffocated by the world's distractions, it can be easy to avoid God. But we're also quite capable of spending our time pondering the great questions instead of dealing with God. Thinking and talking about God is not communion with God. Only prayer is prayer. Both worldly distractions and theoretical cogitating can be used to avoid the challenge that ultimately faces each of us: that we are called to enter a direct, personal relationship with God,

It's like we're born with a memory of something we've never seen. We yearn to return to a place we've never been. We mourn that loss and seek it every day, no matter what our religion, or none.

In Euro-American Christianity, "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23) means that the punishment for sin is death. It's like saying that the punishment for speeding is a fine. But in Orthodoxy, "the wages of sin is death" means that sin is death. The two are inextricably enmeshed: sin causes death, and fear of death causes sin.

Death is the result of sin, not a punishment. It is a consequence.

We are pitiable, and God pities us. With God's merciful help, we begin to heal. Progress is not very discernible in the midst of the fray, but over time it becomes clear that we are indeed fighting off the infection and gradually getting stronger, less fretful, more loving.

It is like leaning over the edge of a canyon and feeling the wind whip by. Any illusions about your significance are wiped away; you realize how puny and inconsequential you are. And yet the beauty is so intoxicating that you only crave more. You long to have a bigger heart that could take it all in. That's a taste of what "the fear of the Lord" means.