When you squeeze an orange, you find out what’s in it: sweet, sour, or even sometimes rotten. Stress does the same thing with most people, in my experience. Stress reveals what is in our hearts, and it is usually not nearly as sweet as we thought it would be. But that is a gift. St. Isaac tells us that to know your own heart is a gift greater than the raising of…
“For even profitable words, spoken without measure, produce darkness, how much more so does vain talk.” (St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 48) I feel a little crazy sometimes, like an idiot—not a godly, holy idiot, just a plain, old-fashioned idiot: the kind that boasts of humility and speaks about the virtue of silence. It seems strange to feel compelled to talk about the virtues of silence. Perhaps I am my own negative…
First let us force ourselves to be silent, and then from out of this silence something is born that leads us into Silence itself. May God grant you to perceive some part of that which is born of silence. St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 64 I’m at an archdiocese convention in Chicago, in a huge hotel with hundreds and hundreds of people. Last night, I went to a Cubs game with some…
