A “thank you, God” present Saint – Gregory the Theologian

Give something to God as a “thank you” present, for the fact that you’re one of those who can give charity rather than someone who has to live off it.

For the fact that you don’t expect help from the hands of others, but that others hope for it from yours.

Become light, and then give light: draw near to God, and so bring others near; St. Gregory the Theologian

St. Gregory the Theologian

The wounded Eagles of Theology

Here is a lovely passage from Oration 2 ,”In Defence of His Flight to Pontus, and His Return, After His Ordination to the Priesthood, with an Exposition of the Character of the Priestly Office”

For indeed the very best order of beginning every speech and action, is to begin from God, and to end in God.

For the guiding of man, the most variable and manifold of creatures, seems to me in very deed to be the art of artsand science of sciences.

Dirge , St. Gregory The Theologian

St. Gregory The Theologian

January 25th

The main message of Gregory’s poetry is the trust in God. It is in his poems and in his letters that we discover the human face of Gregory. Besides the saintly side of him: contemplation, ascetic endeavor, prayer, fasting, deprivations, here we see the common person that he was, very similar to us, with all his pains, doubts, problems, depressions, suffering, struggle…Gregory writes: “It is terrible when love is combined with power”He tells us that “we ought to think of God more often than we draw our breath” since prayer is the encounter of the thirst of God with our thirst. God thirsts that we thirst for him

Dirge

Woe is me! Just now that I press forward

ON THE DEATH & RESURRECTION OF CHRIST By St. Gregory the Theologian.

I come in with a Mystery, bringing with me the Day as a good defender of my cowardice and weakness; that He Who today rose again from the dead may renew me also by His Spirit; and, clothing me with the new Man, may give me to His New Creation, to those who are begotten after God, as a good modeller and teacher for Christ, willingly both dying with Him and rising again with Him.

Yesterday the Lamb was slain and the door-posts were anointed; Egypt bewailed her Firstborn; the Destroyer passed us over; the Seal was dreadful and reverend, and we were walled in with the Precious Blood. Today we have clean escaped from Egypt and from Pharaoh; and there is none to hinder us from keeping a Feast to the Lord our God—the Feast of our Departure; or from celebrating that Feast, not in the old leaven of malice and wickedness, but in the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, (1 Cor 5:8) carrying with us nothing of ungodly and Egyptian leaven.