Hearts And Minds

"He keeps looking. It is what love does."

"Heaven is the experience of the illuminating energy of God. Hell is the experience of the burning energy of God. The one sun has two properties. It can illumine, and it can blind. It can warm, and it can burn."

"The branches are unique but all attached to the one Vine who gives them life."

Fr. John shares his speech from the The National March for Marriage in Washington D.C., and reflects upon his experience with the counter demonstration.

The journey of Christ-likeness ends in the cross where Christ dies in love for all of His enemies.

Nothing in life matters more than the purification of our souls and bodies, so that when we meet Christ in death he recognizes Himself in us.

Together, we are connected by the forgiveness we all need.

Let us remember to lean on each other. "A burden shared is half the burden. A joy shared is twice the joy."

The struggle is what we bring to God, only what we bring, because deliverance his His job.

Our Lord's desire is for each of us to have experiences with Him, to be able to say, "My Lord and my God," and to share that experience openly and freely with others.

The purpose of your life is to become by grace what God is by nature.

Fr. John shares his reflections on the priesthood in anticipation of the 2016 Antiochian Archdiocese Clergy Symposium to be held at the Antiochian Village in Bolivar, PA.

Love is too precious, too powerful, and too popular to mean anything we want it to. Instead, love needs definition and contour so that we may know what love is not, just as we may know what love is.

A martyr for Christ is someone who has good reasons to live, but a better reason to die.

God does not always remove the wave, but he does always give us himself.

Why work on ridding ourselves of excuses in this life? So we won't face the consequences of our excuses in the next.

"It's not the size of the crumb that turns it into a miracle; it's whether we can see it as a miracle at all."

We need both truth and love to row through the fog of this world.

An old proverbs says, "When you light a torch for another, you illumine your own path too."

"The soul can not know peace unless she prays for her enemies. If you will pray for your enemies peace will come to you." St. Silouan the Athonite