St. Augustine: "Shed over me Your light"

"GOD, OUR FATHER, who exhortest us to pray, who also bringest this about, that supplication is made to You; since when we make supplication to You, we live better, and are better: hear me groping in these glooms, and stretch forth Your right hand to me. Shed over me Your light, revoke me from my wanderings; bring Yourself into me that I may likewise return into You. Amen."

~St. Augustine: Soliloquies, Book II, 9.

St. John Climacus: "A Christian is an imitator of Christ"

“A transgressor is someone who observes the divine law only in his own depraved fashion and holds on to heretical belief in opposition to God. A Christian is an imitator of Christ in thought in thought, word and deed, as far as humanly possible, and he believes rightly and blamelessly in the Holy Trinity. A friend of God is the one who lives in communion with all that is natural and free from sin and who does not neglect to do what good he can.”

~St. John Climacus (A.D. 579 - 649): The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 1.

St. John of the Ladder

“God’s angry man, His crotchety scholar"

[Just for fun....a poem about the temperamental St. Jerome]

THE THUNDERER

God’s angry man, His crotchety scholar
Was Saint Jerome,
The great name-caller
Who cared not a dime
For the laws of Libel
And in his spare time
Translated the Bible.
Quick to disparage
All joys but learning
Jerome thought marriage
Better than burning;
But didn’t like woman’s
Painted cheeks;
Didn’t like Romans,
Didn’t like Greeks,
Hated Pagans
For their Pagan ways,
Yet doted on Cicero all of his days.

A born reformer, cross and gifted,
He scolded mankind
Sterner than Swift did;
Worked to save
The world from the heathen;
Fled to a cave
For peace to breathe in,
Promptly wherewith
For miles around
He filled the air with
Fury and sound.
In a mighty prose
For Almighty ends,
He thrust at his foes,
Quarreled with his friends,
And served his Master,
Though with complaint.
He wasn’t a plaster sort of a saint.

But he swelled men’s minds
With a Christian leaven.
It takes all kinds
To make a heaven.

—From Times Three: Selected Verses From Three Decades With Seventy New Poems, by Phyllis McGinley.

St. Gregory of Nyssa: "Consider your royal dignity!"

“O MAN, scorn not that which is admirable in you! You are a

poor thing in your own eyes, but I would teach you that in reality you are a great thing! . . . Realize what you are! Consider your royal dignity! The heavens have not been made in God’s image as you have, nor the moon, nor the sun, nor anything to be seen in creation. . . . Behold, of all that exists there is nothing that can contain your greatness.”

~St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – c. 395): In cantica, homily 2.