This reading is from "Wounded by Love: The Life and the Witness of Saint Porphyrios", pp. 107-109 & 96-99

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St. Porphyrios writes:

Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet. That's what it is! You must suffer. You must love and suffer—suffer for the one you love. Love makes effort for the loved one. She runs all through the night; she stays awake; she stains her feet with blood in order to meet her beloved. She makes sacrifices and disregards all impediments, threats and difficulties for the sake of the loved one. Love towards Christ is something even higher, infinitely higher.

When you love Christ you exert yourself, but in blessed exertions. You suffer, but with joy. You make prostrations and pray because these are things you crave for with divine craving. They are at once pain and longing, passion and yearning and exaltation and joy and love. Prostrations and vigils and fasting are exertions which are made for the Beloved, exertions in order to experience Christ. But this exertion is not made under duress; you don't protest and rebel. Whatever you do under compulsion is very harmful both to you and to the work you are doing. The pressure and coercion provoke opposition. Exertion for Christ, true desire for Christ, is love, sacrifice and dissolution of self. This is also how David felt: My soul longs and faints for the courts of the Lord. My soul longs with craving and melts away out of love for God (Psalm 83:2).

Christ is joy, the true light, happiness. Christ is our hope. Our relation to Christ is love, eros, passion, enthusiasm, longing for the divine. Christ is everything. He is our love. He is the object of our desire. This passionate longing for Christ is a love that cannot be taken away. This is where joy flows from.

Qur task is to attempt to find a way to enter into the light of Christ.

Christ is life, the source of life, the source of joy, the source of the true light, everything. Whoever loves Christ and other people truly lives life. Life without Christ is death; it is hell, not life. That is what hell is—the absence of love. Life is Christ. Love is the life of Christ. Either you will be in life or in death. It's up to you to decide.

The Christian feels for everyone, he wants all to be saved, all to taste the Kingdom of God. That is Christianity: through love for our brother to arrive at love for God.

That is what preoccupies me. I try to find ways to love Christ. This love is never sated. However much you love Christ, you always think that you don't love Him and you long all the more to love him. And without being aware of it, you go higher and higher!

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Orthodox Wisdom is dedicated to sharing the writings and lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church. Glory to Jesus Christ!