"Religious feeling, on the contrary, easily accepts a rupture between religion and life and gets along happily with ideas, convictions, sometimes entire worldviews that are not only alien to Christianity but frequently openly contradictory to it."
"We should not depend on sentiment in our relationship with God. Instead, we should be fortified by a faith that goes beyond our feelings."
"...you will not find these distressing symptoms in a cold, Pharisaic prayer performed for the sake of reward, praise or admiration from people. Far from it: in this guise the flesh accepts prayer and gets really quite keen about it. The practitioner gets up early to perform it in public. He or she makes a point of standing long hours in front of people and raising his or her voice. The person’s mind is agile and he or she recites his or her prayer with such studied reverence and painstaking scrupulosity, that people are amazed. Such prayer is a delight to the human ego. It reaps a carnal reward, as it promotes self-assertion rater than self-denial and self-deification rather than mortification. In this way it gets to be as attractive a proposition as making money: the flesh never gets bored with it, any more than with delicious food."
+ Fr Alexander Schmemann. "The Eucharist." Translated by Paul Kachur. (New York: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1987) 144.
"We should not depend on sentiment in our relationship with God. Instead, we should be fortified by a faith that goes beyond our feelings."
+ Fr Mattew the Poor, Guidelines on Prayer.
"...you will not find these distressing symptoms in a cold, Pharisaic prayer performed for the sake of reward, praise or admiration from people. Far from it: in this guise the flesh accepts prayer and gets really quite keen about it. The practitioner gets up early to perform it in public. He or she makes a point of standing long hours in front of people and raising his or her voice. The person’s mind is agile and he or she recites his or her prayer with such studied reverence and painstaking scrupulosity, that people are amazed. Such prayer is a delight to the human ego. It reaps a carnal reward, as it promotes self-assertion rater than self-denial and self-deification rather than mortification. In this way it gets to be as attractive a proposition as making money: the flesh never gets bored with it, any more than with delicious food."
+ Fr Mattew the Poor, contrasting the difficulty of authentic prayer, in Guidelines on Prayer.
"One of the characteristics of a genuinely healthy spiritual life is temperance. We know in ordinary speech what sobriety means in comparison to drunkenness. One can get drunk in various ways, and not only through wine. Everything that fascinates us so much that we no longer can remember God or ourselves, nor the basic values of life: this is a form of drunkenness. It has no connection to what I have called inspiration – the inspiration of a scholar, of an artist, to whom God has given the ability to see behind the outward form to that which surrounds it: a certain depth of being, which he can draw out and express in sounds, or lines, or colours so as to make it accessible to the people around it who were blind to it. But when we forget specifically that very meaning revealed by them and create an object of delight out of that which should be an object of contemplation – then we lose our sobriety. In Church life it happens so often and so destructively, when people come to church because of the singing, or because of the emotions that are aroused by the harmony of the mystery of the divine service, when God is no longer in the centre of everything but only the experience that is the fruit of his presence. The essential feature of Orthodox piety, of Orthodox spirituality, is sobriety, which transfers everything of value and its entire meaning from itself to God."
+ Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh: Essential Writings , 132-133.