Alexander Schmemann quotes:

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  • Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence...To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that 'something more' is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.

  • Every evil screams only one message: 'I am good.'

  • In the process of replacing the old religions, Christianity became a religion.

  • To be more precisedeath is [contrary to] God, and if death is natural, if it is the ultimate truth about life and about the world, if it is the highest and immutable law about all of creation, then there is no God, then this whole story about creation, about joy, and about the light of life is a total lie.

  • Love is the essence of the holiness of the Church.

  • The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world.

  • If the Church is in Christ, its initial act is always the act of thanksgiving, of returning the world to God.

  • Principles are what people have instead of God.

  • Academic theology is false.

  • Whether we "spiritualize" our life or "secularize" our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at the secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave his only begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp.

  • Man is a hungry being. But he is hungry for God. Behind all the hunger of our life is God. All desire is finally a desire for Him.

  • For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is the communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.

  • How torturous is the "churchly" language one must speak in church - the tone, style, habit. It is all artificial; there is a total absence of a simple human language. With what a sigh of relief one leaves this world of cassocks, and kissing and church gossip. As soon as one leaves, one sees: wet bare branches, fog which floats over fields, trees, homes. Sky. Early dusk. And it all tells an incredibly simple truth.

  • It seems to me that any ideology is bad because it is inevitably reductive and identifies other ideologies as evil, and itself with truth, whereas both truth and goodness are always transcendent.

  • We should have understood long ago that there is, in this world, religion without God, religion as a center of all idols that possess fallen man, religion that is the justification for these idols.

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