“There – now you see the difference. To enjoy something means to become attached to it in love as though it were an ultimate good. To use something means gratefully accepting what has been given to help you reach your final destination. If we wish to return to our Heavenly Homeland, where alone we can truly be happy, we must use this world rather than make it our ultimate delight.
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“The question is not whether to love it, but how to love it rightly. Our citizenship is in heaven, says the Apostle, and from there we await the Savior. Remembering this does not mean despising the earth. It means refusing to demand from it what it could never give us in the first place – an unshakable foundation.
“Twice over. The person who remembers his true Homeland takes better care of the roadside inn than the one who mistakes it for his final home. Longing for the Heavenly City neither abolishes nor destroys anything on which earthly life depends. We obey human ordinances in pursuit of peace on earth – provided they do not conflict with our faith.
“Many people today look only at the ground and focus exclusively on themselves. This image calls us to lift our gaze upward, toward God and Heaven.
“You want to know why the city fell? Wait. Let me tell you about something else. There are two cities, built by two kinds of love. The earthly city was built by love of self carried to the point of contempt for God; the Heavenly City, by love of God carried to the point of contempt for self. The first glories in itself. The second glories in the power of the Lord.
“An essential component of pilgrimage is the willingness to make an effort, confirming once again what has already become an established principle: true joys are attained only through effort
“The Panagia thus reveals that the ultimate destiny of the human person is not merely moral improvement, but deification—the participation, by grace, in the life of God,