Frederica Mathewes-Green Quotes & Sayings

Of the seven deadly sins, anger has long been the one with the best box of costumes. When the guy in the next car rages at you, he's dangerous. When you rage at him, you're just. We can usually recognize the results of anger, especially in others, as destructive and evil. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

We want a just-my-size God, fluffy and approachable, without all those picky commandments. But once we get him down to teddy-bear size we find that he is powerless. He is not able to ease our suffering or comprehend our dark confusions; he does not have strength equal to our grief. A reduced God is no God at all. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

People don't do theology in a vacuum but in a community with other theological thinkers, where there's jealousy, vanity, hurt pride, all those things. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

The New Testament Scriptures are full of references to the malice of the devil, but we generally overlook them. I think this is because our idea of salvation is that Christ died on the cross to pay His Father the debt for our sins. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Easter may seem boring to children, and it is blessedly unencumbered by the silly fun that plagues Christmas. Yet it contains the one thing needful for every human life: the good news of Resurrection. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

I was raised in a nominal Roman Catholic home, but without any really strong faith there. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

My mother was an unbeliever - and still is. My father was a nominal Catholic. We would go in to church at the last minute before the gospel reading, take Communion, and walk right out again. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

In communities, at work, but particularly in families, people are put together in something like a three-legged race. God means us to cross the finish line together, and all the other people tied together with us play some part in our progress. They are oftentimes to rouse our stubborn sins to the surface, where we can deal with them and overcome them. Bundled together in families, a giant seven or nine or fifteen legged pack, we seem to make very poor progress indeed and fall to the ground in bickering heaps with some regularity. But God has put us together - has appointed each person in your bundle specifically for you, and you for them. And so, 'little children, let us love one another' with might and main, and keep hopping together toward the finish line. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

The Christmas story has such power and such appeal every year. There are other stories we get tired of. You think of your favorite movie; you don't want to watch it 15 times. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

The Church's teaching isn't an official statement, but the cumulative understanding of all the people who have loved and experienced Jesus through time. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Women and men just aren't that different. Oh, we're different in some intriguing ways, and it can be fun to band together for all-gal or all-guy projects. But when it comes to the tragic mess Christ came to heal, we're pretty much the same. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

As I ponder my pilgrim's progress to Orthodoxy, however, I realize that I didn't make the trip alone, but in a two-seater. And I wasn't the one driving. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Like an animal caught in a trap, trying to gnaw off its own leg, a woman who seeks abortion is trying to escape a desperate situation by an act of violence and self-loss. Abortion is not a sign that women are free, but a sign that they are desperate. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Jesus showed us how to be courageous and sacrificial while we die for our beliefs, not while we kill for them. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Beauty must mean something. God must know something about how beauty works on the human heart. He must have made us that way. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Dusty, dark, cold, and hard, coal has no beauty of its own, but when it is consummated by fire it is beautiful and becomes what it was designed to be. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Women don't need to have our own little corner of the church where we can feel precious or, alternatively, cranky. In every essential thing, as far as life in Christ is concerned, the differences between men and women are irrelevant. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

It is not a loss of inert, amorphous tissue, but of a growing being unique in history. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Disaster movies do us the psychological service of forcing a quick march through the worst that could happen. At the end we see that you win a few, you lose a few, some cars are up in trees, and only the most attractive of the young people have survived. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

What's wrong with us isn't a rap sheet of bad deeds, but a damaged heart, a soul-sickness, that plunges us into fearful self-protection, alienation from God and others. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Everyone wants to transform, but nobody wants to change. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

I think intellectualizing annoys me because it is the enemy of experience; you cannot experience the presence of God and analyze it at the same time. You can't analyze anything and experience it simultaneously. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

After I graduated from college, while traveling around Europe, hitchhiking, doing the tourist thing, I went into a church in Dublin. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

I know by experience that Jesus Christ is a very powerful spirit - I know by experience that he is probably the most powerful spirit in the universe. I know by experience he is not a mere human being. He is something beyond that. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

It is tragic that some Christians have been so battered with stories of a prideful, vindictive God that they have fled from Jesus' fold. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Easter tells us of something children can't understand, because it addresses things they don't yet have to know: the weariness of life, the pain, the profound loneliness and hovering fear of meaninglessness. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

As a teenager and a student, I totally cast away the Christian faith. I just believed it was stupid, and only stupid people could believe it. I actually became an anti-Christian, and very antagonistic. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

God is not looking for repayment, but repentance. What heals a broken relationship is sincere love and contrition. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

There are lots of things to like about being Eastern Orthodox - incense, liturgies, all the baklava you can eat - but you know what I like best? None of that stupid 'women's ministry' stuff. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

The devil's main purpose is not to scare us, in a horror-movie way; when we're scared of him, we're alert to him, and that might undermine his plans. Instead, he wants to quietly, subtly lure us into stepping away from God. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Sex is still the leading cause of pregnancy. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

The Church is the safe place to be. I can safely believe everything the Church teaches. It will not harm me, and in fact it will equip me to grow and grow and have a better and better ability to experience that direct presence. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

God's presence is not just Light, and Life, but Love. And Love invites, but does not compel. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

I've been able to dig deeper into awareness of my own sinfulness, and take baby steps toward spiritual healing. I'm able to worship in an ancient communion full of awesome beauty, one that is now being blessed with quiet revival. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

The Orthodox hierarchy doesn't have the kind of power that high-ranking clergy do in other churches. There isn't even a worldwide governing board to hold all the various Orthodox bodies together. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Somehow we just don't make the same boisterous fun of Holy Week that we do of Christmas. No one plans to have a holly, jolly Easter. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

A segregated spiritual subculture does women no good, even if it does have adorable butterflies in the logo. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Someone who wanted to challenge Orthodoxy would not be able to locate a building to hold a protest march in front of. The faith is too diffused. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

No woman wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Lots of Orthodox go to church every Sunday but don't know much about the faith. Yet they know that there is something that they don't know much about. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Jesus didn't come to save us just from the penalty of our sins; he came to save us from our sins - now, today, if we will only respond to the challenge and let him. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Temptation coaxes us toward sin, and sin leads to sickness and death, and ultimately confinement in the realm of the evil one. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

The Bible, that powerful book, has many effects: it comforts, counsels, instructs, and brings us into the presence of God. But trying to erase offense as one of its functions is a fundamentally misguided task. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

You can latch onto theological ideas that are, in fact, not accurate, and refuse to let them go. I think we've seen this a few times in church history. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

Could a body broken and blood spilled two thousand years ago restore my own damaged life? — Frederica Mathewes-Green