A biography for Frederica Mathewes-Greenhasn’t been written yet.
“God is not looking for repayment, but repentance. What heals a broken relationship is sincere love and contrition.”
“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.”
“After I graduated from college, while traveling around Europe, hitchhiking, doing the tourist thing, I went into a church in Dublin.”
“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.”
“People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Could a body broken and blood spilled two thousand years ago restore my own damaged life?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Jesus showed us how to be courageous and sacrificial while we die for our beliefs, not while we kill for them.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Temptation coaxes us toward sin, and sin leads to sickness and death, and ultimately confinement in the realm of the evil one.”
“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.”
“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.”