Don’t criticize or judge other people—regard everyone else as an angel, justify their mistakes and weaknesses, and condemn only yourself as the worst sinner.  This is step one in any kind of spiritual life.

- Fr. Seraphim Rose

I was torn between a post about that quote and a post about how awesome Robinia is, so I suppose doing both isn’t a bad idea. It is a high bar, that quote. Fr. Seraphim has a way of setting a high bar, but also one for our century. At least that has been my experience when it comes to my limited knowledge of him. 

I don’t feel that I live up to that quote almost ever. I have it in the back of my mind and it nags me when I’m behaving in a flagrantly opposite way, but that’s reactionary most of the time, I’m afraid. 

One exception, perhaps the only exception with any consistency at all is how I treat Robinia. She has never done anything wrong nor will she. I’ve read several different versions of the idea that new parents become religious at higher than normal rates because we are given fresh insight into the way that God must love us, because that is how we love our children. 

Here’s another quote I, a wretched sinner, fail to live up to.

“I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. ...I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life -- namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.”

- CS Lewis

Another quote that applies primarily to Robinia and to myself. I like CS lewis more than Seraphim Rose, but I’ve read more of his books. I suppose we’ll see what happens as I find more time to read.