Perhaps I am mistaken, but I suspect one of the problems involved in the pursuit of wisdom is that some folks fancy they are further along than they really are. I am thinking of those who read the Upanishads and Plato when they have yet to master Mother Goose.

Normally the simpler things come first: Grammar before logic. We crawl, and then walk. We take the pen in hand after we are competent with the pencil, and maybe the pencil should wait until we are sufficiently skilled with the crayon.

Saint John was born in 1758 in the village of Geraki in the southern Greek province of Monemvasia. He was born to a devout Orthodox Christian couple and his father was a priest in the village where they lived. The couple instilled in the child the Orthodox Christian faith and the lessons of Holy Scripture, and young John was a good and pious lad and increased in wisdom and the love of God.

Teaching children to fast is very basic in an Orthodox Christian upbringing, like teaching them to pray. The question of when and how strictly to have one's children begin fasting should be discussed with a spiritual father. If a family does not have a spiritual father and the family is involved in a parish where fasting is not encouraged, especially among the children, one should ask God to present the family with an opportunity to find a spiritual father who can guide the family in the True Orthodox Christian life.

Nothing on this earth is so important for both parents and children as prayer (cf., Ephesians 6:4; Psalm 33:11-15). All of the early writers, teachers, and Saints of Christianity, including the Holy Fathers of the Church, wrote on prayer as a part of the Living Tradition of the Faith.

The human spirit hungers for knowledge--for entire, integral knowledge. Nothing can destroy our longing to know and, naturally, our ultimate craving is for knowledge of Primordial Being, of Whom or What actually exists. All down the ages man has paid instinctively homage to this First Principle. Our fathers and forefathers reverenced Him in different ways because they did not know Him as He is, (I John 3:2). Some (surely they were among the wisest) set up 'an altar with this inscription, to the Unknown God' (Acts 17:23). Even in our day we are continually made aware that reason per se cannot advance us over the threshold to the "Unknown', God is our only means of access to this higher knowledge, if He will reveal Himself.