"The whole essence and effort of the devil is to separate and remove our attention from God and entice it toward worldly concerns and pleasures. He works interiorly, in the heart, suggesting good works and resolutions and ["]reasonable["], or rather unreasonable, thoughts. We must not pay the slightest attention to these things. The spiritual combat consists in keeping the mind fixed on God, in not entertaining or approving impure thoughts, and in not paying any attention to the phantasms which the detestable, diabolic picture maker stirs up in our imagination."
St. John of the Golden Mouth indeed!
Indeed! But does anyone notice that what this great saint said cuts "both ways"? Don't the words of the heresiarch, for many here on FR, "entice it [the heart] towards worldly concerns" and away from God by engendering strife?
I think I may have mentioned before that much of what I have read on these threads concerns me in a sense other than that the Evil One has gotten hold of ECUSA (though that of course concerns me greatly). It concerns me that many, with the soundest, or at least most understandable, of reasons as the world reckons these matters, have indeed lost their focus on God and transfered it to a vitriol filled struggle over something, a revisionist ECUSA, which in the end will have little to do with their theosis, unless they stay in ECUSA or otherwise cut themselves off from The Church.
When The Church was One in fact, before the Great Schism and the Reformation, when heresy sprang up, usually somewhere near the top (The floor of Hell is paved with the skulls of bishops!), all anyone could do was stay and struggle within The Church. There was nowhere else to go. Today we are witnessing the dissolution of a constituent part of or perhaps even a particular Church within, The Church. To stay or wander off into an "ecclesial assembly" should be no choice because remaining within The Church is the same singular option today that it was before the Great Schism.