May 16

For man, faith is the requirement and door of salvation, since through it, he clings with all his being to Christ’s saving work, through and in proportion to faith, the sick man receives from Christ the pardon of his sins, the healing of all his illnesses, and true health. Christ grants healing of bodily and spiritual illnesses to him who has faith in Him. St. Barsanuphius writes: “If one has faith in Him Who has come to heal every sickness and infirmity in the multitude, He is capable of healing not only bodily illness, but also those of the inner man.”…

However, one must know that there are many degrees of faith, and that there is a great distance between its first manifestation and its fulfillment, between the effort to believe in what one does not see and the sense of total certainty; and further, between the initial devotion to the word of God, in which one finds an exterior and quite partial kind of knowledge, and the vision of God, which the Fathers also liken to faith possessed in its perfection. Between these two extremes lie all the degrees of existential devotion to God, realized by the keeping of the commandments, which itself stems from faith and indeed forms the basis of the only true faith.

~Dr Jean-Claude Larchet (Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses vol.2 pp.68-69)