From the elder Zossima’s talks and homilies:

Young man, do not forget to pray.  Each time you pray, if you do so sincerely there will be the flash of a new feeling in it, and anew thought as well, one you did not know before, which will give you fresh courage; and you will understand that prayer is education. . . .

A loving humility is a terrible power, the most powerful of all, nothing compares with it.  Keep company with yourself and look to ourself every day and hour, every minute, that your image be ever gracious.  See, here you have passed by a small child, passed by in anger, with a foul word, with a wrathful soul; you perhaps did not notice the child but he saw you, and your unsightly and impious image has remained in his defenseless heart.  You did not know it, but you may thereby have planted a bad seed in him, and it may grow, and all because you did not restrain yourself before the child, because you did not nurture in yourself a heedful, active love.  Brothers, love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time. Anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance. . . .

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies.  Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it. So I think.  (From The Brothers Karamazov, Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, pp. 318-20)

The idea of the soul as a garden in which seeds germinate and grow is one of the most important metaphors for understanding the Christian spiritual life. And its the traditional wisdom about cultivating the soul’s garden into something fruitful, abundant, and beautiful that is, or ought to be, at the heart of what is understood as Christian morality.  This wisdom is completely absent from the moralistic priggishness that thinks of itself as Christian.

But I think it’s fair to say that it’s an all-but-lost wisdom. It’s there if you dig for it, but it’s not a part of the contemporary Christian’s imagination of what the Christian life is at its core. And for this reason there really isn’t much that contemporary Christians can point to that distinguishes themselves from agnostics or atheists who live ethically principled lives.   

Anything that calls itself Christian morality that isn’t about the wisdom and discipline of cultivating a beautiful, love-saturated soul has as little value as a sack of sterilized sand.