Month: July 2008
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The Seven Holy Maccabbees
August 1 is the Feast of the Precious and Life-Giving Wood of the Cross, but also the feast of the martyrdom of the Seven Maccabees. Since Protestant Christians do not include the books of First and Second Maccabees in their canon, they will be unfamiliar with this historically accurate and Godly tale of the courage…
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The Absence of Beauty
We can say without hesitation that God is the ultimate author of Beauty, and what we know and love of beauty is an echo or stronger of our desire for the Beautiful God. It becomes a major problem of sin, largely unrecognized, when beauty begins to recede from the consciousness of people, or something tawdry…
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The God Who Is Beautiful
I suggested this as reading in a comment yesterday and decided to re-post it so that it would be more readily available. It belongs with the question of God and beauty that I started in yesterday’s post. Everything is beautiful in a person when he turns toward God, and everything is ugly when it is…
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Beauty – The Great Mystery
Having spoken about the world as perhaps not best understood (theologically) in terms of cause and effect – I turn my attention for a short time to the mystery of Beauty. God created the world and said it is good, but both the Hebrew and the Greek translation of that statement in Genesis carry the…
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The Paradox of Prayer
Writing about his experiences in praying for the sick, the Elder Sophrony writes: It is still not clear to me why less intense prayer on my part might occasionally cause the illness to take a favorable turn, whereas at other times more profound supplication brought no visible improvement. From On Prayer He says later that…
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Don’t Be Angry
Abba Agathon said, “If someone who is angry were to raise the dead, God would remain displeased with the anger.” Sayings of the Desert Fathers The most difficult part of our Christian life is found within us – our inner life. It is certainly the case that many of the outward things we do –…
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What Kind of People Are We?
From Fr. Sophrony’s book On Prayer: [The author recounts his arrival in France from the Holy Mountain.] In france, having arrive from Greece, I met with the sort of people I had become unfamiliar with during my twenty-two years on the Holy Mountain-especially during the latter period when I was spiritual confessor to several hundred…
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The Feast of the Dormition of St. Anne
Today is the patronal festival of my parish, the feast of the Dormition of Righteous Anna, mother of the Theotokos. The details we know about her life, and that of her priest-husband, Righteous Joachim, are from sources within the Tradition (though not within the Scriptures). They are often pointed to as one of the great…
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Who’s in Charge of Our Life?
[Youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/v/kU9YeOQm3Y0&hl=en&fs=1″>]
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The Essence of the Passions – Staniloae
Dimitru Staniloae, the great Romanian Theologian, offers an excellent introduction to the passions as understood in Orthodox Christianity. The following excerpt is from his Orthodox Spirituality, which I highly recommend. The passions represent the lowest level to which human nature can fall. Both their Greek name, pathi, as well as the Latin, passiones, show that…
There is a psychological method called Internal Family Systems, developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. It addresses the various internal “parts…