Glory to God For All Things

When my son was four, he wrote a prayer to St. Michael. We had placed a small statue of St. Michael on his chest-of-drawers. It was classic: St. Michael in Roman soldier’s outfit with a drawn sword, and the devil beneath his foot. It seemed to have made a strong impression on my son. His prayer: Dear St. Michael, Guard my room. Don’t let anything eat me or kill me. Kill it with your sword! Kill it with you sword! Amen. I wrote about it on the blog. Years later, it became an inspiration for a children’s book that Ancient…

When Cecil B. DeMille cast Charlton Heston in the role of Moses in the 1956 film, The Ten Commandments, he had in mind a very American version of the central story of the Old Testament. The 50’s were deep in the heart of the Cold War with Communism. The film became a vehicle for America’s own cultural mythology. The Ten Commandments turned on the theme of freedom. As such, Hollywood was following a well-worn American path, reading its own history into the Scriptures and the Scriptures into its own history. Moses could thus become the Abraham Lincoln of Israel. Heston’s…

Beloved, we are children of God, and it doesn’t yet appear what we shall be. But we know, that when He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. (1John 3:2) You are dead, and your life is hid in Christ in God. (Col. 3:3) Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will save it. (Lk. 17:33) You have to live God, because God is life. – Fr. Roman Braga +++ There is a deep connection between God and the self within Christian understanding. Obviously, they are…

C.S. Lewis once discussed the question of how angels (and such things) could pass through a wall. His response was intriguing: he suggested that they could do so not because they were less substantial, but because they were more substantial. Just as a rock is more substantial than water or air, so, he posited, an angel (or such) is more substantial than our materiality. Of course, this is completely arguable and unprovable. But it is a useful image for thinking about another aspect of reality, that which the Church describes as “mystery.” Our tendency in thinking about anything we do not…

Nothing is more traumatic than the onset of chaos. Predictability breaks down, goodness seems to disappear, and the madness of sheer survival takes over. In chaos, everything seems plausible since reason itself has become unreachable. A recent spate of reading took me down the rabbit hole into the madness of the 14th century. For all of the “structure” and stability of the Middle Ages, a society where everyone seemed to have a place and all of the places were arranged into a meaningful pattern, brutality and greed often bared their teeth with a rapacious grin. Wars and violence were common,…

First published in March, 2022 “My spiritual efforts don’t do anything, they merely bring me to the place where I know I can’t do anything, to the place where I am utterly naked before God!” -Fr. Silviu Bunta Sometimes I run across a quote that strikes my heart so deeply that it takes my breath. The quote above is from Fr. Silviu Bunta, Associate Professor of Old Testament at St. Vladimir’s Seminary, in a retreat talk he was giving at St. Athanasius Orthodox Church in Nicholasville, KY. During the same weekend, I was in Loveland, CO, doing a series of…

I love walls. Perhaps the most charming aspect of medieval cities are their use of walls. Some surrounded the city and served as protection. Others surrounded smaller areas and prevented easy access and egress (perhaps understandable in a world with lots of animals present). There were other walls that signaled “higher” boundaries. In a medieval world, the “order” of things was thought important: kings and commoners, high-born and low-born, masters, yeomen, and apprentice, etc. The whole of the universe had an order (hierarchy) that included the angels, human beings, and all creatures. The point was not oppression or suppression, nor…

In the summer of 1952, an obscure event took place in London that would have a profound impact on the future of Orthodox Christianity in the English-speaking world. A seventeen-year-old English lad walked through the doors of St. Philip’s Russian Orthodox Church on Buckingham Palace Road (the Church has long since been torn down). Today he is known as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, one of the most important figures in the contemporary Orthodox world. His own worlds vividly recount his experience: I can remember exactly when my personal journey to Orthodoxy began. It happened quite unexpectedly one Saturday afternoon in the…