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To Sing Like a River
Read more: To Sing Like a RiverArticle from October, 2016 We stood looking out at a river rushing past the rocks – a brisk morning in the North Carolina mountains, a rare setting for the Divine Liturgy. The tradition of the Church generally holds that services such as the Divine Liturgy are to be held indoors, in the Church. There are […]
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The Abbreviated God
Read more: The Abbreviated GodWhen an Orthodox Christian is asked questions about the faith, there is often a hesitation. The questions that come to mind (for me) are: “Where do I begin?” and “How much do I try and tell them?” For, in many ways, the amount of information includes about 2,000 years of history and an encyclopedia’s worth […]
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The Secret Life
Read more: The Secret LifeThe truth of a person is always more than the person himself knows and always more than anyone else knows. Created in the image of God, human beings have an inherent transcendence. The soul is a mystery. Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe What is a soul? This is the sort of question that […]
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“That Which Is Lacking” – Is Jesus Enough?
Read more: “That Which Is Lacking” – Is Jesus Enough?Recent questions on the blog make this article worth re-visiting. I pray you find it of interest. The average Christian, reading his Bible in happy devotion, stumbles across this passage: Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the […]
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The Ascetic Imperative – A Matter of Communion
Read more: The Ascetic Imperative – A Matter of CommunionAmong the more interesting experiences in my life was the two years spent in a Christian commune. It was not West Coast fancy, much less connected to anything historic such as the Bruderhof. It started with two very zealous Jesus freaks (myself and a friend), an apartment, and something of a necessity thrust on us […]
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Becoming Personal
Read more: Becoming Personal“Person” is among the most difficult words in the classical Christian vocabulary. It is difficult on the one hand because the word has a common meaning in modern parlance that is not the same meaning as its classical one. And it is difficult on the other hand even when all of its later meanings and associations […]
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Marriage as a Lifetime of Suffering
Read more: Marriage as a Lifetime of SufferingThis article first appeared in 2015. I have thought it worth re-publishing in honor of mine and my wife’s celebration of 50 years of marriage, joined this past weekend by my children and grandchildren and a host of friends. The service (a molieben with additional prayers appropriate to the occasion) had many of the prayers […]
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The Nature of Being Human
Read more: The Nature of Being Human“Human nature” is a term that can have a casual meaning in any number of conversations. I recently listened to a discussion with an academic professional who made the statement that “anyone who failed to understand that human nature was evil would never understand the lessons of history.” From the perspective of Orthodox theology – […]
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The Eye of Evil and the Eye of Light
Read more: The Eye of Evil and the Eye of LightThroughout the film version of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the image of the “Eye of Sauron,” a tower with a great fiery eye burning at its peak, is an abiding threat overhanging every moment of conflict, every chance encounter. It threatens to interrupt the quest to destroy the Ring of Power. It is an […]
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Truth, Lies, and Icons
Read more: Truth, Lies, and IconsAs verbal beings, we live in a world of icons. We experience the world in an iconic fashion. A major difficulty for us is that we have lost the vocabulary of iconic reality. We have substituted the language of photography. The dissonance between reality and our photographic assumptions has led us to doubt both. Man […]
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John Mark, I think that St. John uses the term to be roughly equivalent to “human” – but in our…
Father, Thank you for your reply! I’ve wondered before what you thought of panentheism. I’ve been interested in the term…
Father, thank you for the insights into St. Paul’s use of the word sarx. How would you say St. John…
Margaret Sarah, To my knowledge, it is not a term used in Orthodoxy. A problem, it would seem to me,…
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Margaret Sarah, I think an important matter in all of this is that of boundaries. God is there (everywhere present)…