Category: Beauty
-
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
There is a death that leads to death and there is a death that leads to life. In them are hidden the meaning of all things. As we approach Pascha, I continue to marvel at St. John’s description of Christ in Revelation 13, as the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” It is…
-
The Disenchanted World
A very apt word for the world we live in is: disenchanted. It was first used by Max Weber and a number of others to describe a certain aspect of the modern world – the absence of the sacred. Where people of earlier eras and other cultures have experienced the world around them as charged…
-
What Happens When We Play (Pray)
In my previous article I compared children’s use of play to the place of ritual words and actions in the life of the Church. I absolutely did not mean to imply that one thing is like the other. I mean to say clearly that they are very much the same thing. And I say this…
-
Singing the Lord’s Song
In my first parish as an Anglican priest, I approached my first Midnight Mass with eager anticipation. I was trained “High Church,” with a very traditional liturgical emphasis – but I was serving in a “Low Church” parish. I was the first priest in their history to wear Eucharistic vestments as a normal practice. But…
-
Around the Corner
Among the most appealing aspects of CS Lewis’ children’s fiction is at the point that I would describe as “turning the corner.” It is not that he creates a fantasy world, but that the fantasy world he creates somehow intersects with the world in which we live. It is the discovery that at this moment,…
-
Some Poems for Pentecost
St. Porphyrios said that to become a Christian one needed first to be a poet. This has nothing to do with arranging words, but everything to do with hearing words. Words, like everything else in our world, hide far more than they reveal. God has so arranged His world that its treasure is reserved for those…
-
The Erotic Language of Prayer
The very heart of true prayer is desire, love. In the language of the Fathers this desire is called eros. Modern usage has corrupted the meaning of “erotic” to only mean sexual desire – but it is a profound word, without substitute in the language of the Church. I offer a quote from Dr. Timothy…
Father, How sadly prosaic the birth of writing is, if it came about due to record keeping! 🙂 When I…