Category: Church
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His Appearing in the Liturgy
Standing in the Church, listening to the choir or chanter sing while priest censes the icons, words swirl with the rising smoke and connections and associations multiply as words evoke images and images evoke thoughts: participation, coinherence, incarnation, mystery, timeless form and formless time, fullness and emptiness, fulfillment and… And then the thought comes, full-formed…
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The Mystery of Holy Week
As we journey through the Great and Holy Week… For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have…
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The Language of Silence
The language of the heart is silence—not a bleak, empty silence, but a profound and meaningful silence that ceaselessly sings the glory of God. Archimandrite Meletios Webber +++ The language…is silence. I will violate this wonderful oxymoron by speaking about the silence. It is the inherent problem with all theology. We use words to speak about what is…
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Finding the God Within
Popular New Age thought postulates that everyone has a “god within.” It’s a pleasant way of saying that we’re all special while making “god” to be rather banal. But there is a clear teaching of classical Christianity regarding Christ within us, and it is essential to the Orthodox way of life. We should not understand…
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Our Conciliar Salvation
I consider it both a strange mystery and a settled matter of the faith that God prefers not to do things alone. Repeatedly, He acts in a manner that involves the actions of others when it would seem, He could have acted alone. Why would God reveal His Word to the world through the agency…
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Orthodoxy and the Global Threat
The peculiar approach of Orthodoxy to the peoples of the nations is often a point of criticism. The so-called “national Churches” are seen as hotbeds of cultural intransigence and sources of division. The modern difficulties between Constantinople and Moscow echo the ancient rivalry of Constantinople and Alexandria (a primary source for the schism with the…
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Forgiveness – Do We Know What We’re Doing?
The first service of Great Lent in the Orthodox Church is “Forgiveness Vespers,” served on the eve of Monday of the First Week. There is nothing unusual about the service itself – other than the “rite of forgiveness” appended to it. In this, the priest and the faithful ask forgiveness of one another. Often this…
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Dying to Become Human
St. Irenaeus was perhaps the first to suggest that the creation of man was a “project.” “Let us make man in our own image,” is strikingly different from “Let there be man!” And the project goes wrong from the beginning. Rather than becoming fully what he is created to be, man breaks communion with God…
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Creation and Evolution
The crucifixion, death and resurrection of Christ is the proper beginning point for all Christian theology. Christ’s Pascha should be the source for all Christian reflection. It is clear that the disciples themselves did not understand the Scriptures nor Christ Himself until after the resurrection (Luke 24:45). We cannot approach Pascha as a midpoint in…
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Walking in a One-Storey Universe
Our modern culture celebrates the individual and his/her choices. We prize freedom above everything. But we long for something we cannot express. Human beings were created for communion and participation and we lose our way without it. The instinct for such a life has never disappeared from our culture, despite almost centuries of nurtured individualism.…
I could only read this by singing it. Fifty-one years since coming into the Orthodox Church and so much of…