Category: Knowledge of God
-
How Do We Know God?
How do we know God? The question is simple and straightforward – until we begin to answer it. I have written lately much about icons, and particularly the Seventh Council’s contention that “icons do with color what Scripture does with words.” This simple statement has such a richness of implication that it is hard to…
-
Looking for God in All Places
Sometimes the title for a piece comes before the rest of my writing and tells me what I’m going to write. Other times it comes as the last thing. Tonight it’s the first. I thought about “Looking for God in all the Right Places,” but, then again, that’s the problem. People frequently assume that God…
-
What Does It Mean to Have Communion with God?
I am sure that the title of this post seems obvious and as though I had pulled a question out of a catechism. And yet, my experience tells me that things that seem as though they ought to be obvious often are not, particularly the more basic and fundamental they are in our life as…
-
Knowing the Personal God
The word personal has a commonplace meaning in English. If I have personal knowledge of an event, it means that I was actually there and saw what took place. Personal knowledge of another person, means that we have actually met, spent time together and shared information. Difficulty arises when this commonplace use of the phrase…
-
Is Fellowship with God Possible?
Too little has been written about the politics (and theology) of Bible translations. From the very first instance, the goal of English translations has not been a primary concern with a faithful rendering of the meaning of the text. Much of the history of the English Bible has been precisely over the agenda carried by…
-
Music and Scenes from the “Desert”
One of the better known monasteries in Russian history is the Valaam monastery. Taken over by government authorities during the time of the Communists and used for other purposes, it has been returned today to the Church and is growing into a full-functioning, thriving monastery, one of the “deserts” where spiritual warfare on behalf of…
-
The Desert – Struggling in a Flat Land
One of the best-known sayings to have come from the Desert Fathers is: “Stay in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.” To a large degree the saying extols the virtue of stability. Moving from place to place never removes the problem – it only postpones the inevitable. Somewhere, sometime we have to…
Debra and Father, Thank you for the words about love: “Only love understands anything. Only love sees anything. Every other…