Category: Mystical Theology
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The Gratuitous Wonder of Unbounded Joy
Any number of Orthodox conversations turn around the topic of “theosis” (to become “like God”). I’m never quite sure what people have in mind when they invoke the term. Do they imagine divine power or a transfiguration in divine light? In a culture marked by success stories, it’s easy to imagine theosis as just that.…
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A Faith You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
In a now-famous experiment, volunteers were fitted with inverting lenses, such that everything they saw appeared upside-down. In a few days their brains adjusted and what they saw appeared correctly. When the lenses were removed, their naked eyes now saw things inverted, though again, after a few days their vision returned to normal. We are…
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To Sing Like a River
Article 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 Secret Life
The 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?
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 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
Throughout 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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Behold Your Mother
Christ’s words from the Cross to St. John, “Behold your mother,” are both an intimate whisper of a son’s care for his most beloved as well as a cosmic directive to the whole of humanity and creation. This woman is Woman – and her significance abides and will not fade. She points us towards the…
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Blood Brothers of the Incarnation
My childhood in the 1950’s had the innocence of the time, fed by stories of our elders and the clumsy movies. We played soldiers (everyone’s father had been in the Second World War) and “Cowboys and Indians.” Despite the clear bias of the movies and the slanted propaganda that passed for history, almost everyone wanted…
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Love and Being
Perhaps the most intriguing statement in the New Testament is St. John’s simple, “God is love.” As mysterious and awesome as the revelation of the Divine Name (“I am that I am”) to Moses might be, St. John’s statement gives a content that echoes and infolds the death and resurrection of Christ itself. Indeed, any…
Thank you Fr. Stephen. I guess you are right about the source of my anxiety – an anxiety which I…