Category: Saints and Tradition

  • 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…

  • Icons in a One-Storey Universe

    I’ll ask my readers to forgive me as I look at yet another aspect of the Christian life when the idea of a two-storey universe is jettisoned and we come to realize that we are living in a one-storey world: that God is with us. Readership has remained very high over the past week or so,…

  • The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe – Gerard Manley Hopkins

    Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Jesuit priest (a convert from Anglicanism) and perhaps the greatest modern (?) poet of the English Language (ok, he’s my favorite). My second daughter, Khouria Kathryn, made me aware of this poem. Hopkins is wonderfully sacramental in his poetry – God permeates his words and the world his words come…

  • The Dormition of the Mother of God

    In giving birth you preserved your virginity, In falling asleep you did not forsake the world, O Theotokos. You were translated to life, O Mother of Life, And by your prayers, you deliver our souls from death. Troparion of the Feast – Tone 1 It is easy to be put off by Orthodox devotion to…

  • Death in a Two-Storey Universe

    I have written before about the two-storey universe that is part of our cultural inheritance in the modern world. I have noted that the default position of our culture is secular protestantism. I have explained that I mean not that we do not believe in God, but that in our dominant cultural metaphor the God…

  • Christ Crucified

    Writing to the Corinthians, St. Paul makes one his most famous statements: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified (1Cor. 2:2). It is among the clearest definitions of the apostolic preaching to be found anywhere in the New Testament, or perhaps I should say, “everywhere in the New…

  • God is Wonderful in His Saints

    The painting of St. Sergius as a youth by Mikhail Nesterov is one of my favorites. Just a bit more beauty to share.

  • What An Icon Says

    According to the Seventh Ecumenical Council, “An icon does with color what the Scriptures do with words.” It is a very simple, straightforward explanation of icons – but it holds within it a world of theological understanding. This morning I had opportunity with a visitor of the Church to fall into conversation about the Scriptures.…

  • The Intercession of the Saints

    Doubtless one of the less understood aspects of the Orthodox faith, particularly by Protestants, is the importance of the intercession of the saints. Orthodox doctrine and teaching is quite clear that we do not treat saints as objects of worship, nor as worthy of worship. This would be blasphemous to us. Nevertheless, it is a…

  • The Spirit, the Modern World, Pentecostalism and Orthodoxy

    Part of the larger Christian context in which Orthodoxy lives today includes not only Catholics (of various sorts), Protestants (of even more sorts), but Pentecostals as well (of which there are quite a few sorts). Indeed, having come splashing onto the modern religious scene around 1900, Pentecostals have been by far the fastest growing of…


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Latest Comments

  1. I hope adding these words will be helpful. I’m adding them mainly to flesh out the meaning and use of…

  2. Ah so! I did find the quote of St Sophrony, however, I found it recorded by Archimandrite Zacharias, in his…

  3. Drewster, I know I read it in St Sophrony’s books somewhere, and yet, despite some time trying to find it,…

  4. Hi Fr. Stephen, Unrelated: You have a saint quote that talks about how you stand at the edge until you…


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