Glory to God For All Things

June 9, 2017

Saving My Neighbor – Just How Connected Are We?

If you are in the “helping professions,” confronting problems in people’s lives, it doesn’t take long to realize that no one is purely and simply an individual. The problems we suffer may occasionally appear to be “of our own making,” but that is the exception rather than the rule. Whether we are thinking of economic […]
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Communion, Modernity, Reflections, Salvation, The Church, Union with God
June 6, 2017

Hell, Justice and the Heart of Prayer – Thinking Like a Slave

In the third kneeling prayer of Pentecost, there is a boldness in which the Church pleads for the souls in Hell (Hades). It is a boldness that can stun the one who prays, easily wondering, “Are we allowed to ask for these things?” In general, all my life I have heard a rehearsal of the […]
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Hell, Modernity, Pascha, Reflections, Repentance
June 3, 2017

Entering Hell on Pentecost – With Prayer

Pascha (Easter) comes with a great note of joy in the Christian world. Christ is risen from the dead and our hearts rejoice. That joy begins to wane as the days pass. Our lives settle back down to the mundane tasks at hand. After 40 days, the Church marks the Feast of the Ascension, often […]
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Atonement, Hell, Orthodox Christianity, Pascha, Reflections
May 30, 2017

The Sacrifice of Worship

When God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac (Genesis 22), there was no questioning on Abraham’s part about what was intended. He understood precisely what was involved in such a thing. There was wood to be gathered, an altar of stones to be constructed, the victim to be bound, and then the slitting of […]
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Atonement, Liturgy, Reflections, Salvation, The Sacraments
May 24, 2017

The Community We All Need

I once read that the Russian instinct, when under pressure, was to gather with other people, while the American instinct was to flee. Thus, the Russian landscape was marked by villages, while America was marked with isolated homesteads. My Russian knowledge is just hearsay, but I know that Americans like to homestead and to be […]
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Communion, Knowledge of God, Modernity, Reflections, The Church
May 19, 2017

Old Friends

A young man imagines that the mistakes he is making are, with more effort, things that he will correct. An older man knows better. It can be a source of humility, or a source of painful regret. Humility is to be preferred. I wonder if this by itself is the reason why the spiritual life […]
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Culture, Last Things, Modernity, Reflections, Time
May 17, 2017

How to Find the Answers

And behold, an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a minister of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of all her treasure, had come to Jerusalem to worshipand was returning; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah.And the Spirit said to Philip, “Go up and join this chariot.” So Philip ran to him, […]
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Reflections
May 13, 2017

The Loneliness of Shame

…shame thoughts are quintessentially alone thoughts. They are produced by the felt impossibility of communion, and they produce realities that have no primary communion in them. Patricia DeYoung, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame +++ What does it mean to be lonely? We could pool our collective experience and quickly generate our own Wikipedia entry […]
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Communion, Reflections, Union with God
May 8, 2017

Goodness and a Word in Due Season

There is an old mystical Jewish belief that when God created all things, He did so by speaking their names (in Hebrew, of course). It was further believed (and here’s the mystical part) that if you could manage to speak that name in the right way, you, too, could cause it to be. The instinct […]
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Beauty, Doctrine, Heart, Icons, Knowledge of God, Reflections
May 4, 2017

Speaking the Words of God

Nothing is as difficult as true theology. Simply saying something correctly is beside the point. Correctness does not rise to the level of theology. Theology, rightly done, is a path towards union with God. It is absolutely more than an academic exercise. Theology is not the recitation of correct facts, it is the apprehension and […]
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Beauty, Knowledge of God, Reflections

Thank you so much, Father. Your words help.

Dee, I think the fig tree is a parable (of Israel). We have been grafted on the New Vine and…

Thanks so much Fr. Stephen and Mallory.

Sometimes Father I have discouragement when I read the story of the fig tree without fruit. Sometimes I wish the…

Matthew, Mallory, NDE’s – it’s a bit of a mixed bag. But, I think there’s something there (not just a…