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A Cure for Depression by Saint Silouan the Athonite

09/24/2014

By Father Vasile Tudora The greatest plague of the 21st century is not AIDS, nor cancer, nor the H1N1 flu, but something that affects much more people in ways we can barely start to understand: depression. Reportedly one in ten Americans suffers from one or the other forms of this malady. The rates of anti-depressant usage in the United States are just as worrisome. A recent poll unveils that one in eight Americans is using

A SUFFOCATING LONELINESS: Between Competition and Togetherness (Part II)

09/23/2014

Loneliness is one of the most universal sources of human suffering today. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists speak about it as the most frequently expressed complaint and the root not only of an increasing number of suicides but also of alcoholism, drug use, different psychosomatic symptoms-such as, headaches, stomach and low-back pains-and of a large number of traffic accidents. Children, adolescents, adults and old people are in growing degree exposed to the contagious disease of loneliness

A SUFFOCATING LONELINESS: Between Competition and Togetherness (Part I)

09/22/2014

It is far from easy to enter into the painful experience of loneliness. You like to stay away from it. Still it is an experience that enters into everyone’s life at some point. You might have felt it as a little child when your classmates laughed at you because you were cross-eyed or as a teen-ager when you were the last one chosen on the baseball team. You might have felt it when you were

God and Caesar (Part IV): Hope and Freedom

09/19/2014

As Christians we know that by participating in history we are not going to turn it into the Kingdom of God. But our horizon is not limited to history; we know that Christ is coming again in glory to raise all the dead and, through them, the flesh of the world and all that history has created. With this hope we have no need of Utopia. Christians are making ready within history a transformation which

A WHEEL FULL OF SPOKES

09/18/2014

Indeed silence does more than tiptoe around the house. Silence moves through all sound like water through netting. The deeper our own interior silence, the more we take on its gracious ways of opening up the tight mind that clenches its teeth around what it wants and spits out what it doesn’t want. The optimal environment for prayer is physical silence. Saint Augustine, surely one of the most eloquent people in history, thought it was

The Times They Are A-Changin’

09/17/2014

“Do not be surprised, brothers and sisters, if the world hates you.” 1 John 3:13 Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. Recently I came across a news story that had everything: patriarchal men facing off against earnest feminists who were protesting male oppression and church traditionalism. The story had liberated sexuality, violence, and people screaming in frustration who couldn’t take it anymore. It had a conference of 17,000 who gathered at the annual the

Father Maximos on Our Greatest Enemy, the Ego

09/16/2014

Fr. Maximos never ceased repeating that our greatest enemy is our ego, what psychologists would call “narcissism,” and that we can work on that ego as we go about our daily affairs. He then mentioned Abba Dorotheos, an early Father of the Ecclesia who instructed his monks on how to confront their desires so that they might undermine their egotism. “He taught them simple exercises. If for example they were hungry and curious to find

Analyzing Our Thoughts and Feelings (IV)

09/15/2014

The third logismos of the instinctual desires, according to Evagrius, is greed. The striving for possessions is an essential part of human life, and it contains a longing for rest. Possessions lead us to expect that we will have no more cares and will be able to calmly spend our time living. But experience shows that possessions can possess us, that we are possessed by our striving for more and more things. Evagrius portrays the

NEITHER IS RENUNCIATION THE SOLUTION: LISTEN AND UNLEARN

09/12/2014

Anytime you’re practicing renunciation, you’re deluded. How about that! You’re deluded. What are you renouncing? Anytime you renounce something, you are tied forever to the thing you renounce. There’s a guru in India who says, “Every time a prostitute comes to me, she’s talking about nothing but God. She says I’m sick of this life that I’m living. I want God. But every time a priest comes to me he’s talking about nothing but sex.”

The Lord’s Prayer (Part V)

09/11/2014

Exodus is a complex image in terms of the Lord’s Prayer; in the beatitudes we find the same progression: ‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled’, ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy’. First a simple bodily hunger and thirst, a deprivation of all possessions, which were a gift of corruption, a gift of the earth from the overlord, a stamp of slavery, and then

Blog

A Cure for Depression by Saint Silouan the Athonite

A SUFFOCATING LONELINESS: Between Competition and Togetherness (Part II)

A SUFFOCATING LONELINESS: Between Competition and Togetherness (Part I)

God and Caesar (Part IV): Hope and Freedom

A WHEEL FULL OF SPOKES

The Times They Are A-Changin’

Father Maximos on Our Greatest Enemy, the Ego

Analyzing Our Thoughts and Feelings (IV)

NEITHER IS RENUNCIATION THE SOLUTION: LISTEN AND UNLEARN

The Lord’s Prayer (Part V)

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