Why He left the Holy Mountain “I told you that there on the Mountain I lived a Heavenly life.” “And why did you leave, Elder?” “I did not leave, they expelled me.” “They expelled you? Why?” “It is a long story. I was in constant motion. I did not stay put for one minute. I constantly created work for myself in order to push myself. I always did these things with permission. The one Elder
The external rudiments lead us now to the warfare that goes on in the depths. As when one peels an onion, one layer after another is removed, and the innermost core, out of which growth reaches up toward the light, lies revealed. There, in your own innermost chamber, you will glimpse the heavenly chamber, for they are one and the same, according to St. Isaac the Syrian. When you strive now to enter your inmost
There is a silence we choose. Our retreats into our cells of silence and solitude still the noise pollution in our lives so that we might eventually be still. Quieted enough to hear the whispers of God. Still enough to feel the Holy Spirit winds blowing through our lives and to observe the effects of the Spirit winds all around us. We retreat in hopes of delight, in hopes of tasting the good, the true,
By Matushka Constantina Palmer “I will sing unto the Lord throughout my life, I will chant to my God for as long as I have my being. May my words be sweet unto Him, and I will rejoice in the Lord,” Prophet David prays. And the sweetness of Byzantine chant makes these words my own when they are brought to life by divinely inspired melodies. Byzantine chant inspires its listener. Of course in the beginning,
You deserve to know my science for interpreting sacred texts. It is called a “hermeneutic.” Without an honest and declared hermeneutic, we have no consistency or authority in our interpretation of the Bible. My methodology is very simple; I will try to interpret Scripture the way that Jesus did. Even more than telling us exactly what to see in the Scriptures, Jesus taught us how to see, what to emphasize, and also what could be
It is a very common thought in the writings of the early Christian ascetics that man must go through these three stages – slave, hireling and son. The slave is one who obeys for fear, the hireling is one who obeys for reward and the son is one who acts for love. We can see in Exodus how gradually the people of God had become more than slaves and hirelings and the law stands at
Evagrius correlates the emotional realm of human beings to the three logismoi of sadness, of anger, and of acedia. “Sadness can sometimes arise when a person’s wishes go unfulfilled. Sometimes it also appears in the company of anger. If it arises as a consequence of needs and wishes that have not been met, it usually occurs in this way: such persons think first of all of their homes, of their parents, or of the life
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
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
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
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