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
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
“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
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
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
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.”
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
Coming as it does right after the beginning of the Church New Year, the Great Feast of the Nativity of Our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos on September 8 allows us a good start that we further hope we can sustain as the liturgical year unfolds before us. As a straightforward and joyous feast of commemorating the birth of the Virgin Mary, we receive a “taste” of the joyousness of life from within the Church
In addition to the celebration of the Annunciation, there are three major feasts in the Church honoring Mary, the Theotokos. The first of these is the feast of her nativity which is kept on the eighth of September. The record of the birth of Mary is not found in the Bible. The traditional account of the event is taken from the apocryphal writings which are not part of the New Testament scriptures. The traditional teaching
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