~Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Christmas Eve – December 24, 2012 In the Western Rite on Christmas Eve the Prologue from St. John’s Gospel is read. It is a good choice for this night. Do you remember it? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God…” “En arxn ain ho Logos…” John equates Jesus, the Son of God, with a word that came to
~By Stephen Freeman, September 18, 2023 I’ve been slowly making my way through the book, An Empire of Things. It’s subtitle, How We Became a World of Consumers from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Centuries, describes the fascinating journey outlined in the text. It tracks the gradual evolution of the modern world as seen in our acquisition of stuff. The average citizen in the 1400’s would have been lucky to have a change of clothes and the
By Abbot Tryphon, November 4, 2019 Centers for prayer and spiritual healing Monastics are an integral part of the Church and should not be seen as independent of the Church Universal. Monks are bound by the same Gospel as other Christians and need to avail themselves to the missionary and pastoral needs of the Church, as needed. Although a primary role of monasticism is to be found in worship and contemplative prayer, monks also have
The Eastern Christian spiritual tradition is not composed of “schools” as in the West, where they are typically associated with a particular religious order (for example, Benedictine, Carmelite, or Franciscan). Yet there is more than one approach in the East. The one favored on Athos is known as hesychasm, from the Greek word hesychia, translated as “stillness.” It flourished especially in the fourteenth century on Athos, at a time when a controversy arose over the
Virtually every spiritual tradition has an authoritative scripture or scriptures that serve as a foundational text for its beliefs, practices, and spirituality. For Christians, that collection of texts is the Holy Bible. But the fracturing of the Christian Church in the fifth century (following the Council of Chalcedon in 451), the eleventh century (the break between what came to be known as the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches), and the sixteenth century (the Protestant
A pilgrim to the Holy Mountain of Athos asked an old hermit, “Father, how can I attain my salvation?” The venerated holy man replied, “Every day at dusk go to the cemetery and for an hour hurl insults to the dead. Do that for a month and pay attention to everything that happens around you. Then come and report to me.” After a month the pilgrim returned. “Father, I have done what you told me
God’s Risk (Part II) Maximus the Confessor clearly distinguishes two freedoms in Man: that of his nature and that of his person. The first is the magnetic attraction of his deepest being towards God, the completion of his nature in love; indeed, Man desires love with his whole nature and finds fulfillment in it. Human beings conceal within themselves an ‘immense capacity for love and joy which is effective from the moment it knows the
As for the problem of the ‘second death’ and the final hell after the Last Day, a solution, existential rather than doctrinal, is to be found in the high Eastern spirituality associated with St Antony. A cobbler in Alexandria, to whom Christ had sent Antony to show him a degree of holiness greater than his own, confessed to the famous hermit that he used to think, as he watched the passers-by, ‘May they all be
And May You Experience Them All The Elder continued, “And you, while you are there at the monastery, you must be very focused during the service. You are to follow them. You should experience them all. This includes the hours, the mid-hours, the psalms, and the canons. Don’t allow one word to escape your attention. You are to read clearly and with meaning. We should proclaim with love and worship unto our Lord, ‘Lord Jesus
The first task of the Church and of Christians is therefore to open up history to the eternity whither she is destined to ‘pass’ one day in a final Passover, whither she is already ‘passing’ by the prayers and the blessing of the liturgy and of liturgical people. To those who see with the ‘eye of the heart’, the reintegrating power of the sacraments holds the world in being, preserves history from decay and slowly
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