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The Fifth Friday of Great Lent: The Three Stages & One Vice leads to Another

04/15/2016

The Three Stages We must distinguish simple thoughts, that is, ones without passion, from passionate thoughts. If we are examining the way in which sins of thought begin, we notice that the latter, namely passionate thoughts are accompanied by a large number of simple thoughts. Let us take money as an example. Someone thinks of a sum of money belonging to someone else. His imagination urges him to theft, and in his spirit he has

The Third Tuesday of Great Lent

03/18/2014

Joy an Uneasy Bedfellow Augustine said: ‘The world’s joy is vanity. We long for it to come, but when it has come we fail to hold on to it. Better the sorrow of the one who suffers unjustly than the joy of the one who acts unjustly.’ Jerome says: ‘The wise person curbs the smile on his face by the gravity of his behaviour. ‘If fortune smiles on you do not brag about it; and

The Second Friday of Great Lent

03/14/2014

Tears, not Sorrows When you hear me speak of tears, you need not think of sorrow. The tears of which I am speaking bring more joy than all the laughter of the world can gain for you. Do you doubt my words? Then listen to St Luke who tells us how the apostles, after being beaten with rods by order of the Sanhedrin, were filled with joy. [Acts 5:41] Clearly that joy was not the

The Second Wednesday of Great Lent

03/12/2014

Before the Ship Sinks An illness that has become chronic, like a habit of wrong-doing that has become ingrained is very hard to heal. If after that, as very often happens, the habit turns into second nature, a cure is out of the question. So the ideal would be to have no contact with evil. But there is another possibility: to distance yourself from evil, to run away from it as if from a poisonous

The Second Monday of Great Lent

03/10/2014

Life is a Dream with Many Changes of Scene I am not telling a lie: human life is a dream. In our dreams we look without seeing, we listen without hearing, we taste and touch without tasting or touching, we speak without saying anything, we walk without moving. We seem to be moving normally even though we stay still and to be making our habitual gestures even though we are not. The mind invents realities

The Finest Exposition of the Bible is our Life

10/18/2013

This God of the new creation is the God who is working today and who was at work in the original creation. And the Word into whose image we shall be transfigured is the same Word who presided over the birth of the universe and who unceasingly stirs up in us the birth of the ‘interior person’. This is the background against which the Fathers range any problem. At root it has the unity of

Hope-Bridled Grief: Discovering in Gregory of Nyssa a Christian Discipline of Grief (Part I)

08/26/2013

The death of a loved one is excruciatingly painful, and it would seem wrong to ask moral questions about the appropriateness of someone’s grief, as if it were possible to hold our emotions in check at such horribly difficult times. It would appear cruel to imply to those in mourning that there is something wrong with them for feeling the way they do. Christianity holds that reason is a distinct faculty that gives guidance to

Father Maximos on the Sins of Parents

09/25/2012

After further discussion and clarification of the issues, Fr. Maximos signaled for the next question. A woman in her fifties, who introduced herself as Maria, a professional counselor, spoke in accented Greek. “Your Eminence, can you comment on what I used to hear my parents say when young, namely that in our religion it is believed that the sins of the parents torment their children?” “Did you hear this in church?” Fr. Maximos asked with

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The Fifth Friday of Great Lent: The Three Stages & One Vice leads to Another

The Third Tuesday of Great Lent

The Second Friday of Great Lent

The Second Wednesday of Great Lent

The Second Monday of Great Lent

The Finest Exposition of the Bible is our Life

Hope-Bridled Grief: Discovering in Gregory of Nyssa a Christian Discipline of Grief (Part I)

Father Maximos on the Sins of Parents

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