comfort Archives - Saint Sophia

The Second Tuesday of Great Lent: Faith Lets Go

03/26/2024

Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, July 31, 2016 The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew. (9:1-8) Often in the Gospel stories, when Jesus brings hope, comfort and healing, detractors often show up. Like the scribes in today’s story. See them as representing the know-it-alls and the self-righteous. We all know people like that and sometimes they may even be us. We must be careful not to be like that.

Comfort for a Child – Speaking Peace to Shame

09/22/2023

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, April 7, 2017 In my previous article, I described the origins of the “self-talk” (logismoi) that haunt our minds with negative chatter. They lie very deep within us, even having something of a signature within the deeper parts of the brain itself. It is very “old” and yet very “young.” It is old in that its foundations were formed as early as infancy. It is young in that it is much more

Unavoidable Suffering and Salvation – The Way of Shame

02/12/2021

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, November 13, 2015 At the heart of the modern narrative is a concern to alleviate and even eliminate suffering. This understanding is rooted in the Christian virtue of compassion. In many ways, however, modern compassion has been detached from its original context and become a thing-in-itself. Modernity is an arena where compassion has run amok, and, ironically, promises to create new and unique miseries in its wake. The Christian gospel is

We Must Respond to Bullying

02/04/2021

By Abbot Tryphon, November 23, 2019 We must end bullying by teaching children kindness at an early age More and more frequently we read about children taking their own lives, having reached a place where they would rather be dead than live another hour suffering from bullying. Too often parents and teachers have ignored the problem of bullying, dismissing it as nothing more than “kids will be kids”, and “kids can be cruel”. The truth

When All Becomes Too Easy

07/10/2015

By Father Vasile Tudora There are many places in the world where the fear of not being able to make ends meet, leaving your family without food, shelter, and other means of subsistence, or the fear of a ravaging war, is intensely present. With the golden era of prosperity, in the Western world at least, these great survival fears have almost disappeared, morphing into new and shallow anxieties: not being able to land the most

ON ERADICATING THE DESIRE FOR “ENJOYMENT”

10/15/2013

It is said that only a few find the narrow way that leads to life and that we must strive to enter by the narrow door. For many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able (Luke 13: 24). The explanation is to be found precisely in our unwillingness to persecute ourselves. We overcome after a fashion, perhaps, our serious and dangerous vices, but there it stops. The small

Lenten Discipline (Part I)

03/29/2012

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. Luke 4:1-13 Do not bother looking for Lent in your Bible dictionary, because there was no such thing back then. There is some evidence that early Christians fasted forty hours between Good Friday and Easter, but the custom of spending forty days in prayer and self-denial

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The Second Tuesday of Great Lent: Faith Lets Go

Comfort for a Child – Speaking Peace to Shame

Unavoidable Suffering and Salvation – The Way of Shame

We Must Respond to Bullying

When All Becomes Too Easy

ON ERADICATING THE DESIRE FOR “ENJOYMENT”

Lenten Discipline (Part I)

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