community Archives - Saint Sophia

The Third Day of Christmas Advent. Broken Communion

11/17/2025

~Father Stephen Freeman, November 25, 2022 The holidays can make it all too poignant: the terrible fact of broken communion. Often, our festivities bring us into close contact with some (few or many) whom we most commonly avoid. An uncle, an aunt, a brother, a parent whose relationship is marked with pain, misunderstanding, shame, and various other torments. Statistics say that these times (particularly Thanksgiving to Christmas) are frequently marred by things we would otherwise

The Communion of Friends

07/24/2023

By Stephen Freeman, August 4, 2021 You meet someone and like them. You slowly get to know them. Conversation and sharing, listening and learning, a picture or a reality begin to emerge. You think about them when they’re away. You’re aware that you matter to them as well. The thought of anything hurting them is painful. This is friendship. We easily reduce friendship to a set of shared emotions. Why we like someone else, we can

ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΑΝΕΣΤΗ! CHRIST IS RISEN! The Sixth Monday of Pascha: The Community We All Need

05/22/2023

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, May 24, 2017 Communities are not built by pioneers. They are rooted in mutual need and brokenness. Stanley Hauerwas has observed: My hunch is that you don’t just make a community up. You discover that you need one another because you’re in danger. The need, created by various forms of weakness, must be acknowledged and accepted. The “shame” associated with it must be borne by the community as a whole. Without

The Fifth Thursday of Great Lent. The Monastic Life: The Way of Perfection, Part III

04/07/2022

Published by Pemptousia Partnership, June 16, 2015 By Prof. Georgios Mantzaridis The monastic profession rite, with its shearing of hair, is called a second baptism”19. Baptism, however, is one and the same for all members of the Church. It is participation in the death and resurrection of Christ. The rite of profession does not repeat, but renews and activates the one baptism. The vows taken during the rite are in essence no different from those taken

The Mystery of Death. Preparing for our Death.

10/14/2021

Death can be a mystery precisely because the triumph over death is not a mystery By Abbot Tryphon, December 16, 2019 As a priest and monk of the Russian Orthodox Church, I am comfortable with the mystery of death, as all Christians should be. Death can be a mystery precisely because the triumph over death is not a mystery. As the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann wrote, “in essence, Christianity is not concerned with coming to

Thoughts on Life and New Life, on God’s Nature and our Nature

08/18/2021

Thoughts on Life and New Life By Michael Haldas, July 6, 2016 “The gift of new life requires the reception and cooperation of the believer through faith and obedience to God. We are His children (Romans 8 v. 14) as He leads us by the power of the Spirit. In this new life, the body becomes the follower, not the leader. In choosing the way of the Holy Spirit, we put to death sinful passions

Reality Is Communion

09/29/2020

In the beginning God says, “Let us make humanity in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves” (Genesis 1:26). The use of the plural pronoun here seems to be an amazing, deep time intuition of what Christians would later call the Trinity—the revelation of the nature of God as community, as relationship itself, a Mystery of perfect giving and perfect receiving, both within God and outside of God. The Body of Christ is another metaphor for

July Fourth Observed: Godly Meditations from America’s Founding Fathers

07/03/2020

Godly Meditations from America’s Founding Fathers John Adams: “The law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal code as well as a moral and religious code. These are laws essential to the existence of men in society and most of which have been enacted by every Nation which ever professed any code of laws. Vain indeed would be the search among the writings of secular history to find so broad, so complete and so

The Beloved Community (Martin Luther King Day)

01/21/2019

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. —Martin Luther King, Jr. [1] As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw clearly in the last years of his life, we face a real choice between chaos and community—we need a moral revolution. If that was true fifty years ago, then we must be clear today: America needs a moral revival to bring about beloved community. —William J. Barber II [2] I believe that

Trust and Surrender

10/29/2018

Power, according to Jesus and the Trinity, is not something to be “grasped at” (see Philippians 2:6-7). I don’t need to cling to my title, my uniform, my authorship, or whatever other trappings I use to make myself feel powerful and important. Waking up inside the Trinitarian dance, I realize that all of this is rather unimportant; in fact, it’s often pretense that keeps me from my True Self and gets in the way of

Archive

The Third Day of Christmas Advent. Broken Communion

The Communion of Friends

ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΑΝΕΣΤΗ! CHRIST IS RISEN! The Sixth Monday of Pascha: The Community We All Need

The Fifth Thursday of Great Lent. The Monastic Life: The Way of Perfection, Part III

The Mystery of Death. Preparing for our Death.

Thoughts on Life and New Life, on God’s Nature and our Nature

Reality Is Communion

July Fourth Observed: Godly Meditations from America’s Founding Fathers

The Beloved Community (Martin Luther King Day)

Trust and Surrender

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