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The Twenty-Sixth Day of Christmas Advent. On the Feast of the Nativity

~Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2013 I don’t know if you knew Professor Jaroslav Pelikan. He was a wonderful historian, a theologian, a Lutheran who converted to Orthodoxy in the last part of his life. He was an amazing man. He said something that I’ve kept in my mind since I heard it: that “the problem with the church is that we have lost a sense of the cosmic

The Erotic Language of Prayer

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, May 4, 2018  The very heart of true prayer is desire, love. In the language of the Fathers this desire is called eros. Modern usage has corrupted the meaning of “erotic” to only mean sexual desire – but it is a profound word, without substitute in the language of the Church. I offer a quote from Dr. Timothy Patitsas of Holy Cross in Brookline: By eros we mean the love that makes us forget

The Thirty-Seventh Day of Christmas Advent: Incarnation to Parousia

By Fr John Breck, December 2, 2009 Celebration of Christmas, the Nativity of our Lord, invites us to look in a fresh way at the intimate relation that exists between the Incarnation of Christ and his “Second Coming” in glory. Too often Nativity is taken as a feast in and of itself, a family festival so deformed by the season’s commercial pressures that two of its major emphases, cosmic and eschatological, become lost in a

The Twenty-Second Day of Great Lent. The Cross: Suffering Love

Many people rightly question how there can be a good or just God in the presence of so much evil and suffering in the world—about which “God” appears to do nothing. Exactly how is God loving and sustaining what God created? That is our constant dilemma, and without some answer you can quite reasonably become an atheist or at least an agnostic. I believe—if I am to believe Jesus—that God is precisely suffering love. If Jesus is the living