The saint Abbot Isaiah, the Egyptian hermit, says of the Jesus Prayer (1) that it is a mirror for the mind and a lantern for the conscience. Someone has also likened it to a constantly sounding, quiet voice in a house: all thieves that sneak in take hasty flight when they hear that someone is awake there. The house is the heart, the thieves, the evil impulses. Prayer is the voice of the one who
We are made up of soul and body; the two cannot be separated in our conduct. Let the physical therefore come to your aid: Christ knew our weakness and for our sake used words and gestures, spittle and earth as media. For our sake He let His power flow from the fringe of His garment (Matthew 9: 20; 14: 36), from the handkerchiefs or aprons that were carried away from the apostle Paul’s body (Acts
But the road from Bethlehem to Zion is long, and is leading us through Gethsemane and Golgotha. Already in Bethlehem the newborn Godchild is presented with funeral offerings by the Wise Men from the East. “Today God leads the Wise Men to worship through the star, prefiguring His three-day burial in gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” The very doors of the Bethlehem cavern are nearly stained with the innocent blood of the children who were killed
Work by day After the morning Office, when he sat down to read the Bible he became like a man enraptured: with every verse he read he would fall many times on his face, and at many of the phrases he would raise his hands to heaven and glorify God many times over. He was about forty years old, his food was sparse, and in temperament he was dry and warm. Because he used to
By Father James Kordaris This month we celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Precious and Lifegiving Cross. Every September for the rest of our lives, we will remember the horrible events of September 11. And yet, as Orthodox Christians, we will also remember that three days later, the Church raises up before us the Cross of Christ. How provident that the commemoration of this horrible tragedy will always be followed by the commemoration
St Isaac the Syrian, or St Isaac of Nineveh, as he is also known, is one of the greatest spiritual writers of the Christian East. If one visits the monasteries of Mount Athos or Romania today and asks the monks whom they would recommend for spiritual reading, the name of Isaac will nearly always be among the first to be mentioned. His influence on Orthodox spirituality continues to be great. It is by no means
Recently, Anglican bishop and theologian N.T. Wright was interviewed on the Evangelical Protestant show “100 Huntley Street”, speaking about heaven and hell. As might be expected from someone of Wright’s stature, he was articulate, fascinating, and Biblical. He prefaced his brief remarks by saying that one day he was sitting in the Sistine Chapel facing an immense image of the Last Judgment, in which souls were departing after the Judgment and either ascending to heaven
When the Son of God, the fullness of personal existence, becomes the Son of the Earth, he allows himself to be contained by the universe at one point in space and time; but in reality the universe is contained in him. He will not use his body to possess and exploit the world, but by his constantly Eucharistic attitude, he makes it a body of unity, flesh which is both cosmic and sacrificial. In him
By Fr. Antony Hughes But the Cross and Resurrection present an unprecedented challenge to us. The coming of Jesus is the invasion of Reality into our fallen world. To embrace the message of Christ means the end of delusion, the opening of new doors, the renewal of the mind. The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost punctuates the invasion even more, making it strikingly personal. Looking back I’ll bet the apostles said to themselves
By Fr. Antony Hughes (Mark 10:32-45) In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ! I would love to make NEW SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION by Thomas Merton the great Trappist monk and mystic required reading. It is a continual source of inspiration for me. I will refer to it in today’s sermon. When James and John heard Jesus tell of his
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