By the Reverend Andrew J Demotses President Harry Truman was the object of an assassination attempt in which two secret service agents were killed while protecting him. In recounting the experience of that terrible day, Mr. Truman said, “You can’t imagine how a man feels when someone else dies for him.” The Old Testament recounts the story in which a similar feeling caused David to worship God. When he had expressed a longing to drink
As I shared earlier this year, the Bible is “a text in travail.” Sometimes the biblical writers catch a glimpse of God’s true character–love, mercy, and justice–and sometimes they lose sight of it. Old Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann traces the evolution of human consciousness through three sections of Hebrew Scriptures: the Torah (the five books of the Pentateuch), the Prophets, and the Wisdom literature (including Job, the Psalms, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes).
Gentleness as a Sign of the Spiritual Person The goal of the spiritual path is not the great ascetic, not the indefatigable faster, not the consistent person, but the meek and gentle one. Evagrius continually mentions gentleness as a sign of spirituality. He challenges us to be like Moses, of whom Scripture says: “Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all the men that were on the face of the earth” (Num. 12:3).
By Father Daniel Kovalak “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). In God’s “strategic plan” for the life of the world and its salvation, He decisively intervened, in Person, “trampling down death by death.” In the radiant light of Jesus’ glorious resurrection, darkness is overcome, creation is renewed, disappointment and despair no longer have the final word, sorrow is turned to
INTRODUCTION The Feast of the Annunciation of Our Most Holy Lady, the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary is celebrated on March 25 each year. The Feast commemorates the announcement by the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Son of God, would become incarnate and enter into this world through her womb. BIBLICAL STORY The biblical story of the Feast of the Annunciation is found in the first chapter of the Gospel
What Happens in the Crossroads of the Spirit It is the task of the hands to find food for the body’s necessities, and the task of the mouth to give service to the word. This particular organ is ours so that we can emit sounds, and we have another organ to receive them. The two activities are not muddled up, every organ carries out its own specific function without disturbing the one next to it.
Meditation: You Shall Call His Name Jesus The Gospel of Matthew begins with a long list of Hebrew names that give the family tree of Jesus on the human side. As we read these names some two thousand years of history pass in review. At the end of the list we find the name above every name, the name of Jesus. The procession passes through the centuries and comes to rest at Bethlehem. “Joseph, son
This light itself is one, and all those who see it and love it are one. -St. Augustine The center of our soul is difficult to define. It’s hard enough just to believe in it. -St. Teresa of Avila Because it is not I who look but I who am being looked through, Gloria. -R. S. Thomas People visit the Academy in Florence mostly to see Michelangelo’s David. The postcards and the photographs in coffee-table
Another thought may press us hard: getting out of our former life, our former profession, and doing something completely different. Often all the arguments are useless here. The thought just keeps coming back. Here too some of the sayings of the fathers show us a way. A father who had struggled for years against the thought of visiting a certain confrere concretely imagined going to him, greeting him, and speaking to him. He imagined the
By Father Matthew Baker In his On the Making of Man, St Gregory of Nyssa likened the human body to a kind of musical instrument, played upon by the mind of man. In the same work, he dismissed as pagan the idea of man as microcosm. Yet later, in his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, Gregory espoused precisely this notion of microcosm in order to express the mediatorial role of the human being between intelligible and
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