A pilgrim to the Holy Mountain of Athos asked an old hermit, “Father, how can I attain my salvation?” The venerated holy man replied, “Every day at dusk go to the cemetery and for an hour hurl insults to the dead. Do that for a month and pay attention to everything that happens around you. Then come and report to me.” After a month the pilgrim returned. “Father, I have done what you told me
THE SLOWEST OF PILGRIMS, I have come to see how my own faith, fragile as it is, is assisted and sustained by the calendar, by the lectionary—by the seasons of the Church. I want to share my growing understanding that our participation in this cycle is one way we might, as they say, redeem the time. “The days are evil,” writes Saint Paul, imploring us to do something about it. By deliberately attaching our given
The Fast of Advent, by Father Leonidas Contos If there is one central idea in Paul, a kind of link that binds his theology to his ethics, that is his doctrinal theology and his moral theology; it is the idea of “newness of life.” Again and again he makes this emphasis: that when a person became a Christian, he literally renounced a former way of life and adopted a wholly new way. In baptism the
Only love can move effectively across boundaries and across cultures. Love is a very real energy, a spiritual life force that is much more powerful than ideas or mere thoughts. Love is endlessly alive, always flowing toward the lower place, and thus life-giving for all, exactly like water. In fact, there is no form of life that does not need water. No wonder water is such a universal spiritual symbol. When you die, you are
By Father Stephen Freeman, February 3, 2015 As I continue this series on morality (or unmorality) the conversation continues to push me back to basics. There are deeply important reasons for unthinking the morality of the modern world and rethinking its place in our relationship with God. The most important reason is because it is incorrect to think of us as primarily moral beings. So what would constitute a moral being? A Moral Being A
I believe that the Mystery of the Cross is saying that the pattern of transformation is always death transformed. Death and life are two sides of one coin, and you cannot have one without the other. The theological term for this classic pattern of descent and ascent was coined by Saint Augustine as “the paschal mystery.” We now proclaim it publicly at every Eucharist as “the mystery of faith.” But why? The pattern of down and up, loss and renewal,
The Gift of Silence (III) From the time of Elijah through the period of classical prophecy, God continued to reveal Himself through His Word of blessing and judgment. At the same time, silence was increasingly perceived as something negative: the absence of God’s voice and thus of His presence. “The land of silence” became synonymous with Sheol, the place of the dead where, by definition, the life-giving God is not to be found (Ps 88:11-13;
By Father Stephen Freeman, January 26, 2015 Salvation can be messy. I believe this with all my heart and so I state it at the outset of this article. As such, it marks me as a heretic in Modernity. I not only believe that salvation is messy – I believe that messiness is pretty much inherent to salvation. And along with that, I believe that our aversion to messiness (in all things) is a peculiar affliction of
By Father Leonidas Contos, New York, December 8, 1965 As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. Psalm 103:15-16 If we were to take this single verse from the familiar Psalm, and consider it in isolation from the rest of what is a glorious hymn of praise, no doubt it
One of the most astonishing features of our time is the tendency of spiritual truths, till recently known only to contemplatives, to become historical facts. So the splitting of the atom is only the outward expression in history of the spiritual state of disintegration in humanity known to Tradition and called just the same thing, ‘atomization’. When the self turns away from God, it can no longer contain its nature; it becomes an individual –
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