By Fr. Stephen Freeman, August 5, 2020 My attention was drawn to the event of the Transfiguration during my college years. It was then that I first read a book on St. Seraphim of Sarov, who himself was transfigured in a famous incident in his conversation with Motivilov. There, on a snowy winter’s day, the saint shown with a brilliant light, and Motivilov felt effused with warmth and joy. It caught my attention in the
Western culture, having spread all over the world, has become so stretched, so cut off from the depths, that it lacks the strength to contain this great upsurge of life and enlighten it. Today it wavers between speculative high refinement and chaos. Only a renewed Christianity can open the ways of beauty. For beauty is one of the divine Names, perhaps the most forgotten, and the seal of the Well-Beloved on creation: ‘Set me as
Restoring this Christian unitive vision of creation as a cosmic sacrament points us to the Iconic Tree. The Iconic Tree The mystery of life is that even the life of fallen nature partakes somehow of the Life beyond life, even though without redemption access to the Tree of Life remains blocked by separation, sin and death. As a great saint of the early Church, Dionysios the Areopagite wrote in his enormously influential work, The Divine
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