There is a darkness that we are all led into by our own stupidity, by our own selfishness, blindness, or by just living out of the false self. And there is a darkness that I believe God leads us through for our own enlightenment. In both cases, we have to walk through these dark periods by brutal honesty, confessions, surrenders, letting go, forgiveness, and often by some necessary restitution, apology or healing ritual. I still
Abba Poemen said to Abba Joseph: “Tell me how I can become a monastic.” And Abba Joseph replied, “If you want to find rest here, and hereafter, say in every occasion, ‘Who am I?” WHO is THERE ANYWHERE in the world who is not looking for something: for approval, for money, for a home, for a career, for success, for security, for happiness? We are, by nature, spiritual foragers, seekers after grails. We look constantly
NO ONE WHO PUTS HIS HAND TO THE PLOW AND LOOKS BACK IS FIT FOR THE KINGDOM OF GOD.—LUKE 9:62 Attachment—how is an attachment formed? First comes the contact with something that gives you pleasure: a car, an attractively advertised modern appliance, a word of praise, a person’s company. Then comes the desire to hold on to it, to repeat the gratifying sensation that this thing or person caused you. Finally comes the conviction that
NO ONE WHO PUTS HIS HAND TO THE PLOW AND LOOKS BACK IS FIT FOR THE KINGDOM OF GOD.—LUKE 9:62 God’s kingdom is love. What does it mean to love? It means to be sensitive to life, to things, to persons, to feel for everything and everyone to the exclusion of nothing and no one. For exclusion can only be achieved through a hardening of oneself, through closing one’s doors. And the moment there is
We need a theology that will answer the atheist position about evil, about the process imputed to God since Jean Paul Richter, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky (think, for example, of the arguments presented by Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov). We must abolish once and for all that image of a “diabolical God” who, from all eternity, controls everything and thus appears as the only source of evil. Our God is the Theos pathon, the crucified God
Another word to describe mystical moments is emancipation. If it isn’t an experience of newfound freedom, I don’t think it is an authentic God experience. God is always bigger than we imagined, expected, or even hoped. All of these words describe mystical moments: enlargement, connection or union, and emancipation. You may not use the same words, but on a practical level mysticism is experienced as a new capacity and a new desire to love. And
Abba Poemen said: “The nature of water is yielding, and that of a stone is hard. Yet if you hang a bottle filled with water above the stone so that the water drips drop by drop, it will wear a hole in the stone. In the same way the word of God is tender, and our heart is hard. So when people hear the word of God frequently, their hearts are opened to the fear
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. Luke 4:1-13
I think of [Lent] as an Outward Bound for the soul. No one has to sign up for it, but if you do then you give up the illusion that you are in control of your life.
On the Leavetaking of the Feast of the Annunciation, the Church commemorates the Archangel Gabriel, who announced the great mystery of the Incarnation of Christ to the Virgin Mary. Mindful of the manifold appearances of the holy Archangel Gabriel and of his zealous fulfilling of God’s will and confessing his intercession for Christians before the Lord, the Orthodox Church calls upon its children to pray to the great Archangel with faith and love. The Synaxis
In many ancient traditions, as still today in India, salvation is understood as dissolution into the vastness of the universe, re-absorption into an impersonal divinity; but the Fathers insist that humanity must ‘personalize’ the universe; not save itself by means of the universe, but save it by communicating grace to it. And all the while human beings must also humbly decipher the ‘Bible of the world’; they elevate themselves above all life in order to
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