On the day after every Great Feast, the Orthodox Church honors the one through whom the Feast is made possible. On the day following the Nativity of the Lord, for example, we celebrate the Synaxis of the Most Holy Theotokos (December 26). On the day after Theophany, we commemorate St John the Baptist (January 7), and so on. Today we honor the all-Holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, Who descended upon the Apostles at Pentecost in
By Father Stephen Freeman, May 24, 2019 I cannot begin to count the number of times I wished there were a simple, felicitous word for “ontological.” I dislike writing theology with words that have to be explained – that is, words whose meanings are not immediately obvious. But, alas, I have found no substitute and will, therefore, beg my reader’s indulgence for dragging such a word into our conversations. From the earliest times in the
On the day after every Great Feast, the Orthodox Church honors the one through whom the Feast is made possible. On the day following the Nativity of the Lord, for example, we celebrate the Synaxis of the Most Holy Theotokos (December 26). On the day after Theophany, we commemorate St John the Baptist (January 7), and so on. Today we honor the all-Holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, Who descended upon the Apostles at Pentecost in
Saint Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, was a younger brother of Saint Basil the Great (January 1). His birth and upbringing came at a time when the Arian disputes were at their height. Having received an excellent education, he was at one time a teacher of rhetoric. In the year 372, he was consecrated by Saint Basil the Great as bishop of the city of Nyssa in Cappadocia. Saint Gregory was an ardent advocate for Orthodoxy,
By Michael Haldas Thoughts on Us and the Holy Spirit, June 17, 2016 “If Jesus had stayed on earth, his physical presence would have limited the spread of the Good News, because physically he could be in only one place at a time. After Christ was taken up into heaven, He would be spiritually present everywhere through the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was sent so that God would be with and within His followers…”
What makes a person holy is love, the adoration of Christ When Christ enters our soul, everything within us will be altered Man is a mystery. We carry within us an age-old inheritance – all the good and precious experience of the prophets, the saints, the martyrs, the apostles and above all of our Lord Jesus Christ; but we also carry within us the inheritance of the evil that exists in the world from Adam
In his “Second Century on Theology,” St Maximus the Confessor makes a startling claim, which was nevertheless understood as both a promise and an exhortation to be received by anyone who lives “in Christ.” “In those found worthy,” he declares, “the Logos of God is transfigured to the degree to which each has advanced in holiness, and he comes to them with his angels in the glory of the Father. For the more spiritual principles
We were created naked but clothed with light, light that shone upon the world to transfigure it. But at the Fall God clothed us with ‘garments of skins’ (Genesis 3.21) to protect us from a world become hostile. And now, in our fallen state, our own skin has become a barrier setting us apart from the universe, and signaling that the organism hidden within is a machine for consuming everything outside until its inevitable death.
In the Old Testament Pentecost was the feast which occurred fifty days after Passover. As the Passover feast celebrated the exodus of the Israelites from the slavery of Egypt, so Pentecost celebrated God’s gift of the ten commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. In the new covenant of the Messiah, the Passover event takes on its new meaning as the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection, the “exodus” of men from this sinful world to
In St Silouan’s teaching concerning the bonds that unite us humans to the rest of creation, there are three points that I find particularly interesting: The Starets underlines the spiritual value of the human body. While he adopts a negative attitude towards the passions, he is fundamentally positive in his estimate of our human physicality. We are to hate, not our bodies as such, but the sinfulness that corrupts them. In its present fallen state
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