Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on the Feast of the Transfiguration, Sunday, August 6, 2017 It is very important that we wrap our minds around the two truths when we are drawn to speak of the Holy Trinity. One, that the doctrine of the Trinity is the beating heart of our faith. Without it there is no Christianity. And Christianity where the Trinity is not central or has been forgotten or ignored has lost
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on the Feast of the Transfiguration, Sunday, August 6, 2017 It is very important that we wrap our minds around the two truths when we are drawn to speak of the Holy Trinity. One, that the doctrine of the Trinity is the beating heart of our faith. Without it there is no Christianity. And Christianity where the Trinity is not central or has been forgotten or ignored has lost
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, June 5, 2016 The science of psychology had its beginnings in the 19th century. It has since gone through many changes, complete with clinical science of the brain and its chemistry. However, in its earliest days it had something of a mystical twist. Freud, Jung and their cohort could see the surface of the personality and the various disorders it presented. Their instinct was that the causes of those disorders lay somewhere
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one, received not in essence but by participation. Just as if you lit a flame from a flame, it is the whole flame you receive. —St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) [1] The path of descent involves letting go of our self-image, our titles, our status symbols—our false self. It will die anyway. So don’t make anything absolute when it is only relative. This is one
At the same time barbarism is increasing. In the first place, it is spreading from the third world: negatively, as the revenge of the revolted slaves, which is the cause of all the destructiveness of ‘cultural revolutions’; and positively as the witness, whether dionysiac or contemplative, of the irrational continents – including France itself, at whose heart there lies a third world of the soul, the spirit of the Celts, and that of Provence, among
SOME VARIETIES OF SILENCE Not all silence is the same. There is the awkward silence of the road trip with someone we do not know quite well enough to be silent next to, the refrigerating silence of hardened anger, the reverential silence of dogwoods in winter, the vast silence of a cathedral, the focused silence of absorption in our sewing or a good book, the stunned silence of seeing the status of our pension fund.
We don’t teach meditation to the young monks. They are not ready for it until they stop slamming doors. — Thich Nhat Hanh to Thomas Merton in 1966 The piercing truth of this statement struck me as a perfect way to communicate the endless disguises and devices of the false self. There is no more clever way for the false self to hide than behind the mask of spirituality. The human ego will always try
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