And she gave birth to her first born Son and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes and laid Him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn. -Luke2:7 Every Nativity play I have ever watched has a scene where Mary and Joseph go to an inn and are told that there are no rooms available. They are, however, told that there is a stable out back and are shown to a
St. Ephraim the Syrian: If he was not flesh . . . And if he was not God . . . The facts themselves bear witness and his divine acts of power teach those who doubt that he is true God, and his sufferings show that he is true man. And if those who are feeble in understanding are not fully assured, they will pay the penalty on his dread day. If he was not
GOD IN SEARCH OF A MOTHER Recently there has been much discussion…as to whether our theological understanding of God has not been too masculine to the detriment of the feminine. For our purpose here it can be said that Fatherhood, as Louis Bouyer has pointed out, belongs to God alone in His essence of absolute Source of Being. Only God is totally perfect, complete, independent and therefore He alone is Love, capable of sharing Himself
UNION BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS Carl G. Jung in his book: Answer to Job discusses the importance of Mary as the archetypal symbol of the feminine in all human beings. “But if the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found. As this is not possible through logic, one is dependent on symbols which make the irrational union of opposites possible. They are
FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT Mary like any Christian contemplative had to learn to walk by faith. We can believe that the great faith she needed to give her fiat to the message of the angel had been prepared by series of acts of faith developed throughout Mary’s life as she contemplated God’s message unfolding in her life before the Annunciation. We see her deep spirit of contemplative faith when we examine Lk 1:37, “For nothing
MARY – THE PERFECT CHRISTIAN I would like to avoid such an approach and begin by basing our deeper devotion to Mary on the fact that God has given her to us as a realized type of the perfect Christian. Mary, in her continued process of growing into a greater fullness of grace, even in her glorified relationship to Jesus Christ, to the members of His Body, the Church, and to the whole created universe,
Mary the Contemplative Some years ago I met Father Chrysostom, a Greek Orthodox monk, on Mount Athos. He lived in a hermitage with his disciple at the foot of Karoulia, the bleak rocky desert at the southernmost tip of this peninsula as it juts defiantly out into the blue waters of the Aegean Sea. On top, 250 feet above the waters, individual hermits rooted their one-room cells and sat like fearless eagles peering into eternity.
St. Mary Magdalene, called by the Orthodox Church both Myrrh-bearer and Equal-to-the-Apostle, is commemorated on July 22, as well as with the other Myrrh-bearers on the second Sunday after Easter. Born in the seaport town of Magdala on the Sea of Galilee, she played an important role during Christ’s ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection. The Gospels provide the little that we know about St. Mary Magdalene, from whom Christ cast out seven demons. St. Mary and
Introduction On the Saturday before Holy Week, the Orthodox Church commemorates a major feast of the year, the miracle of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ when he raised Lazarus from the dead after he had lain in the grave four days. Here, at the end of Great Lent and the forty days of fasting and penitence, the Church combines this celebration with that of Palm Sunday. In triumph and joy the Church bears witness
By Father Stanley Harakas On February 2, our Orthodox Church celebrates a beautiful moment in the life of Christ – The Presentation of Christ at the Temple. According to the Jewish practice at that time, the first-born son of a family was to be brought forty days after his birth to the Temple in Jerusalem for sacrifices to be made. Since the coming Messiah was expected to be a first-born son, it was done in
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