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The Gift of Silence III

07/19/2018

The Gift of Silence (III) From the time of Elijah through the period of classical prophecy, God continued to reveal Himself through His Word of blessing and judgment. At the same time, silence was increasingly perceived as something negative: the absence of God’s voice and thus of His presence. “The land of silence” became synonymous with Sheol, the place of the dead where, by definition, the life-giving God is not to be found (Ps 88:11-13;

God is Watching Us

06/27/2018

Every day, every night, let us think that God is watching us, that He hears our prayers, that He sees the depths of our spirit. This does not mean, of course, that we see God as He is, but it creates an atmosphere which allows us to perceive our imperfections in the course of each day: the dissipation of our mind, our faults in our relations with others, and so on. Living with other people,

Silence as Sacrament

06/19/2018

“For God alone my soul waits in silence.” (Ps. 61:1) “When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” (Rev. 8:1) “Silence is the sacrament of the world to come.” (St. Isaac the Syrian) Silence is not just the absence of ambient noise. Nor does it mean the lack of laughter or music or shared reflection. Silence is a state of mind and heart, a condition of

Tuesday of the Second Week of Great Lent: Purify the Roots and You will be Entirely Pure. The Perfect Person’s Rule of Life

02/27/2018

Purify the Roots and You will be Entirely Pure Discipline of the body, if it is combined with peace of mind, purifies it from all material tendencies. Discipline of the soul makes it humble and purifies it from the impressions that push it in a material direction. Discipline effects the transition from the emotions of passion to the activity of contemplation, or, better, it raises the soul above all terrestrial objects and feeds it on

Get Real for Lent

02/16/2018

By Father Stephen Freeman According to St. Basil, God is the “only truly Existing.” Our own existence is a gift from God who is our Creator. None of us has “self-existing” life. We exist because God sustains us in existence – in Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). Sin is the rejection of this gift of God – a movement away from true existence. +++ Much of our attention in the modern world is

Let us Glory in Temptation. Tackle your Fears Head-On

09/26/2017

Let us Glory in Temptation The devil does not have only one weapon. He uses many different means to defeat human beings: now with bribery, now with boredom, now with greed he attacks, inflicting mental and physical wounds equally. The kind of temptation varies with the different kinds of victim. Avarice is the test of the rich, loss of children that of parents and everyone is exposed to pain of mind or body. What a

Love in Action

07/31/2017

The way to arrive and remain within “the force field of the Holy Spirit”, which is one way of describing consciousness–is both very simple and very hard: you’ve got to remain in love, with a foundational yes to every moment. You can’t risk walking around with a negative, resentful, gossipy, critical mind, because then you won’t be in the force field. You will not be a usable instrument. That’s why Jesus commanded us to love.

Face to Face—Beholding God

07/14/2017

My mind wandered back to these thoughts as I pondered the growing phenomenon of “selfies.” Of course, the “selfie” is the passion-driven distortion of the theology of the face – existence as ego. For the mystery of the face is not to look at myself, but to look at the other. You are God’s “selfie.” Ponder it. Nothing about the human body is as intimate as the face. We generally think of other aspects of

Lost Christian Language for Repairing the Person (Part II)

02/01/2017

By Scott Cairns The Mind in the Heart The more we read in the fathers and mothers across the early centuries of the Church, the more profoundly we come to recognize this formula, this admonition that we might find our prayer lives made fruitful by our descending with our “minds” into our “hearts.” This figure, then — of the lucid nous descended into the ready kardiá, of the mind pressed into the heart — articulates both the

Lost Christian Language for Repairing the Person (Part I)

01/31/2017

By Scott Cairns “He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul.” —Psalm 22:3 Among a good many advantages our predecessors in the early Church could claim was a more nearly adequate vocabulary. For instance, they were in possession of a number of words that indicated a number of amazing truths. Nous, kardiá, népsis and théosis were among those words that helped to keep the young Body focused on the task at hand, the task of healing our shared

Archive

The Gift of Silence III

God is Watching Us

Silence as Sacrament

Tuesday of the Second Week of Great Lent: Purify the Roots and You will be Entirely Pure. The Perfect Person’s Rule of Life

Get Real for Lent

Let us Glory in Temptation. Tackle your Fears Head-On

Love in Action

Face to Face—Beholding God

Lost Christian Language for Repairing the Person (Part II)

Lost Christian Language for Repairing the Person (Part I)

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