THE CASE OF Bartimaeus, as recorded in Mark 10:46, gives us some insight into a certain number of points relating to prayer. And they came to Jericho; and as he went out of Jericho with his disciples and a great number of people, blind Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, sat by the highway side, begging. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out, and say, Jesus, thou son
IT follows from this that prayer is your first and incomparably most important means of fighting. Learn to pray, and you vanquish all the evil powers that could imaginably assail you. Prayer is one wing, faith the other, that lifts us heavenward. With only one wing no one can fly: prayer without faith as meaningless as faith without prayer. But if your faith is very weak, you can profitably cry: Lord, give me faith! Such
By throwing off the outer bonds, you throw off the inner as well. While you are freeing yourself from external concerns, your heart is freed from inner pain. It follows from this that the hard warfare you are compelled to wage with yourself is exclusively a means. As such it is neither good nor bad; the saints often liken it to a prescribed cure. However painful it may be to follow out, it nevertheless remains
Each of the Sundays of Great Lent has its own special theme in the Orthodox Church. The First Sunday of Great Lent we celebrate the “Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy” since it was on this day in 843 A.D. that the final great heresy against the person of Christ, that of Iconoclasm, was eradicated and the Orthodox Faith became the standard by which mankind could achieve purification, illumination and glorification. The Second Sunday of
For Christians Jesus himself is the prime example of the practice of contemplation. According to early Christian contemplatives, this example is not the healing of the demoniac, the rebuking of the winds, or the Transfiguration, but Jesus’ own temptation in the desert (Mt 4:1-11). The ordeal in prayer is fundamentally a battle with thoughts, and the early contemplatives noticed something vitally important in how Jesus dealt with the thoughts by which Satan tried to ensnare
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