By Father Stanley Harakas Q: I have asked many persons this question, but I have as yet not received a satisfactory answer. Maybe there is no answer. The question is, “Why was humanity created by God?” I know the “how” and the “circumstances,” but not the “why.” – D.A.C., Augusta, GA. A. One way of answering your question would be to say simply, we have no direct revelation on the subject in the Bible, and so
Between the first and second comings of the Lord, between the God-man and the God-universe, between the fallen and transfigured states of being, stands the Church, as a boundary and a crossing-place. And every Christian, through communion with holy things, i.e. the Eucharist, and in the communion of saints, is himself a ‘living boundary’, a place where death passes over into life. The cosmic history of the Church is the history of a childbirth, that
Again, the Annunciation is “the beginning of our salvation and the revelation of the mystery which is from eternity: the Son of God becometh the Son of the Virgin, and Gabriel proclaimeth good tidings of grace” (Troparion of the Feast of the Annunciation). The divine will has been declared and proclaimed by the archangel. But the Virgin was not silent. She responded to the divine call, responded in humility and faith. “Behold the handmaid of
In Spirit and in Truth, by Father John Breck The account of Jesus and the Samaritan woman, which we read on the fifth Sunday after Pascha, brought to mind something I often forget, and maybe others do as well. It’s the fact that authentic prayer is not really a human endeavor. We can probably say it is not even a human possibility. In Romans 8, the apostle Paul declares, “We do not know how to
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