As my soul bows to the ground I offer to you with all my bones and with all my heart the worship that befits you. O glorious God, who dwell in ineffable silence, you have built for my renewal a tabernacle of love on earth where it is your good pleasure to rest, a temple made of flesh and fashioned with the most holy oil of the sanctuary. Then you filled it with your holy
After conversion, self-consciousness (in the negative sense) slowly falls away and is replaced by what the mystics call pure consciousness or unitive consciousness–which is love. Self-consciousness implies a dualistic split. There is me over here, judging, analyzing, labeling that or me over there. The mind is largely dualistic before spiritual conversion and even foolishly calls such argumentation “thinking.” In true conversion the subject-object split is overcome at least for a moment. You can’t maintain this
And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. John 1:14 (From the Gospel at the Divine Liturgy on Pascha) Christ is Risen! We’ve all seen displays of the Nativity in our homes and churches during the Christmas season. Christmas plays and pageants highlight the story of the shepherds and angels, told in the Gospel of Luke, and the Magi, as told in the Gospel of Matthew. In some sense,
A Testament of Beauty Today it is not only service that must witness to the Spirit, but art, the art that unifies us in the ‘heart-spirit’, in the ‘eye of the heart’ which sees the third beauty latent in everyone, and perceives everything to be holy. The art of being astonished that the Inaccessible God draws near to us in all the faces and all the beauty of the world. Then we find the courage,
Then went out to him Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. -Matthew 3:5-6 (Gospel from Royal Hours of Epiphany) Christ is born! Glorify Him! St. John the Forerunner was known as the Baptist, because he was baptizing people in the River Jordan. In the Jewish faith, one entered the faith through the ritual of circumcision. Periodically thereafter, people
By Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon In the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian churches of the West, the several weeks prior to Christmas are known as Advent, a name from a Latin word meaning “coming.” It happens that the beginning of Advent always falls on the Sunday closest to November 30, the ancient feast day (in both East and West) of the Apostle Andrew. Among Christians in the West, this preparatory season, which tends to
But God is patient, with all the patience of love. The evil that he cannot prevent, because it is born of the freedom in which his omnipotence is at once fulfilled and limited, God will use to open us to his love. Thus death, ‘the wages of sin’, paradoxically becomes a remedy for sin. Precisely because it is against nature, it makes us aware, if we do not run away from it, of our true
GOD’S KENOTIC LOVE St. Paul had grasped the essence of God’s self-giving love as a kenosis, an emptying. That Greek word contains a great mystery for us. God’s outpouring did not begin only on the Cross when He, whose state was divine, did not cling “to His equality with God but emptied Himself to assume the condition of a slave … even to accepting death, death on a cross…” (Ph 2:6-8). God’s kenosis began when
MARY THE WOMAN TOWARD OTHERS It was at Pentecost that Mary received an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that enabled her, more than any of the Apostles, to understand the universal love of her Son and Savior for all human beings. By the Spirit of Jesus Christ she burned to surrender herself even more completely to serve His Body than she had done at Nazareth or at the foot of the Cross. With new awareness
Saint Paul has always been a hero of mine. Unfortunately, Christians have often misunderstood Paul, seeing him as a moralist rather than a mystic. Yet Paul has so much to teach us. He never knew Jesus in the flesh, so Paul’s experience of the Risen Christ is much closer to what our own could be. For the next two weeks we are going to focus especially on Paul’s teachings on love, which is the theme
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