Misplaced Priorities: Our laziness and misplaced priorities
By Abbot Tryphon, November 7, 2019
Our laziness and misplaced priorities regarding the Sunday and holy day services, keep us from our obligations to God, and endanger the soul, for in keeping ourselves away from God’s temple, we remain afar from the cure that comes from participating in the Divine Mysteries. Saint Gregory Palamas tells us that we “may remain uncured, suffering from unbelief in your soul because of deeds or words, and failing to approach Christ’s surgery to receive… holy healing”.
Orthodoxy is not a religion by which we can attain salvation in the privacy of our own home, for our faith is a communal faith, whereby we participate in the Body of Christ in a corporate way. It is in this life that we must participate in the communal life of the Church, for after death there is no treatment for that which separates us from God. There is no repentance after this life, because all people share the same end. Each of us is destined to see the Glory of God at the Second Coming of Christ.
Protopresbyter John Romanides tells us, “All people will see the Glory (Uncreated Light) of God, and from this viewpoint they have the same end. Everyone, of course, will see the Glory of God, but with one difference: The saved will see the Glory of God as a most sweet and never-setting Light, whereas the damned will see the same Glory of God as a consuming fire that will burn them.”
Our laziness, and our misplaced priorities, keep us from the Divine Mysteries, and deprive our soul of the healing grace that comes with an encounter with the Living God. As the Hospital of the Soul, the Church has been established by Christ Himself as that place wherein we receive the cure, so that we may bask in the Eternal Banquet that awaits us in the afterlife. By depriving ourselves of the grace filled Mysteries in this life, that are only found within the life of the Church, we separate ourselves from the very treatment that ensures eternal bliss in the next life.
With love in Christ,
Abbot Tryphon
~Abbot Tryphon, The Morning Offering, https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/morningoffering/2019/11/misplaced-priorities/.
Situation Ethics: Situation ethics versus biblical morality
By Abbot Tryphon, November 25, 2019
Situation ethics has become the norm for our times, having replaced the biblical ethics of past generations. In situation ethics as long as no one is hurt one can do as one pleases. Taking drugs, watching pornography and aborting the unborn child, all can come under the flag of situation ethics.
Taking drugs is seen as morally neutral by increasing numbers of Americans. We believe no one is hurt by our drug use, while refusing to see the obvious connection between our drug purchases and the mass killings in Mexico by drug cartels that are in business because of the demand for drugs by American users.
Nothing wrong with watching pornography, we tell ourselves, forgetting that the demand for pornography enslaves many poor young women (and men) in a form of prostitution, all for our sexual gratification. Pornography has become one of the major addictions of our times, keeping large numbers of people in bondage, and preventing sound healthy relationships.
Situation ethics has convinced women that since they have the right to make decisions concerning their own bodies, aborting the fetus is allowable if their own life style will be negatively affected. Nothing about the rights of the unborn, who have no voice whatsoever.
The Fathers knew that even the secret sins committed by people had an effect on the whole of the cosmos. The people who promote situation ethics would have us believe that nothing that is done in private hurts anyone. Biblical ethics tells us quite the opposite.
Love in Christ,
Abbot Tryphon
~Abbot Tryphon, The Morning Offering, https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/morningoffering/2019/11/situation-ethics/.
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