The Fast of Advent, by Father Leonidas Contos If there is one central idea in Paul, a kind of link that binds his theology to his ethics, that is his doctrinal theology and his moral theology; it is the idea of “newness of life.” Again and again he makes this emphasis: that when a person became a Christian, he literally renounced a former way of life and adopted a wholly new way. In baptism the
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO “LIVE THE CHURCH YEAR”? Our goal is to recover a more ancient way of looking at time and the mysterious relationship between the material and spiritual realms. The early Christians believed that the rhythm of the year gave us a perfect opportunity to re-enact the story of our salvation. In the holy days and seasons of the church year, the life of Christ and the entirety of human history are
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, March 11, 2015 I have written from time to time about the concept expressed in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, “Forgive everyone for everything.” It is a quote taken from the fictional Elder Zosima, but it is certainly a sentiment well within the bounds of Orthodox thought. I have recently been challenged in several places by people arguing that we cannot forgive those who have not sinned against us – that this right belongs
Contemplative prayer is like striking a tuning fork. All you can really do in the spiritual life is resonate to the true pitch, to receive the always-present message. Once you are tuned, you will receive, and it has nothing to do with worthiness or the group you belong to, but only inner resonance, a capacity for mutuality (see Matthew 7:7-11), which implies a basic humility. We must begin with the knowledge that the Sender is absolutely and
Fr. Nektarios Vitalis, well-known in Lavrio [a city in Attika, Greece] for his deeds and his sympathy to the poor and those written-off by the world in these difficult times, retells the following incident from when he was dying from cancer. What is said below has been told elsewhere, repeatedly, including in the book I talked to Saint Nektarios (Athens 1997, by the renowned writer Mr. Manolis Melinos). Fr. Nektarios Vitalis recalls: “I was suffering
On the 8th of November, the Orthodox Church celebrates the Feast of Synaxis of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel and the rest of the archangels. The word synaxis means the gathering of believers to celebrate a feast, or to make a remembrance of a saint. This feast also has a special meaning; it is the gathering of the humans with the angels, “their union, their gathering and standing in fear in front of the Creator.”(1)
The Demands of Prevenient Grace O Lord of Love, I beg you, don’t go so fast! I can’t keep up with you. You’re moving too quickly for me. Wait for me, let me catch up to you! Still, Lord, you have not stopped, you have not even slowed down. Lord, I see you coming toward my house. Don’t trouble yourself to come to me; I’ll come as quickly as I can to you. We can
Members of One Another (Part III) ‘My soul longs for the whole world to be saved…. Divine love desires the salvation of all…. The Lord’s is such that He would have all men to be saved…. Our one thought must be that all should be saved…. The merciful Lord sometimes gives the soul peace in God but sometimes makes the heart ache for the whole universe, that all men might repent and enter paradise. According
The words action and contemplation have become classic Christian terminology for the two dancing polarities of our lives. Thomas Aquinas and many others stated that the highest form of spiritual maturity is not action or contemplation, but the ability to integrate the two into one life stance—to be service-oriented contemplatives or contemplative activists. By temperament we all tend to come at it from one side or the other. This full integration doesn’t happen without a lot of mistakes and practice
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, March 6, 2015 A very apt word for the world we live in is: disenchanted. It was first used by Max Weber and a number of others to describe a certain aspect of the modern world – the absence of the sacred. Where people of earlier eras and other cultures have experienced the world around them as charged with divine power (of various sorts), we simply experience the world as inert. There
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