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
The things written below are dedicated to the glory and honor of the Holy Anargyroi [Unmercenaries] doctors Kosmas and Damian. 1. “Wondrous Is God in His Saints” For two years (1943-1945) I was sick with “vertigo”. When I would wake up I had to sit motionless for 3-5 minutes on the bed and then get up, get dressed and make my first steps with great care so as not to fall down because of a
Breaking the limits “My child,” God replies, “I will never leave you be. I want to teach you how to surpass yourself, to encounter something more, something greater. “It is good for you to be satisfied with any form of harmonious beauty. Yet you need to discover the painful tearing away from yourself that will allow you to behold what is truly sublime. “This doesn’t mean you should disdain your intelligence. After all, I am
Members of One Another (Part II) Despite the striking parallels between the Russian novelist and the Athonite monk, it is highly unlikely that St Silouan had ever read Dostoevsky. More probably, the similarities arise because both are shaped by the same living tradition, and both are drawing on the same sources. St Silouan (almost certainly) and Dostoevsky (possibly) have been influenced by a Mesopotamian hermit of the seventh century, St Isaac the Syrian, who writes
Power, according to Jesus and the Trinity, is not something to be “grasped at” (see Philippians 2:6-7). I don’t need to cling to my title, my uniform, my authorship, or whatever other trappings I use to make myself feel powerful and important. Waking up inside the Trinitarian dance, I realize that all of this is rather unimportant; in fact, it’s often pretense that keeps me from my True Self and gets in the way of
It was October 26, 1987. The time was past 10:00 p.m. The city was celebrating the memory of the contest of its patron saint, St. Demetrios, and the freedom from the nearly five hundred years (1430-1912) occupation by the Ottomans. The Church of St. Demetrios with open doors received its nightly venerators, who were kneeling in front of the silver casket with the holy relics of the Myrrh-gusher. At that moment there must not have
Members of One Another (Part I) ‘Love all creation,’ says Starets Zosima in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov: ‘Love all creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand within it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.’ This ‘divine mystery’ of which Starets Zosima speaks is precisely the interdependence, the reciprocal
The Violent Announcement Infinite Love storms the very gates of our life. It could be that I’ve already achieved a kind of peaceful co-existence with God. Perhaps I’ve been able to convince myself that I am more or less “in order” with my soul and therefore more or less at ease with myself. Maybe I’ve even foreseen a happy and peaceful ending to my earthly life. Then suddenly all these assurances are turned upside down
God’s Risk (Part II) Maximus the Confessor clearly distinguishes two freedoms in Man: that of his nature and that of his person. The first is the magnetic attraction of his deepest being towards God, the completion of his nature in love; indeed, Man desires love with his whole nature and finds fulfillment in it. Human beings conceal within themselves an ‘immense capacity for love and joy which is effective from the moment it knows the
The God of Jesus Christ exists entirely for, with, through another. The law of personhood is that the only way one “has” oneself at all is by giving oneself away. —Catherine Mowry LaCugna [1] What if we actually dropped into this Trinitarian flow and let it be our major teacher? Even our very notion of society, politics, and authority would utterly change, because most of it is still top down and outside in. Trinitarian theology says
© 2020 Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral
