AS WE SLOW DOWN to hear our breathing, we can become aware of an inner vastness opening up, a new dimension to our awareness. This is the beginning of an awareness of the holy presence of God. Within that space we can become alert to God guiding and strengthening us, aware of His voice. We slowly become aware of Him as our strength and our song. When I first began to give retreats in Orthodox
Love is just like prayer; it is not so much an action that we do, but a dialogue that already flows through us. We don’t decide to “be loving”; rather, to love is to allow our deepest and truest nature to show itself. The “Father” doesn’t decide to love the “Son.” Fatherhood is the flow from Father to Son, one hundred percent. The Son does not choose now and then to release some love to
By Father Stephen Freeman “I’m doing better.” Over the years I’m sure I’ve heard this many times in confession. I’ve also heard, “I’m not doing so well.” These are timely updates, personal measures and reports on the state of spiritual lives. And they are wrong. You are not doing better. You are not doing worse. In truth, we don’t know how we’re doing. Only God knows. But we have internalized a cultural narrative and made
It is helpful to observe that repentance through compassion is perhaps nowhere more available to us than in our mediated relationships with society. Living in the world, we are surrounded constantly by stories of awful vice and sin, found in the news, on the web, told through friends and the like. Our usual instinct, which is one strongly encouraged in the secular world, is to sit in judgment of the wrongs we hear about on
One of the most difficult problems faced in Christian life, and one that the desert monks experienced acutely, is the problem of our temptation to seek distance from the struggles of others, and to promote a sense of separation from the sins of the world around us. There is a certain passing resemblance to Christianity in doing so. Indeed, we certainly do not actively desire temptation for ourselves, nor do we approve of engaging in
Compassion As we have noted, the idea that charity and good works are important for Christians, and that life in the world offers a lot of opportunities to do them, is probably quite obvious. The work of developing compassion, however, which is the topic of this section, requires a little more discussion. First, we should define the term “compassion” as we mean it here. While the modern English word tends to delineate a certain feeling
I think it’s foolish to presume we can understand Jesus if we don’t first of all understand Trinity. We will continually misinterpret and misuse Jesus if we don’t first participate in the circle dance of mutuality and communion within which he participated. We instead make Jesus into “Christ the King,” a title he rejected in his lifetime (John 18:37), and we operate as if God’s interest in creation or humanity only began 2000 years ago.
By Father Steven Kostoff “And He said, ‘There was a man who had two sons….’” This is how Christ begins what is perhaps the greatest of his parables, the one we know as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but which could easily be titled the “Parable of the Two Sons” or the “Parable of the Compassionate Father.” With this parable, which we will hear at the Divine Liturgy on Sunday, February 4, we are
By Father Stephen Freeman The story in the gospel of Christ’s visits to the Temple in his childhood – the first at 40 days of age (marked by the Feast of the Presentation and the occasion of prophecy by the Elder Simeon and Hannah the Prophetess) and at age 12 when He is lost and later found giving instruction to the teachers and scribes, is a reminder of the importance of children in the Temple
Silence and Purity of Heart The disciples of Abba Pachomius learned that silence is not simply the absence of sound. It is a unique form of human consciousness. In the silence of their teacher they were drawn beyond themselves into a transpersonal form of listening, seeing and learning. They witnessed the presence of God in Pachomius in such a way that the judgments of their egos were released. They were lured beyond the boundaries of
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