Many sayings of the fathers start out from the assumption that we must first die to the world in order to be up to the tasks that the world sets us: “A brother asked Father Moses, ‘I see a task before me and I cannot fulfill it.’ The old man said to him: ‘If you do not become like a dead body, like those who are buried, you cannot master it.’” If I completely identify
Divine Eros Makes Prayer Imperative “A person was upset with his wife. At noontime, when he got tired at work, he asked himself where he should go. He went to Elli, his wife, to get some rest.” “Do you hear my child do you hear? He was very tired. He went to a certain place. They talked and he rested. Because the flame of love was present, he found rest. This is a great thing.”
The outward beauty of the liturgy must not seduce us into forgetting that sobriety in prayer is a very important feature in Orthodoxy. In the Way of a Pilgrim a village priest gives some very authoritative advice on prayer: ‘If you want it to be pure, right and enjoyable, you must choose some short prayer, consisting of few but forcible words, and repeat it frequently, over a long period. Then you will find delight in
As attentive and vigilant as the nous may be, without divine strength and the invocation of the name of the Lord Jesus, “the rotating sword,” it is unable to be guarded from harmful thoughts. The vigilance, therefore, or the watchfulness or attentiveness of the nous is accompanied by prayer. On its own, the nous does not have the power for pure prayer unless it uses the salt of watchfulness that drives away impure and wicked
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
Samuel Adams Signer of the Declaration of Independence and Father of the American Revolution “And as it is our duty to extend our wishes to the happiness of the great family of man, I conceive that we cannot better express ourselves than by humbly supplicating the Supreme Ruler of the world that the rod of tyrants may be broken to pieces, and the oppressed made free again; that wars may cease in all the earth,
This experience explains what Rainer Maria Rilke meant when he said, “Love . . . consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other”· and what Anne Morrow Lindbergh had in mind when she wrote, “I feel we are all islands in a common sea.” It made me see that the togetherness of friends and lovers can become moments in which we can enter into a common solitude which is not
By the Late Reverend N. Patrinacos By the term Twelve Apostles only the twelve disciples of Christ should be understood. There are four lists of their names in the New Testament: Matthew 10:12, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:14, and Acts of the Apostles 1:13. The list of names is as follows: Simon also called Peter and Andrew his brother; James and John, the sons of Zebedee; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew, the tax collector; James
The divinely-blessed Peter was from Bethsaida of Galilee. He was the son of Jonas and the brother of Andrew the First-called. He was a fisherman by trade, unlearned and poor, and was called Simon; later he was renamed Peter by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, Who looked at him and said, “Thou art Simon the son of Jonas; thou shalt be called Cephas (which is by interpretation, Peter)” (John 1:42). On being raised by the
At the same time barbarism is increasing. In the first place, it is spreading from the third world: negatively, as the revenge of the revolted slaves, which is the cause of all the destructiveness of ‘cultural revolutions’; and positively as the witness, whether dionysiac or contemplative, of the irrational continents – including France itself, at whose heart there lies a third world of the soul, the spirit of the Celts, and that of Provence, among
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