Daily Meditations Archives - Page 133 of 333

Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition (Part IV)

08/30/2019

Logos and Creation The fundamental cosmic intuition of the Christian spiritual path is that creation is the manifestation of an order that at one and the same time transcends it, sustains it from within and manifests itself through it. This intrinsic, transcendent, immanent order is the Logos — the eternal son of God. The term ‘Logos’ in Christian theology marries, through the revelation of St. John’s Gospel and the Epistles of Paul, its Greek philosophical

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist: A Little Great Friday

08/29/2019

Today is a little Great Friday, a second Great Friday. For today the greatest man among those born of women, John, the Holy Forerunner and Baptizer of the Lord, is murdered. On Great Friday, people murdered God, crucified God. On today’s holy great feast, people murdered the greatest of all men. It is not I who chose to use the expression “the greatest.” What are my praises of the great and glorious Forerunner of the

Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition (Part III)

08/28/2019

The Original Christian World-view A study of the lives and writings of the great spiritual masters of the First Millennium of the Christian Church — East and West — will show that a sacred cosmology was integral to the Church’s world-view. Salvation, or deification, as the ancient Church and the Orthodox Church of today calls the process of reconciliation with God, was cosmic as well as personal in scope. It included not only human beings

Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition (Part II)

08/27/2019

“Man’s Divorce from Nature” What I wish to suggest is a way to recover the lost cosmic dimension of religion by showing how it might be found again in the Christian tradition. What must be recovered above all is the vision — not only that religion needs to be imbedded in the cosmos, but also that the world is imbedded in God. For it is this loss that inevitably led to the separation of religion

Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition (Part I)

08/26/2019

“Where is the life we have lost in living; where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge; where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” — T. S. Eliot These three poignant questions, penned by T. S. Eliot over a half-century ago, point us directly at the problem of the Christian view of the Creation as we face the new millennium. The Christian conscience has lost its ancient wisdom, and needs to recover

Getting Saved on Star Trek

08/23/2019

By Father Stephen Freeman, November 1, 2017 Movies have a way of mirroring reality. They are cultural products, even if written by a single person. Our creative mind is formed and shaped in the reality we live. With that in mind, I have been thinking about the guys who wear red shirts on Star Trek episodes. In popular lore, they are the ones who are expendable. They show up in a single episode, maybe beam

On Spiritual Struggle by Elder Porphyrios

08/22/2019

What makes a person holy is love, the adoration of Christ When Christ enters our soul, everything within us will be altered Man is a mystery. We carry within us an age-old inheritance – all the good and precious experience of the prophets, the saints, the martyrs, the apostles and above all of our Lord Jesus Christ; but we also carry within us the inheritance of the evil that exists in the world from Adam

The Voice of God

08/21/2019

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

On Being Perpetually Distracted

08/20/2019

Article by Ron Rolheiser (March 2019 eNews) There’s a story in the Hindu tradition that runs something like this: God and a man are walking down a road. The man asks God: “What is the world like?” God answers: “I’d like to tell you, but my throat is parched. I need a cup of cold water. If you can go and get me a cup of cold water, I’ll tell you what the world is like.”

True Self and False Self: The Illusion of Our False Self

08/19/2019

Guest writer and CAC faculty member James Finley continues exploring insights on the true self and false self that he gleaned from Thomas Merton. In the following text, Merton makes clear that the self-proclaimed autonomy of the false self is but an illusion: Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything