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
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
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