Daily Meditations Archives - Page 238 of 333

Dealing with Our Passions (Part VIII)

10/01/2015

The antirrhetic method requires that we first observe our thoughts precisely, that we note whether they make us sick or healthy, whether they lift us up or drag us down, whether they correspond to the Spirit of God. Evagrius describes the process of testing thoughts with the image of the gatekeeper: “Be a gatekeeper of your heart and let no thought in without questioning it. Examine every single thought one by one and ask it:

Conversations with Abba Isaac: Kung Fu and the Way of the Ant

09/30/2015

By Father Micah Hirschy As was the case with many young men who grew up during the 80’s and 90’s, I went through a period of deep fascination with Kung-Fu movies. There was something intrinsically appealing about a story where a young man could spend a few days with a Kung-Fu master or read an ancient scroll and henceforth become invincible and able to battle evil! I also loved that the Kung-Fu Masters gave their Art really

Saint Isaac the Syrian: Work by Day

09/29/2015

Work by day After the morning Office, when he sat down to read the Bible he became like a man enraptured: with every verse he read he would fall many times on his face, and at many of the phrases he would raise his hands to heaven and glorify God many times over. He was about forty years old, his food was sparse, and in temperament he was dry and warm. Because he used to

Theosis

09/28/2015

The Orthodox doctrine of theosis, according to John Paul II, is perhaps the greatest gift of the Eastern Church to the West, but one that has largely been ignored or even denied. [1] The Eastern fathers of the Church believed that we could experience real and transformative union with God. This is in fact the supreme goal of human life and the very meaning of salvation–not only later, but now and later. Theosis refers to

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part X): The Great Divorce

09/25/2015

By the Middle Ages, however, with the rise of humanism and rationalism, there were already the beginnings of a breach between Christianity and a self-sufficient humanity. In Byzantium, and spreading into Franciscan Italy, there was an attempt, supported by a theology of the transfiguration of the body and the earth, to transfigure the renaissance, to divinize humanism. But this last phase of Byzantine culture, which seemed so promising, was swamped by Asian influence, while Western

The Lord’s Prayer (Part IX)

09/24/2015

The fact that Christ and we become one, means that what applies to Christ applies to us, and that we can, in a way unknown to the rest of the world, call God our father, no longer by analogy, no longer in terms of anticipation or prophecy, but in terms of Christ. This has a direct bearing upon the Lord’s Prayer: on the one hand, the prayer can be used by anyone, because it is

The Superiority of Being over Doing (Part II)

09/23/2015

By the Very Reverend Stelyios S. Muksuris, Ph.D Recently, a woman shared with me a series of endearing stories of how she feels called by God to spend time with elderly men and women in nursing homes, whose only hope and joy is a smile or hug or good word. But more than such acts is the presence of another person in their lives who simply listens and stands by them in their suffering. Now

The Superiority of Being over Doing (Part I)

09/22/2015

By the Very Reverend Stelyios S. Muksuris, Ph.D One of my favorite passages in all of Scripture is Psalm 46 (45 LXX):10, which reads: “Be still, and know that I am God.” This brief but powerful assertion, applicable to virtually any age in history, speaks to the uneasiness and distress every person or group experiences throughout life. Specifically, the Psalm addresses signs of violence in nature and the tumults that exist between nations which seek

The Eastern Fathers on the Trinity

09/21/2015

Just as some Eastern fathers saw Christ’s human/divine nature as one dynamic unity, so they also saw the Trinity as an Infinite Dynamic Flow. The Western Church tended to have a more static view of both Christ and the Trinity–theologically “correct” but largely irrelevant for real life, more a mathematical conundrum than invitation to new consciousness. In our attempts to explain the Trinitarian mystery, the Western Church overemphasized the individual “names” Father, Son, and Holy

Dealing with Our Passions (Part VII)

09/18/2015

Another thought may press us hard: getting out of our former life, our former profession, and doing something completely different. Often all the arguments are useless here. The thought just keeps coming back. Here too some of the sayings of the fathers show us a way. A father who had struggled for years against the thought of visiting a certain confrere concretely imagined going to him, greeting him, and speaking to him. He imagined the