Daily Meditations Archives - Page 265 of 351

Dealing with Our Passions (Part I)

06/09/2015

In reading the description of these nine logismoi we sense how much psychological experience Evagrius gathered in his kellion. But he thought there was something still more important than knowing about the logismoi: handling thoughts and feelings. Evagrius advises a different method for every passion. The three basic drives – eating, sex, and greed – are transformed through fasting, asceticism, and almsgiving. Here discipline is a good way not to suppress the drives, but to

Saint Silouan the Athonite and His Relevance Today, Part V

06/08/2015

By Harry Boosalis Logismoi, or these ‘evil thoughts’, may be manipulated to stir up anxiety and anger aimed against those people with whom we are closest. This often includes friends, relatives, fellow members of a parish community, as well as those with whom we are sacramentally linked or have spiritual bonds—even our own clergy and others who work for the Church. Whether well founded or not—and usually they are not—these logismoi can end up as passions of

Music and Mediation in St Gregory of Nyssa’s Commentary ‘On the Inscriptions of the Psalms’

06/05/2015

By Father Matthew Baker In his On the Making of Man, St Gregory of Nyssa likened the human body to a kind of musical instrument, played upon by the mind of man. In the same work, he dismissed as pagan the idea of man as microcosm. Yet later, in his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, Gregory espoused precisely this notion of microcosm in order to express the mediatorial role of the human being between intelligible and

ON PRAYER (Part II)

06/04/2015

FROM the foregoing we understand that by prayer the holy Fathers are not referring to occasional prayer, morning and evening devotions and grace at meals, but for them prayer is synonymous with unceasing prayer, the life of prayer. Pray without ceasing (I Thessalonians 5: 17) is to be taken as a literal command. Understood in this way, prayer is the science of scientists and the art of artists. The artist works in clay or colours,

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part II): Humanity, Priest and King of the Universe (Part I)

06/03/2015

The universe is present to Man as the first revelation he receives, and it is his task to interpret it creatively, to give conscious utterance to the ontological praise of things. The world is also, in impersonally female guise, presented to Man, to be united with him in a mystical marriage, forming one flesh with him. The whole sensible universe is an extension of our body. Or rather, as we have already said, and in

Saint Silouan the Athonite and His Relevance Today, Part IV

06/02/2015

By Harry Boosalis According to St. Silouan, and our entire Orthodox tradition, spiritual life entails spiritual warfare. This is a primary point that we must fully acknowledge and accept as we strive to live our lives in Christ. For the majority of believers, this spiritual warfare refers primarily to the encounter with evil thoughts. For example, St. Philotheos of Mount Sinai teaches, “It is by means of thoughts that the spirits of evil wage a

Monday of the Holy Spirit

06/01/2015

A Sermon by Fr. Antony Hughes In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ! The Reading is from John 7:37-52; 8:12 “He who believes in me, as the scripture says, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive.” “Do you not know,” writes

Pentecost: The Descent of the Holy Spirit

05/31/2015

By Father Thomas Hopko In the Old Testament, Pentecost was the feast which occurred fifty days after Passover. As the Passover feast celebrated the exodus of the Israelites from the slavery of Egypt, so Pentecost celebrated God’s gift of the ten commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. In the new covenant of the Messiah, the Passover event takes on its new meaning as the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection, the “exodus” of men from

The Fall of Constantinople, May 29, 1453

05/29/2015

THE CAPTIVE CHURCH, by Aristeides Papadakis, Ph.D. In general, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a great misfortune for Christianity. For Eastern Christendom it was nothing less than an unqualified disaster. As a result of the Ottoman conquest, the entire Orthodox communion of the Balkans and the Near East was suddenly isolated from the West. For the next four hundred years it would instead be confined within a hostile Islamic world, with which it had little in common religiously or culturally. Orthodox Russia alone escaped this fate. It is this geographical and intellectual

The Seventh Thursday after Pascha: ON PRAYER (Part I)

05/28/2015

IT follows from this that prayer is your first and incomparably most important means of fighting. Learn to pray, and you vanquish all the evil powers that could imaginably assail you. Prayer is one wing, faith the other, that lifts us heavenward. With only one wing no one can fly: prayer without faith as meaningless as faith without prayer. But if your faith is very weak, you can profitably cry: Lord, give me faith! Such