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Recapturing the Experiences of the Church’s Youth

From Abraham onwards, through many centuries, God has prepared the chosen people to receive the Messiah. Despite that, when the Messiah appeared, the greater part of the Jewish people rejected him.  In the Church of the Nations, that is to say, among the pagan peoples, the opposite happened. The soil that seemed to need more cultivation received the seed of the Gospel and brought forth the hundredfold. Already, in the middle of raging persecutions, Christianity

Every Believer is as ‘Amen’ who will become an ‘Alleluia’

I am what my father thought; I am what my mother prayed for. I am the labour of my forebears. I am their hopes, their sicknesses, their healings. I am their loves, their struggles, even their blasphemies and their sins. I am their dawns and sunsets, their pitiless winters, their thrilling spring times, their blazing summers, their tranquil autumns. I am their births and their deaths. Scientists at one time used to speak, perhaps they

Desert Fathers and Mothers and the Patristic Period

The desert Fathers and Mothers were honestly not referred to that much, because they just told little stories. These stories seemed like harmless anecdotes, and we wanted to go ahead with serious religion. But in the last 30 years, there’s been a rediscovery of the absolute simplicity of their message and the fact that it isn’t concerned about the issues that we’ve been concerned about in recent centuries. In fact, they’re usually concerned about the

The Search for the ‘Place of the Heart’: A Life-Giving Discipline

Our whole spiritual progress is a ‘search for the place of the heart’. Little by little, the conscious self frees itself from idols, strips away the dead layers and illusions, and ‘descends’, like Psyche holding a lighted lamp, into the dark crypt of the heart. Sanctuary, crypt and tomb become the bridal chamber; the ‘heart-spirit’ is remade in the fire of grace, it trembles with joy, it bursts into flames, the world and humanity are

Father Maximos on Logismoi and the Jesus Prayer

Fr. Maximos paused, waiting for another question. “I am puzzled by what the Fathers of the Ecclesia say about the Jesus Prayer,” Teresa commented. “They claim that when we pray, the mind, or nous, must be on the heart. I don’t understand what that means.” “I appreciate your puzzlement,” Fr. Maximos replied. “This is what the tradition of the Ecclesia teaches as noetic prayer or prayer of the heart. When the Fathers say that the