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The Dormition Fast: Ending another Year of Grace in Our Lord

08/01/2019

The Byzantine Church since at least the 5th century has practiced a period of fasting prior to the feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. This ancient custom has much to offer contemporary Christians. Christians of the East have always recognized the mystery of Our Lady’s Dormition, her ‘falling asleep’ at the end of her natural life. The passage of Mary the Virgin Mother of God from this life to life eternal is a cause

What the Fathers Sought

07/23/2019

What the Fathers sought most of all was their own true self, in Christ.  And in order to do this, they had to reject completely the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion in “the world.”  They sought a way to God that was uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others who had mapped it out beforehand.  They sought a God whom they alone could find, not one who was “given” in a set,

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

07/17/2019

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

The Fourth Wednesday after Pascha. CHRISTOS ANESTI! CHRIST IS RISEN! Persons in Communion: Blood and Fire

05/22/2019

In Christ, God has reunified humanity. From henceforth and without limit of time or space, it is nothing other than the Body of God. That is what Cabasilas meant when he said that people are more truly related to each other in Christ than they are according to the flesh. Carnal kinship leads to death, kinship in Christ to eternity. The blood that springs from the pierced side of Christ, the wine of the Eucharist,

The Fortieth Day of Great Lent. Get Out of Hell Free

04/19/2019

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, April 2, 2015  The Saturday before Palm Sunday is known as Lazarus Saturday among the Orthodox, and they celebrate Christ raising him from the dead just prior to His entrance into Jerusalem (gospel of John). It is a feast that offers something of a preview of Christ’s resurrection, and a foretaste of the General Resurrection at the End of the Age. Some years back I sat in a cave that is purported to

The Philokalia

02/28/2019

Virtually every spiritual tradition has an authoritative scripture or scriptures that serve as a foundational text for its beliefs, practices, and spirituality. For Christians, that collection of texts is the Holy Bible. But the fracturing of the Christian Church in the fifth century (following the Council of Chalcedon in 451), the eleventh century (the break between what came to be known as the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches), and the sixteenth century (the Protestant

The Three Hierarchs

01/30/2019

During the reign of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus (1081-1118), a controversy arose in Constantinople among men learned in the Faith and zealous for virtue about the three holy Hierarchs and Fathers of the Church, Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom. Some argued for Saint Basil [known as Basilians] above the other two because he was able, as none other, to explain the mysteries of the Faith, and rose to angelic rank by

Man’s Place in the Universe

10/09/2018

The ancient philosophers loved to stress the central place of Man in the universe. They said that Man is the only animal which stands upright, and so symbolizes the dimensions of space, first the high, or heavenly, and the low, or earthly. Other animals walk on all fours or crawl. Their space is purely earthly; it is only by Man that they are connected to the heavens. True, trees and rocks stand upright, symbolizing the

The Dormition of the Ever-Virgin Mother of God

08/15/2018

In the Communion of Saints, which is the true Church Universal and Catholic, the mystery of the New Humanity is disclosed as a new existential situation. And in this perspective and living context of the Mystical Body of Christ the person of the Blessed Virgin Mother appears in full light and full glory. The Church now contemplates her in the state of perfection. She is now seen as inseparably united with her Son, who “sitteth

The Fast of the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin (Part I)

08/08/2018

By Father Leonidas Contos There are in the Orthodox tradition three principal periods of fasting during the ecclesiastical year; they are also the ones that are the least neglected. One is the forty-day period of Advent; the second is the forty-day period of Lent; the third is the fifteen-day fast which begins the first of August, and will end on the fifteenth with the commemoration of the Falling Asleep of the Theotokos. Among the three

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