Tears, not Sorrows When you hear me speak of tears, you need not think of sorrow. The tears of which I am speaking bring more joy than all the laughter of the world can gain for you. Do you doubt my words? Then listen to St Luke who tells us how the apostles, after being beaten with rods by order of the Sanhedrin, were filled with joy. [Acts 5:41] Clearly that joy was not the
The Soul’s Dizziness There are two different roads, one broad and easy, the other hard and narrow. And there are two guides vying with each other to attract the traveler’s attention. Now that we are grown to years of discretion we see that life is an amalgam of vice and virtue. The soul by casting its gaze first on one and then on the other can calculate the consequences of each. The life of the
Before the Ship Sinks An illness that has become chronic, like a habit of wrong-doing that has become ingrained is very hard to heal. If after that, as very often happens, the habit turns into second nature, a cure is out of the question. So the ideal would be to have no contact with evil. But there is another possibility: to distance yourself from evil, to run away from it as if from a poisonous
Has the Lord Abandoned us after Telling us to Set Sail? In all his dealings with us the Lord teaches us how to live on this earth. There is not a person in this world who is not a voyager, even if not all are anxious to return to the homeland. In the course of this voyage the waves and the storms make us seasick. But at least we are in the ship. Outside the
Life is a Dream with Many Changes of Scene I am not telling a lie: human life is a dream. In our dreams we look without seeing, we listen without hearing, we taste and touch without tasting or touching, we speak without saying anything, we walk without moving. We seem to be moving normally even though we stay still and to be making our habitual gestures even though we are not. The mind invents realities
Better not to be Born? Homer says that humanity is weak and worried. Theognis, the Sicilian, cries out: ‘The best fate for a person would be not to be born, not to see the rays of the sun.’ Euripides is fully in agreement with them: when someone is born, everyone ought to join together in weeping for him. How much misery he has come to suffer! On the other hand, the one who dies is
Mystery within Us The Apostle Paul says: ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord?’ [Rom. 11:34] To this I would add, ‘Who knows his own mind?’ Let those who pretend that God’s nature is within their comprehension explain their own nature. Do they understand the functioning of their own mind? It has many parts and many components. How does it comprehend knowledge? How are its different elements brought together? The mind is a single
God does not Need us, But He Longs to Shower us with Gifts God created Adam in the beginning, not because he needs the human race, but so that he might have a recipient of his generosity. Moreover, God commanded us to follow Christ, not because he has any need of our service, but because he wants to give us salvation. To follow the saviour is to share in salvation, just as to follow the
Seek to be like God The main aim of all rational creatures, defined by many philosophers as the greatest good, is to become like God. Actually this is not so much a discovery of the philosophers as something derived from Holy Scripture. The book of Genesis illustrates it when it describes the original creation of the human race….that the human race received the dignity of God’s image at the beginning of its creation, whereas the
Each of the Sundays of Great Lent has its own special theme in the Orthodox Church. The First Sunday of Great Lent we celebrate the “Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy” since it was on this day in 843 A.D. that the final great heresy against the person of Christ, that of Iconoclasm, was eradicated and the Orthodox Faith became the standard by which mankind could achieve purification, illumination and glorification. The Second Sunday of
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