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Self-Emptying: We Love by Letting Go

We cannot love God unless we love God’s world. Christians [should] have always known this, because an incarnate God is a world-loving God; but now it takes on new meaning and depth as we realize the radical interrelationship and interdependence of all forms of life. . . . In sum, we are not called to love God or the world. Rather, we are called to love God in the world. We love God by loving the world. We love God through and with the world. But this turns out

On the Sunday before Theophany

By Fr. Patrick Reardon, January 2, 2005 In the Christian East it is the Baptism of our Lord that receives the dominant emphasis in the Church’s annual celebration of Theophany (commonly called Epiphany in the West) on January 6. This feast is celebrated, moreover, as the manifestation of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This emphasis is clear in the troparion of the day: “When Thou, O Lord, wast baptized in the Jordan, the

And the Word Became Flesh

By Fr. Stavros Akrotirianakis, December 24, 2018 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory. John 1:14 The Gospel accounts of the Nativity are limited to a mere forty verses. In the Gospel of Matthew, there are 19 verses about the Nativity. The Gospel of Luke has 20. The Gospel of Mark makes no mention of the Nativity. It begins with the Baptism of Christ. The Gospel of John

Trust and Surrender

Power, according to Jesus and the Trinity, is not something to be “grasped at” (see Philippians 2:6-7). I don’t need to cling to my title, my uniform, my authorship, or whatever other trappings I use to make myself feel powerful and important. Waking up inside the Trinitarian dance, I realize that all of this is rather unimportant; in fact, it’s often pretense that keeps me from my True Self and gets in the way of

Pentecost: The Descent of the Holy Spirit

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 this sinful world to

Persons in Communion: The Justification of the Good

But sin turns this diverse unity into a hostile multiplicity, so that space becomes a separator, time a murderer, and language good only for expressing juxtaposition or possession. Whence the slogan of May 1968, ‘Love one another’; this is facile blasphemy, because the erotic encounter itself is given us as a symbol, a foretaste of personal communion. In the universe of sin solitary individuals devour one another. There is a besetting tendency today, when faced

Persons in Communion: Singular and plural (Part II)

The idea of a truly trinitarian anthropology is chiefly associated with St Gregory of Nyssa, the most speculative of the Cappadocians. In little tracts dismissed rather hastily by his detractors as works of philology he attacks the ‘erroneous custom’ whereby Man is spoken of in the plural and God in the singular; in both cases personal plurality is quite consistent with unity of essence. We ought to say that in Christ, the new Adam, ‘Man

Persons in Communion: Singular and plural (Part I)

Personal existence has a ‘vertical’ dimension, a desire to be plunged into the fullness of God. And this fullness is not a solitude but an ocean already alive with the movement of infinite love. The depth is not unrelieved gloom; it contains reciprocal activity, interchange, the presence of the other, while duality is avoided in the communion of the Three in One. The depth itself suggests the inexhaustible character of the Persons and of their

Spirituality from Below (Part I)

The spirituality bequeathed to us by the moralizing theology of modern times works from the top down. It presents high ideals that we are supposed to translate into reality. Typical ideals include selflessness, self-control, continuous amiability, selfless love, freedom from anger, and mastery of sexual desire. Spirituality from above surely has some positive meaning for young people, since it challenges them and tests their powers. It prompts them to grow up and out of themselves

From Image to Likeness (Part I)

Since we are in the image of God we are therefore in the image of Christ, and it is only in Christ that we discover the truth about ourselves. He alone is the one to whom the Beatitudes fully apply; the poor man who receives himself unceasingly at the hands of the Father and whose royal gentleness transforms the earth into a Eucharist, the ‘pure heart’ like a still lake in which each discerns his