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Last night found me yelling at the television once again over a panel discussion about “science and religion.” Both sides thought that rational processes can only take us so far in the journey to faith (agreed). After that, people turn to some other resource in order to connect with God (so far so good). What they use is their emotions. Around my house, that’s when the sputtering starts. Only in the realm of religion is it assumed that every experience is a subjective experience, which means it’s an emotional projection—which means: Look, dear, a lunatic. But in the real world, experience is just that: an experience. A few months ago I spent two weeks in Turkey. I experienced being in Turkey. When ...

The contemplation of God does not belong to the realm of emotions, neither to the visual sense, but it is the existential unity and contact of the created creature with the uncreated “Being”- not with His essence or His substance but with His divine energies, in accordance to the measure of the person who “participates” in the contemplation. When Moses requested to see God as he imagined he could, he heard from Him that this was impossible and would only admire His “back view”, which means His divine energies or attributes. Whoever finds himself in the contemplation of God, testifies that there is no similarity between the created world and the uncreated Being and that “it is impossible to interpret ...

People who deprive their soul of prayer, will suffer in the same way as a fish out of water. It’ll expire.

The more I contemplate this phrase, the more I realize that it holds the key to living our lives the Orthodox way. First, to live each day as if it were the Second Coming confirms the first postulate of Christianity: that we accept the first coming of Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. Secondly, if we lived each day as if it were the Second coming, we would be better people – better mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, friends, co-workers, etc, in that we would be more forgiving of others. As my parish priest also says that we have to make amends with people in this life because once we are on the other side it’s too late. We must forgive not ...

  “Why worry, when you can pray? “ Growing up in a Christian home, I used to hear this phrase frequently. The words had even been set to music in a cheerful, upbeat chorus. When I would hear the song as a teenager, I remember cynically thinking that it wasn’t as easy as all that to not worry about things. I struggle with the passion of imagining about the future, or analyzing the past, rather than living in the present, and so I have always worried a good deal! Prayer erases worry, aligns me with my Lord’s heart, opens my eyes to an eternal perspective, and introduces me to the Kingdom of God that is within. Nothing illustrates this better than how prayer ...

The Prophet Joel also gives us a beneficial word that is able to enlighten our mind and to sustain our heart in a perfect relationship with God and with all His creation. He says: ‘The vine is dried up, and the fig tree languisheth; the pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered: because the sons of men put to shame joy.’ According to the Prophet, there is only one joy that deserves our honouring. This is the joy that is sourced in God Himself, because only this joy is perfect and ‘full’. The joy that God gives to man works by the Holy Spirit. We honour this precious ...

Over the past few years, there has been an enormous popular interest in Gnosticism and early Christian writings. Book shops are full of material on the subject and, on Christian holidays, the media bombards us with television productions on the topic. But the Gnosticism that is today being hailed as the ‘original Christianity’ is anything but the Gnosticism that plagued the Christian Church between the second and fourth centuries. One of the main characteristics of Gnosticism was an ethos that saw the material world as inherently evil. To the Gnostics, therefore, the idea of God made flesh (a thing evil and beyond redemption) was repugnant and ridiculous. For the Gnostics, salvation could only be achieved by an escape from the body ...

Saint Silouan the Athonite (24 September) Saint Siouan- Symeon Ivanovich Antonov, before his tonsure- was born in 1866 into a peasant family in the Tambov region of Russia. From the age of four he began wondering: ‘Where is this God? When I grow up, I’ll travel the whole world looking for Him’. When he was a little bit older he heard about the life of a holy recluse and the miracles that happened at his grave and thought: ‘If he’s a saint, that means God’s with us already, so there’s no need to go wandering the world to find Him’. At this thought his heart became inflamed with love of God. His mind focused on the continuous recollection of God and he ...

God asks only one thing: that you should honor Him, love Him and keep His commandments, recognizing that He’s your Maker. He doesn’t want to share His glory and for you to worship any old thing. He doesn’t want you to love anything more than Him.

Let us begin by offering a definition of the soul as provided by Saint John the Damascan: ‘The soul, therefore, is a living essence, uncomplicated, incorporeal, invisible - in its proper nature - to the eyes of the body, immortal, reasoning and intelligent, formless, making use of an organic body and being the source of its powers of life, growth, sensation and generation, the intellect being its purest part though not in any way alien to it (as the eye is to the body, so the intellect is to the soul). It has power over itself, its volition and energy, and is mutable, i.e. able to be changed, because it is created. All of these features are natural to it ...

Theodora Episcopa But now let us continue to follow the lead of the feminist tour leaders through the streets ofRomefrom the Catacomb of St. Priscilla to theChurchofSt. Praxedes. There we find a ninth-century mosaic depicting four female "saints" who were dear to Pope Pascal I (817-824), a fierce opponent of iconoclasm. The heads of three of these women are each shrined in a round nimbus, signifying that they were already venerated as saints in the liturgical calendar of the Church: St. Praxedes, the Virgin Mary, and (supposes Henri Leclercq, who enjoys a kind of infallibility in these matters) St. Prudentiana. The woman on the extreme left is featured with a square nimbus, indicating that she was still alive when the mosaic ...

The verses from the Psalter which follow ‘Lord I have cried’ at the Vespers service are among the most beautiful sounds at Athonite feasts Usually sung in triple time they create a festal atmosphere which is enhanced by the bells on the censer. %audio%

All the passions are fires of the soul, conflagrations raging within us. We have to put this fire out with the water of love, which is so strong it can extinguish any internal flames of evil and the other passions. But woe betide us, woe betide our vanity, if we feed this fire with another, with wickedness and rancor.

St. George           Since the Church started its earthly sojourn about two millenia ago, it has waded through a lot of history, and this historical journey has left its mark upon it, for good and for ill.  One of the good things that our historical pilgrimage has given us is a wealth of saintly intercessors, who look down upon us from heaven, a “great cloud of witnesses” (see Heb. 12:1).  Their many names adorn our liturgical celebrations, and at each liturgical dismissal, we not only commemorate the most-holy Theotokos and the holy, glorious and all-laudable apostles, but also our local community’s patron saint and “the saint of the day”.  Pretty much every day on our church calendar has several saints, ...

Eternity is an everlasting banquet (the Divine Liturgy) that takes place in the heavenly realm. Every time we participate in the Divine Liturgy we are transported into a place where there is neither time nor space, and participate in that very banquet. As we receive the Holy Mysteries (Christ's very Body and Blood), we receive the healing medicine for that which ails us. Our brokenness in both body and soul are given the healing medicine that we so very much need. God is everywhere present and fills all things. There is no where He is not. Hell fire is none other than the Fire of God, burning those who are unloving and unresponsive to His invitation to commune with Him. God ...

       One of the great spiritual figures of monasticism, St Sabbas, is honoured today. Yet he is not well known here on the Holy Mountain. This great guiding light is a great consolation to us. In the way he lived we are able to find the most essential elements of our monastic capacity. We will refer to some of these.           He started his life with absolute devotion to the Lord, enforcing the prophetic verse ‘Blessed is he who carries the yoke (of the Lord) from a young age’. Even though his parents were wealthy they placed no obstacles in his path towards monasticism. He arrived in the East to become a monk. He excelled as a novice and ended up ...

In the continuation of this sacred history, we see that the relationships of men become increasingly more tragic. For example, the son of Adam, Cain, offered an abominable sacrifice to God which was rejected. Full of envy and fratricidal hatred, he murdered his brother Abel. Certainly, as all of the generations of men lived under the judgment of the fear of death, they continued to be corrupted by self-love and the struggle to survive, and in this deception they became capable of every crime. In the monotonous course of the ages, only a few righteous men were able to preserve some of the traces of the knowledge of God of the first-created. Having kept in their consciousness a little light of ...

Don’t worry if your mind wonders sometimes during the Jesus prayer. You keep saying it, God will hear it and the demons will flee.