Month: September 2009
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Prayer – It’s Something Personal
I have long been intrigued with the notion of our common responsibility, or rather, that I am “responsible for the sins of the whole world.” I think I first came across the notion in a quote from the Elder Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov. And even there, Dostoevsky was only putting on the lips of his…
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Revisiting the Great Crisis
As a companion to the recent post on the Death of Christ – the Life of Man – I offer this reprint of a short article on “the Great Crisis.” The Great Crisis, if I can coin a term, is the threat of non-existence, or relative non-existence. Classical Orthodoxy, following St. Athanasius, does not see…
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Winners and Losers
We are a great society for competition – and America is not unique in this. What America thinks is competitive in her “Super Bowl,” pales in comparison to the frenzy engendered elsewhere by the “World Cup.” Several years ago I was in London when England was playing Ecuador in the World Cup. It was a…
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My Sins Pour Out Behind Me
Abba Moses [one of the desert fathers] hesitated to accept a summons to be part of a council that would pass judgment on a brother who had committed a sin. A delegation approached him insisting that all the others were waiting for him. Reluctantly, he got up and went with them. He took a jug…
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Short Prayer for Enemies
These two petitions are found in Orthodox Daily Prayers. Both give a model for our prayers on these topics: Save, Lord, and have mercy on those whom I have caused to stumble, turning them away from the path of salvation and leading them to evil and unseemly deeds. Return them to the path of salvation…
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In Him We Live And Move and Have Our Being
St. John of the Ladder wrote: Every free creature lives in God. God is everyone’s salvation. God loves believers and unbelievers, the just and the unjust, the pious and the impious, those free of passions and those subject to passions, monks and those living worldly lives, the educated and the illiterate, the healthy and the…
Bless, Father. How do we suffer well? How do we suffer without de-moralization? Without de-moralizing our children? What do we…