Glory to God for All Things
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 fictional Elder the sentiments of the saints and the common teaching of the Church. At one time…
Glory to God for All Things
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 humanity threatened with pure non-existence, but with a dynamic movement towards a “relative” non-existence, which some have…
Glory to God for All Things
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 Sunday afternoon. With my companions we walked across London heading to the museums, assuming that the afternoon…
Glory to God for All Things
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 of water that leaked all along the path. The council came outside to greet him. Puzzled by…
Praying in the Rain
Spiritual Disciplines
·
“God will not judge us about psalmody, nor for the neglect of prayer, but because by abandoning them we have opened our door to the demons.” — St. Isaac the Syrian The Church has taught us to discipline ourselves through prayer, fasting and almsgiving. These three are really categories of disciplines that the Church recommends to us as means to “acquire the Holy Spirit”; that is, to be continually full of the…
Glory to God for All Things
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 by thy Divine Providence. (a prostration is made) Save, Lord, and have mercy on those who hate…
Glory to God for All Things
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 sick, the young and the old. God is like an outpouring of light, a glimpse of the…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Barton Decker, barber
·
This past Friday, I made another assay into the streets of and around Emmaus to find myself a decent barber shop. My first haircut experience in Emmaus, to put it frankly, hurt. I have no idea exactly why that gent had such a need to dig the clippers with such fervor into my neck, but, suffice it to say, once I did my fiduciary…
Glory to God for All Things
The Death of Christ - The Life of Man
·
A recent comment posed a fundamental question with regard to the Christian faith: Why do we believe that Christ had to die? What is the purpose of His death on the cross? Preliminary Thoughts Part of the information accompanying the question was the experience (of Mary K) with teaching on the atonement that centered largely on the wrath and anger of God. (I paraphrase and summarize) We sinned  (both ourselves and Adam…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Ancient History meets American History
·
On Saturday the 15th of August, after we completed services for the Dormition, members of the Orthodox Church of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, manned a booth at the festival marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Borough of Emmaus. One could say that we are a church obsessed with history, and so it is only fitting that we should make one small footprint into…
Glory to God for All Things
How Simple Should Christianity Be?
·
There is a tendency in our modern world to make things as simple as possible. We hide the complexities behind a keyboard (I don’t know how my computer works – or not very well) or we treat things that seem complex as unnecessary obfuscations. This same drive to simplify was very much alive in the 16th century as Christianity underwent reform in many places of the world. Thomas Cranmer, the English Reformer,…
Glory to God for All Things
What's the Point?
·
For a man who does not believe in God – nothing points to God. For a man who believes in God – everything points to God. So who’s right? There is almost no argument between these two experiences. For someone who does not believe in God my own contention that everything points to God is pretty much meaningless. In extraordinary cases we can listen to each other and struggle to understand what…
Glory to God for All Things
The Agent of Change
·
A continuation of the series on culture and the individual. As inhabitants of our modern culture, we find ourselves trapped in a world of “cause and effect.” It is a physical explanation of the universe that has, for all intents and purposes, become a universal metaphor, dominating religion and the most personal aspects of our lives. We see ourselves as the agents of change – or responsible for the disasters that litter…
Glory to God for All Things
Dostoevsky on the Individual
·
The following passage from The Brothers Karamazov is taken from one of the “Talks and Homilies” of the Elder Zossima – one of the key characters in the novel. His thoughts echo earlier articles here that contrast man as “individual” (isolation) to man as Person (brotherhood and communion). I plan to offer a series of thoughts on the position of the Christian in a consumer culture. Look at the worldly and at the…
Praying in the Rain
Spiritual Interpretations
·
In the epistle for this Sunday, (I Cor. 9:2-12), St. Paul asks the rhetorical question: “Who works as a soldier at his own expense?” That is, he asserts the obligation of a community to financially support those who “sow spiritual good” among them, an obligation that St. Paul had not pressed upon them, “rather than put an obstacle in the way of the Gospel of Christ.” On the one hand the Corinthians…
Praying in the Rain
Making Solomon King, Twice
·
In 1 Chronicles 29:22b-24, we read: “And they made Solomon the son of David King a second time…and all Israel listened to him. All the leaders and the mighty men as well as all the sons of King David his father, were subject to him.” A second time? Why had I never seen that before? The note in the OSB says that the two enthronements prefigure the two comings of Christ. What…
Glory to God for All Things
The Mystery of Faith - Sacrament and Icon
·
Recent questions have been raised about the difference between icons and sacraments in the Orthodox Church. It is an easy place for confusion to occur – particularly when seen from the outside. The Church in the West, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, developed a carefully-worded and defined understanding of sacrament during the Middle Ages. This definition depended on matters such as the authority of its institution, the intention of its performance, and…
Glory to God for All Things
The Role of Icons
·
Icons are not about art. Icons are not about left-overs of Byzantine style. Icons are not about the idolatrous impulse within fallen humanity. Icons are about the very nature of our salvation. The history of Western theology, particularly the opposition to icons within the Protestant movement, has removed one of the most traditional components of Christian theology and handicapped the modern imagination and understanding of our relationship to God. Our encounters with…
Glory to God for All Things
Bad Icons
·
And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into His likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18). It is a teaching of the Fathers concerning the holy icons that we do not truly “see” them if we have no reverence for that which they depict. Icons are “windows into heaven,” but…
Glory to God for All Things
The Face of God
·
Orthodox Christians mark August 16 as the Feast of the Icon “Not Made With Hands,” the miraculous face of Christ first left on a cloth sent to King Abgar of Edessa. The stories of the icon are swathed in the mists of history – but the image (or representations of it on icons) remain among the most popular of Orthodox images. It is frequently the icon that graces the entrance of a…
Glory to God for All Things
Rejoice, O Virgin - A Blessed Feast
·
Glory to God for All Things
Being Famous Doesn't Make You Moral
·
The news story is so common that the name can be left blank.  “N. confessed today that he has been unfaithful to his wife and children and let down his fans. ‘I want to say I’m sorry for what I’ve done and ask God’s forgiveness.’” I do not believe that our nation is suffering a rash of infidelities. We are suffering a rash of cheap shots – easily made because the targets…
Glory to God for All Things
The Last Battle
·
The Scriptures end with the description of a battle that is truly “apocalyptic” in its scale: all the forces of evil arrayed against all the forces of good. It is grand theater, having caught the imagination of countless generations (and even Hollywood). I do not know quite what to make of the description. That it describes a reality, I do not doubt. What that reality will look like to its bystanders (if…
Glory to God for All Things
The Inverted Pyramid
·
No greater image of prayer and the love of God has been given in our modern time than that of the Elder Sophrony’s Inverted Pyramid. The subject of such prayer has risen. I thought to share this as an effort to shed some light. Fr. Sophrony [Sakharov], in his book on St. Silouan, presents this theory of the “inverted pyramid.” He says that the empirical cosmic being is like a pyramid: at…
Glory to God for All Things
The Icon We Love Most
·
An early post on icons – hopefully part of a short series… Years ago when I was studying in an Anglican seminary (mid-70’s), I had the beginnings of my interest in icons. I owned a couple, and read what little was available on the topic in English at that time (believe it or not there was a time when not many books were available in English on the topic of Orthodox Christianity).…
Glory to God for All Things
The Time for Prayer
·
A brother asked a hermit, “If I oversleep and miss the time for prayer, I hesitate to keep the rule of prayer. I am embarassed and do not want the brothers to hear me praying.” The hermit gave him this advice: “If you sleep late, get up and shut your door and windows. Then pray your psalms. Both day and night belong to God. You will glorify God whatever time it is.”…
Glory to God for All Things
The Experience of Prayer
·
As a foolish man I go so far in this post as to speak of the experience of prayer. I write this not to speak of great experiences but, if possible, to quiet our minds, and to speak a word of peace in a culture that is full of madness and spiritual delusion. There are many wonderful spiritual stories to be found in the lives of the saints and elders. Many people,…
