Glory to God for All Things
Beauty and God
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This is a reprint of an article from earlier this year. I found it worth re-reading. Everything is beautiful in a person when he turns toward God, and everything is ugly when it is turned away from God. Fr. Pavel Florensky I come to the end of a day that has been filled with other activity and little time for writing. But in my reading at bedtime I came across the above…
Glory to God for All Things
The Problem with Lying
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Anyone familiar with Scripture will be aware of the commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” Lying is treated as a problem from the earliest moments of Scripture. Adam and Eve fail to speak the truth in a direct manner when questioned about their breaking of the commandment and eating of the forbidden fruit. The New Testament shows at least as much concern with the subject. St. Paul states in very simple…
Glory to God for All Things
The Act of Giving Thanks as a Way of Life
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The act of giving thanks is among the most fundamental acts of love. It lies at the very heart of worship – in which, in the words of Archimandrite Zacharias, there is an exchange. In giving thanks we make an offering which itself is always inferior to what we have received – but which is itself an enlargement of the human heart. To live rightly in the presence and communion of God…
Frederica
The Liturgy of St. James
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[Ancient Faith Radio; November 27, 2008]
FMG: I’m in a crowded and noisy banquet room here. This is the annual banquet for St. John Chrysostom Antiochian Orthodox Church in York, PA. I’m sitting here at the banquet table, we’ve just finished our… this was really a good meal. This was some kind of terrific filet mignon, sliced, a little garlic, almonds on the green beans, it was delicious. And in this little space we have between when they bring out the dessert- I love these banquets- I would like to talk to Fr. Elias Yelovich. What is the name of your parish, Father?
Glory to God for All Things
Give Thanks In All Things
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I heard this from Archimandrite Zacharius, the disciple of the Elder Sophrony: The Elder Sophrony once said that if a man would give thanks always and for everything, he would have kept the saying which Christ gave to St. Silouan: “Keep your mind in hell and despair not.” I pondered this statement for a long time. For more than 30 years I had been aware of the famous dictum of St. Silouan…
Glory to God for All Things
The Tree in my Backyard
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I have given this posting a very prosaic title in order to help readers focus on precisely what I am saying. In my previous post on icons – I noted that even the world functions as an icon – but, undoubtedly, having put that in a very theological context, most readers think simply about the traditional icons found in Orthodox Churches. Instead I want to talk about the tree in my backyard.…
Glory to God for All Things
The Role of Icons
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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
The Agent of Change
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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 our lives. Those who “succeed” imagine that they are the…
Glory to God for All Things
The Kingdom of Choice
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This is a slightly edited version of a post from last June. I plan to use it as an introduction to a series on the choices we make – and don’t make. Part of the spiritual landscape of American religion is the sizable role played by choice in a culture shaped in the free market – with freedom as a mythic symbol. It is not unusual to hear American politicians describing solutions to social…
Glory to God for All Things
A Note of Thanks and Some Statistics
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One of my personal joys at the recent All American Council in Pittsburgh was the opportunity to meet face-to-face a number of readers of this blog, including some who regularly post comments. Their warmth and encouragement for the writing that I do is about all it takes to keep me writing. That, and a whole lot of grace. I continue to be deeply thankful for the readers, and the generally warm community that…
Glory to God for All Things
Cynicism and the Goodness of God
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I admit to being a child of the 60’s (which means I was born in the early 50’s). I have lived through a period in American history marked by assasinations, abuse of power, incompetence and unrelenting and outrageous pieties from the lips of the impious. As such, like many in my generation, I am tempted by cynicism – an assurance that things are never as they seem but that things seem mainly…
Glory to God for All Things
What Is the Truth?
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In the Gospel record of Christ’s trial before Pontius Pilate, we are told that Christ said He had come to bear witness to the Truth. Pilate, in what he must have thought was a clever response, says, “And what is Truth?” We know from elsewhere in the Gospel that Christ explained, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” It is a statement that is easily tossed about – to settle…
Glory to God for All Things
Axios! Axios! Axios!
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As a personal rule of thumb, I do not write on the inner news of the Church – or at least not often. I have been in attendance this week at the All American Council, the national assembly of the Orthodox Church in America. One of the central tasks before us was the election of a new Metropolitan (the Bishop who serves as the primate of our Orthodox Church in America). Eleven days…
Glory to God for All Things
The Creation and the Christian
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This week I am in Pittsburgh for the All American Council of the Orthodox Church in America. We have many difficult things to deal with and I ask your prayers. I will try to work with the blog as I have time. Today I offer some thoughts of Met. Kallistos Ware, who led the pilgrimage I recently made to the Holy Land. His thoughts are on creation and our Christian relationship to…
Glory to God for All Things
Faces in the Dark
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 One of the finest short contemporary classics of Orthodox spiritual writing is Tito Colliander’s Way of the Ascetics. The following excerpt is from his “Chapter Thirteen: On Progress in Depth.” THE external rudiments lead us now to the welfare that goes on in the depths. As when one peels an onion, one layer after another is removed, and the innermost core, out of which growth reaches up toward the light, lies…
Glory to God for All Things
The Death of Religion
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In August of 2007 I wrote an article on Christian Atheism. At the time I was seeking to describe the strange phenomenon of modern Christianity – one in which life as we live it and life as we say we believe it are two separate things. This is not a problem of hypocrisy but of shipping Christianity to an off-shore location in which all significant spiritual activity is accomplished somewhere other than…
Glory to God for All Things
A Single Moment and Paradise - Revisited
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I am leading a retreat this coming weekend at another parish in Tennessee. I have interiorly entitled the retreat, “Are We Not in Paradise?” The thoughts are on the immediacy of Christ and heaven – so wonderfully described in the passage quoted here from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It is a passage that is never far from my thoughts. This is a reprint from last June. During Holy Week, one of my…
Glory to God for All Things
In the Normal Course of Things
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There is an expectation that most of us share – at least in its general shape – and that is that the normal course of things will largely remain the normal course of things. Each day much like another and though changes occur they are often of an occasional or casual nature. There are certain aspects to this expectation that are healthy. Constant change, if not a sign of insanity, will soon…
Glory to God for All Things
That Which Completes What Is Lacking
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St. Paul in speaking of the full responsibility that weighed on his ministry stated plainly, “Who is sufficient for these things?” This same thought has crossed the mind of the ordained ministry ever since, except for those who have not yet learned that they cannot do what has been given them to do. Yet again, yesterday, I heard three times this phrase describing the Holy Spirit who “completes what is lacking.” It is…
Glory to God for All Things
Prayer and Worship
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In answer to a question on the difference between prayer and worship, Archimandrite Zacharias, one of the Elders at the Monastery of St. John the Baptist in Essex, England, had this to say: Worship is a more general term and an all-embracing life, while prayer is an activity of worship. Worship is more like the exchange of man’s life for the life of God, which takes place in the Divine Liturgy, for…
Glory to God for All Things
When All Else Fails
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I fail. We fail. It’s just how things are. It is not a conspiracy or the judgment of God or a universe arrayed against us – we simply fall short. At times falling short is nothing less than embarrassing. This is especially so if we have raised our own expectations as well as the expectations of others. I do not measure up to my own expectations much less to those of others.…
Glory to God for All Things
Florosvsky on the "Catholicity of the Church"
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I continue in this short series to present classical, Othodox, treatments of certain aspects of the faith by “modern” doctors of the faith. This by Fr. Georges Florovsky: The catholicity of the Church has two sides. Objectively, the catholicity of the Church denotes a unity of the Spirit. “In one Spirit were we all baptized into one body” (1 Cor. 12:13). And the Holy Spirit which is a Spirit of love and…
Glory to God for All Things
From Khomiakov's The Church Is One
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Alexei Khomiakov (1804-1860) was a Russian lay theologian. One of his most important essays was The Church Is One. In a private conversation with Met. Kallistos Ware, I asked questions about the story of his conversion to Orthodoxy. There were few Orthodox writings available in English at the time (Met. Kallistos’ The Orthodox Church [1962] was probably the first major work in English on the Orthodox Church). He said to me that…
Glory to God for All Things
The Meaning of Meaning
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Yesterday I posted on the “meaning of Scripture.” I want to go a further step today and write on the “meaning of meaning.” For it is all too possible to understand “meaning” as less than it should be. In a culture in which the dominant form of Scriptural interpretation is based on some form or structure of “reason,” meaning quickly becomes nothing more than “intellectual understanding.” This itself is a distortion of…
Glory to God for All Things
The Meaning of Scripture
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What is the meaning of Scripture? Where do we look for it and how is it found? It is interesting to listen to the disarray of voices on this subject. My early training, in college and later in a liberal protestant seminary, was to look, first, to “authorial intent” (to use a constitutional interpretive phrase), and to the “Sitz im Leben” (the “life situation” or “context”) and through a host of various…
Glory to God for All Things
When Creation Speaks
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An interesting theme within the holy Scriptures is the “voice of Creation.” The famous Old Testament Canticle, Song of the Three Young Men, in English traditionally known as the Benedicite, omnia opera Domini, and which in Orthodoxy forms the basis of the Seventh and Eighth odes of the Canon, very famously calls on creation to offer praise to God: O let the earth bless the Lord; O ye mountains and hills, bless…
Glory to God for All Things
The Mystery of Words - Prayers by the Lake XXVII
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by St. Nikolai of Zicha Your birds awaken me in the morning, and the murmur of the lake lulls me to sleep in the evening. But it is not the birds that awaken me, nor the lake that lulls me to sleep, but You, O Lord, Master of the voice. You lend Your voice to the birds and the midnight murmur to the lake. You have lent a voice to every throat,…
