Glory to God for All Things
Keeping It Simple
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A comment yesterday asked for greater simplicity. I am entirely sympathetic to the concern expressed and offer here an earlier posting which draws our focus to simple things. I have written and posted numerous times that “I am an ignorant man,” which is to say that I do not consider myself a great source of wisdom and insight and that what knowledge I do have is indeed limited. It is also true…
Glory to God for All Things
Mystical Theology
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A question was posted recently about “mystical theology.” I offer a few thoughts (written in my hotel room) that might be of some use. My first exposure to Orthodox thought was reading Vladimir Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church when I was a college student. A friend gave me the book and urged me to read it. Lossky’s work read like one of the fathers from the pen of a modern…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Upcoming lecture in Bethlehem
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Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
New Jerusalem
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It seems that Allentown (our three years younger neighbor to the north of Emmaus and my temporary place of residence) has hired someone to come up with a new slogan: “City without limits.” I know that the purpose of this slogan is essentially for marketing for development, but I can think of few worse slogans for any town. Allentown, it should be noted, is…
Glory to God for All Things
A Nature That Is Less Than Obvious
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In modern usage, the word “nature” generally refers to growing things – “the great outdoors.” Having been born in the ’50’s, I have been the veteran of several “back to nature” campaigns. There is a sense, at least as old as the Enlightenment, that if we could only get ourselves “back to nature,” things would be alright. Some of the present day environmental movement has this sense about things. Green is good.…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Upcoming lecture at Bucknell University
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Glory to God for All Things
The Existence of God and the "God Who Does Not Exist"
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There is a current “pop-sensation” in the writings of a number of “atheists” whose pronouncements are always sure to garner media attention. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others are current “go-to” sources for the media’s search for usable quotes from atheists. In many ways, the current popularity of such figures is fueled by “pop” Christianity. One mirrors the other. In matters of serious Christian thought – neither is of particular concern – neither…
Glory to God for All Things
The Secret Place
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Of all the places and spaces to which we should attend – this article names the most important. I suspect that our failure to recognize holy space in the physical surroundings of our lives contributes to our inability to find the holy place within our own heart. I am not sure which must come first – but I think we must know both. Without a proper regard for the ‘secret place of…
Glory to God for All Things
The Shape of Heaven
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This post from 2007 continues thoughts on Holy Space and its place in our lives. I am feeling my way forward with this post – that is to say – I have some thoughts that are probably still in formation – so bear with me. That human beings have a particular relationship with icons is, to me, part of the dogma of the Church. It is not an expressed dogma – the…
Praying in the Rain
Make Haste and Come Down
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At a friend’s request, I’d like to write a little about Jesus’ words, “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down.” As you recall, Zacchaeus is sitting in a tree when Jesus “looked up and saw him, and said to him” these words. Zacchaeus is a man who wants to see Jesus but because of his short stature, and because of the crowd, he cannot. Some of the Fathers of the Church interpret his…
Glory to God for All Things
The Heavenly Spaces
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“The Church is the earthly heaven; in these heavenly spaces, God lives and walks about.” In these words of Patriarch Germanus, we get a glimpse of the dizzying heights of the church building’s significance. The Byzantines treated space as God’s dwelling place. Their architectural problem was to create harmony between the natural scale of the human and the transcendent scale of the infinite. Recent attempts to find forms adapted to the modern…
Glory to God for All Things
The Light of Beauty
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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 +++ In thinking about darkness and light – and their role in our apprehension of the truth – I cannot but think about Beauty, which is a primary place in which the light of God made manifest among us (if rightly perceived). The heart that is full…
Praying in the Rain
On Virginity
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One must be careful interpreting apocalyptic books, most particularly Daniel and the Revelation. The purpose of apocalyptic literature is not to teach, but to inspire and reveal—not in the sense of explain, but in the sense of pulling back the curtain of time and space to expose in symbol and metaphor some of the reality hidden behind reality. From the early days of the Church, Christians have gotten themselves into trouble and…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Dancing the Ruins
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Praying in the Rain
On Steps to Knowing God
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Some Christians tend to simplify spiritual life into steps or principles that can be easily communicated: Twelve Steps/Four Laws/Seven Principles of Salvation, or of A Successful Marriage, or of A Prosperous Business, or of Raising Godly Children. But the problem with this way of dicing up wisdom or knowledge is that once someone begins to look at salvation, for example (or any other aspect of life), as a simple matter of “Four…
Glory to God for All Things
Is This All There Is?
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A comment deleted earlier today contained a short rant on the topic: “There is no such thing as sin.” I have no idea what the writer thought the word “sin” meant – and if I knew I might even agree. I certainly do not think of sin as a legal category. But when I think carefully about the statement, “There is no such thing as sin,” I begin to wonder how someone…
Praying in the Rain
Fr. Hopko on St. Seraphim on the Holy Spirit
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Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Blessing the Waters
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Praying in the Rain
Successful Spiritual Warfare
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It is interesting, given the amount of time I spend talking about spiritual warfare with my more zealous parishioners, how little the New Testament speaks of spiritual warfare. The New Testament does indeed speak of it, but really much less than it focuses on the result of successful spiritual struggle. The most famous passage on spiritual warfare, the one that immediately come to mind, is Christ’s exhortation in the Sermon on the…
Praying in the Rain
St. Gregory Palamas: Three Kinds of Poverty
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“The first [kind of poverty] is to lack life’s necessities and [it] depends on one’s [lack of] income and resources. It stands as the opposite extreme to wealth…. Then there is physical poverty, when the body withers away because of an extremely frugal diet or lack of food [or mental or bodily sickness]…. Another type of poverty is the soul’s moderation and restraint. This is our soul’s spiritual humility, the opposite of…
Glory to God for All Things
The Opacity of Sin
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“And this is the condemnation: that the light has come into the world and men preferred darkness to the light for their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). There is an opacity to sin: we do not see through it. Sin sheds light on nothing beyond itself. It refers only to itself and because of this it is darkness. It is the nature of light to give beyond itself and what it illumines…
Glory to God for All Things
The Allegory of All Things
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Andrew Louth, writing in his book, Discerning the Mystery, says: If we look back to the Fathers, and the tradition, for inspiration as to the nature of theology, there is one thing we meet which must be paused over and discussed in some detail: and that is their use of allegory in interpreting the Scriptures. We can see already that for them it was not a superfluous, stylistic habit, something we can…
Glory to God for All Things
Let No Anger Arise
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One of the brothers asked Isidore, the priest of Scetis, “Why are the demons so afraid of you”? ” He said, “Ever since I became a monk, I have been trying not to let anger rise as far as my mouth.” +++ In a culture which speaks and only later repents (if at all) such self-control is mighty indeed. There is much that is offered for the internet which time and hesitancy…
Glory to God for All Things
There Be Dragons...
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Today marks one of the greatest feasts of the Orthodox year (New Calendar), the Feast of Theophany, Christ’s Baptism in the Jordan river. Across the world Orthodox Christians will gather after the Liturgy to bless the waters: the ocean, a river, a spring, etc. Every feast day in Orthodoxy is connected to the Feast of Pascha, because Pascha is God’s great act of salvation. However, some feasts show this connection more clearly…
Praying in the Rain
Theophany
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What we now celebrate as two feasts, Christmas and Theophany (Epiphany in the West), was originally celebrated as one feast on January 6th. By the time of St. John Chrysostom (late 4th century) the Church had already separated the feasts creating a twelve-day festal season. But in one of his homilies on the Theophany, St. John points out that there are actually two Theophanies. The word “Theophany” means the “appearance of God.”…
Glory to God for All Things
Do Not Resent, Do Not React, Keep Inner Stillness
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A very fine essay by Metropolitan Jonah of the OCA on essential practices of the spiritual life can be found among the abbatial essays on the website of the Monastery of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco. It is worth the read – even worth printing out and saving… An excerpt… …One of the things which is so difficult to come to terms with is the reality that when we bear…
Glory to God for All Things
Now Is The Change of the Most High
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There is no doubt that God is changing the world – though most of this work is hidden. A strange part of this hiddenness is the work that God does within us. The work is not entirely hidden – I can look back and see change that has occurred in my life – it’s just that it helps sometimes to live long enough to see it. Human beings seem to change at…
