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,…
Glory to God for All Things
In the Image of God
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In the life of the saints, “repetition” or “copying” is the most creative act: it is the mystery of the Tradition of the Holy Spirit. The way to the acquisition of this holy Tradition was first indicated by the great Apostle Paul, “Be ye imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). Archimandrite Zacharias in The Enlargement of the Heart I grew up as the son of…
Glory to God for All Things
True Theology
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From the book, The Enlargement of the Heart, by Archimandrite Zacharias: For Elder Sophrony [Sakharov], theology was the state of being in God….theology was for him the description of the event of his meeting with Christ when he was caught up and saw the divine Light. [as described earlier in the text]. (For him theology was the narration of an event.) According to his writings, authentic theology consists not in the conjectures…
Glory to God for All Things
Reading Rightly
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The course of your reading should be parallel to the aim of your way of life…. Most books that contain instructions in doctrine are not useful for purification. The reading of many diverse books brings distraction of mind down on you. Know, then, that not every book that teaches about religion is useful for the purification of the consciousness and the concentration of the thoughts. St. Isaac of Syria quoted in The…
Glory to God for All Things
Without Distraction
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A desert hermit, dear to God and often in prayer, was joined by two angels as he walked, one on each side. He tried to pay them no attention. He did not want to be distracted from his conversation with Christ. From the Desert Fathers This is one of the great religious tragedies of our age – we do not want God so much as the proof of His existence – all…
Glory to God for All Things
What Can One Man Do?
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In our modern world we sometimes forget that a single person is not able to do much on their own. If Wittgenstein was right, then we really can’t do anything on our own. We live, for good or ill, within a culture, within a social matrix that makes most aspects of our life possible. Language is a social construct; world-views are a social construct; family is a social construct and I could…
Glory to God for All Things
Cultures of Remembrance
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I grew up in a “culture of remembrance.” By that, I mean that the history of the place in which I lived was far more a matter of discussion and meaning than the present or the future. That culture was the American South. Much of the remembrance we discussed was not true – just a left-over from the sentimentality of the 19th century. My childhood was spent in the 1950’s, which may…
Glory to God for All Things
Remembrance
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St. Macarius said, “If we remember the evil that others have done to us, we shut down our ability to remember God.” From the Desert Fathers Memory is a very powerful thing. The older I get, and the more of my earthly life lies behind me instead of before me, memory becomes indeed powerful. I have lived in my present home for almost 20 years, which, for a priest, can be quite…
Glory to God for All Things
Me, You and the Other Guy
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It has been said that a recession is when someone else loses his job; a depression is when you lose your job. I am too young to remember the Great Depression, though all the adults I knew as a child had come through that period. In 1928, my paternal great-grandfather lost everything (farm, machinery, house, etc.) in the Cotton Market Crash that preceded the Great Depression. My father was four years old…
Glory to God for All Things
When Money Fails
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I know little about economics, perhaps less than most. I do know when I hear scary stuff on television, though I know television likes to scare us (it keeps us watching). Nonetheless, I can’t help but notice that, world-wide, various markets are in a bit of a panic – and if not panic – at least they recognize a crisis when they see one. One of the great difficulties in our modern…
Glory to God for All Things
The Great Crisis
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I wanted to write a bit more on “crisis” following up on my previous article on Dostoevsky, et al. 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 threaten humanity with pure non-existence, but with a dynamic movement towards a “relative” non-existence, which some have described as a “meontic” existence (to get a little technical). If you…
Glory to God for All Things
Crises, Dostoevsky and the Gospel
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There is something of a common thread that runs throughout the novels of Dostoevsky, the 19th century Russian writer: personal crises. Dostoevsky has long been recognized as a genius of psychological perception, writing at a time before psychology was a formal academic discipline. Many of his novels carry a relgious theme, particularly Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. There are other personal crises in many of his other works – though…
Glory to God for All Things
The Humility of God
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The humility manifested in Christ’s voluntary death on the Cross was not an aberration, but a manifestation of who God is. Humility is divine. St. Silouan offered the following observation: There are many kinds of humility. One man is obedient, and has nothing but blame for himself; and this is humility. Another repents him of his sins and considers himself loathsome in the sight of God – and that is humility. But…
Glory to God for All Things
O, Happy Day
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Today I return to my home parish, my home altar, and the people who are my home in the Orthodox Church. We are not a perfect lot, but it is the lot that I know and love, and who, largely, know and love me. Some of them have suffered long with me from early early days in a warehouse in Knoxville, TN, to our present, relatively good days, others have joined us…
Glory to God for All Things
Where We Stand in Time
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An aspect of travel through the ruins of earlier civilizations is a sense of walking through the past. Here in the South we have numerous Battlegrounds, preserved as reminders of our nation’s struggles in the 19th century (and some from the 18th as well). There is even a lively sub-culture of “re-enactors” who seek to have some sense of the experience of times past. Christianity stands in a very different place with…
