Glory to God for All Things
The Truth of an Icon
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Icons are lovely objects – directing our hearts towards God – sometimes miraculous and truly “windows to heaven.” But I want to be somewhat theological today and write about the “truth” of an icon. Icons are peculiar, when painted according to the most traditional patterns. They are not just “ahistorical” they are positively non-historical. We can look at an icon and see any number of events depicted that do not belong to the…
Glory to God for All Things
Boundaries Which God Has Set
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I have written previously of boundaries and their essential nature in our spiritual lives. This can be described by the boundaries we experience within ourselves (certain ones must be maintained) or the boundaries we experience in an Orthodox Temple (such boundaries serve to teach us about ourselves and the Truth of our relationship with Christ). One boundary which is perhaps the most essential, and yet contrary to much modern thought, is the…
Glory to God for All Things
The Ladder of Divine Ascent
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There is something about charts, methods, tables and the like that always make me react in a negative manner. There is a form of rationalism that, for me, simply screams, “This is the work of man.” A Linaeus can invent a table for classifying nature – and I’m sure that biologists find it very helpful. But there is something irrational at the same time about nature in which everything resists classification. The…
Glory to God for All Things
The Breastplate of St. Patrick
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I arise today Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, Through a belief in the Threeness, Through confession of the Oneness Of the Creator of creation.I arise today Through the strength of Christ’s birth and His baptism, Through the strength of His crucifixion and His burial, Through the strength of His resurrection and His ascension, Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.I arise today Through the…
Glory to God for All Things
Signposts
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I have spent my day traveling by car to the heart of South Carolina where my parents are now living, having moved to an “Assisted Living” Center recently. I have a brother nearby. “Going home” to South Carolina has become a sort of barometer of sorts for me in the past 20 years (it’s how long I’ve been gone). There have been vacations, funerals, weddings, graduations – all the events that mark…
Glory to God for All Things
Reverent Audaciousness
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From Fr. Sophrony’s We Shall See Him as He Is Divine Love begets reverent audaciousness. Thus a handful of Apostles, hitherto faint-hearted, after the descent of the Holy Ghost were filled with courage and took on the whole of the rest of the world in spiritual struggle. Nearly all of them suffered martyrdom. When the governor of Patras threatened St. Andrew with crucifixion the latter made the marvelous reply, “If I feared…
Glory to God for All Things
Pray for Catechumens
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In this season of the year it is traditional for Catechumens to be preparing for reception into the Church. My experience is that for anyone preparing to be received life gets a little tougher. I suspect the enemy to be the culprit behind this and therefore think it all the more incumbent on all Orthodox to remember and pray for Catechumens. The Fathers wisely gave us such prayers for every liturgy (though…
Glory to God for All Things
Icons and the Heart
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My maternal grandparents’ home had an array of popular religious art: Jesus knocking at the door (as discussed in the previous post’s comments), the guardian angel and the children, prayer in the garden of gethsemane. They were country Baptists, and yet religious art (I suppose some would call it kitsch) was an important part of the home. My first encounter of the Theotokos was with a Raphael Madonna that was the frontispiece…
Glory to God for All Things
The Door of the Heart
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If there is anything about our life that captures my attention (indeed some days I think of little else), it is the heart. There is a clear sense in the writings of the Fathers of what is meant by the heart and Scripture has much to say as well. Christ said about the heart: “A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil…
Glory to God for All Things
Smashing the Gates of Hell
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Perhaps it seems early to be talking about smashing the gates of hell (isn’t that something to be left until Pascha?), but the Church engages us as “gate smashers” much earlier in the Lenten season than just Pascha itself. The memorial Saturdays (“Soul Saturdays”) that we observe in which we pray for the departed (it’s nearly every Saturday in Lent) are small reminders that the Pascha of our Lord has smashed the…
Glory to God for All Things
Encountering God
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Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, in his little classic, Beginning to Pray, focuses first on the absence of God rather than His presence – which is helpful for me since that’s starting where I have to start (as do almost all of us). He grounds this in God’s personhood and His freedom. God is not some object that we always have at our beck and call. Though He is indeed “everywhere present and filleth…
Glory to God for All Things
At the Edge of Heaven
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In writing about the Iconostasis in the previous post, I wrote of “boundaries,” and how the definitions that exist in the Church reflect even greater realities. I believe those realities are two-fold. The first reality is to be found within ourselves. Fearfully and wonderfully made, created in the image of God, there is a spiritual reality to our composition and inner relationship that is far too easily overlooked in our materialistic age.…
Glory to God for All Things
The Iconostasis and Modern Piety
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This is meant as a follow-up with more personal reflections to accompany my earlier post on the Iconostasis in Orthodox Churches. I know from my many conversations with bright young seminarians (two of whom are married to my oldest daughters) that there is much, much more to know about the history and development of Eastern liturgical practices than I begin to know, despite my years of reading. But I do know something…
Glory to God for All Things
Over at the Undercroft
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Glory to God for All Things
The Iconostasis
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A recent email suggested to me that I might write about the iconostasis (the icon screen) found in Orthodox Churches. Some Protestants in particular have problems with it, feeling on the one hand that they are “shut out” of the liturgy to some extent or that Orthodox practice is restoring the “curtain of the Temple” that Christ’s crucifixion rent in two. Those are not surprising thoughts and are worth some comment. I…
Glory to God for All Things
Hollywood Goes for the Jugular
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Sometimes I can’t help myself – I simply have to comment. Larry King, commenting on the controversy raised by the Discovery Channel’s latest silliness – the bones of Jesus – asks the seminal question: “Can this be the end of the Easter Bunny?” Surely both East and West could get together and issue a joint communique: “There is no such thing as an Easter bunny,” and that would help Hollywood feel better.…
Glory to God for All Things
Some Modest Thoughts on the Atonement
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The doctrine of the Atonement, that is, the doctrine of how exactly it is that Christ has reconciled us to God, is a matter of much discussion. For some, particularly among conservative Protestants, the Atonement is defined by the model of the penal substitution (Christ bore the wrath of the Father that we deserved and thus made propitiation for us). Some have rejected this model as either bound too strongly to a…
Glory to God for All Things
Sailing to Byzantium
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I recommend for your reading interests, a series on The Undercroft, which, thus far, is doing an excellent job of setting forth matters of the faith. Today he looks at Scripture and the Church. It’s a good read. I offer a short quote: Where, then, is the record of holy souls in the first centuries, raising their voices and shedding their blood for the sufficiency and pre-eminence of scripture against the rise…
Glory to God for All Things
The Unplanned Life
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One of the geniuses of modern life is the plan. It is certainly the case that if you have a company and a product, or whatever passes for those in these days, there is probably a plan to go with them. Occasionally you hear from Christians, “God has a plan for my life.” Several years ago I was flying from Dallas back to Tennessee and was sitting in the middle of two…
Glory to God for All Things
From Dostoevsky - Miracles
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From Chapter 5 Elders …but it seems to me that Alyosha was even more of a realist than the rest of us. Oh, of coure, in the monastery he believed absolutely in miracles, but in my opinion miracles will never confound a realist. It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not…
Glory to God for All Things
Prayer and the Name of Jesus
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From Archimandrite Sophrony’s On Prayer. The Name Jesus as knowledge, as ‘energy’ of God in relation to the world and as His proper Name, is ontologiclly bound up with Him. It is spiritual reality. Its sound can merge with its reality but not necessarily so. As a name it was given to many mortal men but when we pray we utter it with another content, another ‘frame’ of spirit. For us it…
Glory to God for All Things
Why People Become Orthodox
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Now this is indeed a presumptious title for a post – as if there were only one reason that people convert to the Orthodox faith. There are certainly many reasons, nuanced by the various personalities that come. And do they ever come! I was asked in Minneapolis, “What sort of Evangelism Events do you have at St. Anne?” I had to confess that other than making ourselves accessible and somewhat “convert friendly”…
Glory to God for All Things
Thoughts on Dostoevsky
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I have begun re-reading The Brothers Karamazov, this time in the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which, I am told is a great improvement over earlier efforts. I readily confess to being a great fan of Dostoevsky and easily touched by his novels. I find an occasional brilliance in them that reveals the world in greater clarity than I see almost anywhere else. I read the following today in the…
Glory to God for All Things
News Media Loses Its Mind Yet Again - They'll Believe Anything
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Roughly paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton: “When a man ceases to believe in God, it’s not so much that he believes in nothing, as it is he is willing to believe in anything.” Proving this maxim once again, the media have given splash to a completely discredited discovery of the “bones” of Jesus (including an assumption that they are buried in a tomb with his “wife,” Mary Magdalen). I have to admit this nonsense…
Glory to God for All Things
It's Not Just the Details, It's Not Just the Particulars, It's Something Personal
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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…
Glory to God for All Things
It's Not Just the Details - It's the Particulars
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I wrote earlier of the details – and my own wrestling with the details of my travel. Slowly, I am decompressing and regaining my own composure. The difficulty of life is not really found in the details but in its very character as particular. I think people do very well in general – that is to say – with things in general. When we think of things on the general level we’re…
Glory to God for All Things
In the Details - God Reigns
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For the second day, I am sitting in airports, just one of many thousands effected by a snow storm and a storm of flight cancellations. I cannot complain – I was comfortable last night and am so now. I will have missed my Tuesday appointments and responsibilities but it cannot be helped. But these are the events that precisely make up the stuff of our life. A plane doesn’t work. Traffic won’t…
