Glory to God for All Things
Knowing the Personal God
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The word personal has a commonplace meaning in English. If I have personal knowledge of an event, it means that I was actually there and saw what took place. Personal knowledge of another person, means that we have actually met, spent time together and shared information. Difficulty arises when this commonplace use of the phrase is mistaken for its theological meaning. The word person, is pretty much a Christian invention, or certainly…
Glory to God for All Things
Thy Word Have I Hid In My Heart
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A dear friend and parishioner whose Blog, Highways in the Heart, is noted on my blogroll, is as great a fan of the Psalms as anyone I know. She has probably committed over 90 to memory – not a small feat in our world today. It was the tradition (and still required by canons) that the Psalter be known by heart by monks (and hence by Bishops). There are certain Psalms (such…
Glory to God for All Things
Is Fellowship with God Possible?
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Too little has been written about the politics (and theology) of Bible translations. From the very first instance, the goal of English translations has not been a primary concern with a faithful rendering of the meaning of the text. Much of the history of the English Bible has been precisely over the agenda carried by the translation itself. Most readers remain unaware of such issues. Most will not notice that the King…
Glory to God for All Things
Music and Scenes from the "Desert"
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One of the better known monasteries in Russian history is the Valaam monastery. Taken over by government authorities during the time of the Communists and used for other purposes, it has been returned today to the Church and is growing into a full-functioning, thriving monastery, one of the “deserts” where spiritual warfare on behalf of the world is unceasing. The music is a development of the “Valaam Chant” that has its own…
Glory to God for All Things
With Humble and Contrite Hearts
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Perhaps among the greatest of Psalms is David’s 50/51: Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love; according to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in thy sight, so that thou…
Glory to God for All Things
The Desert - Struggling in a Flat Land
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One of the best-known sayings to have come from the Desert Fathers is: “Stay in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.” To a large degree the saying extols the virtue of stability. Moving from place to place never removes the problem – it only postpones the inevitable. Somewhere, sometime we have to face the heart of our struggle and by the grace of God overcome. Of course, not everyone…
Glory to God for All Things
Icons in a One-Storey Universe
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I’ll ask my readers to forgive me as I look at yet another aspect of the Christian life when the idea of a two-storey universe is jettisoned and we come to realize that we are living in a one-storey world: that God is with us. Readership has remained very high over the past week or so, so I will take that to mean that many people are interested in this approach and the…
Glory to God for All Things
New "Page" Posted
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Glory to God for All Things
Music from Orthodox Georgia
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Glory to God for All Things
Christian Atheism
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The title for this post sounds like an oxymoron, and, of course, it is. How can one be both an atheist and a Christian? Again, I am wanting to push the understanding of the one-versus-two-storey universe. In the history of religious thought, one of the closest versions to what I am describing as a “two-storey” world-view, is that espoused by classical Deism (the philosophy espoused by a number of the American founding…
Glory to God for All Things
Living a One Storey Life
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I have chosen to use language of the “first and second storey” to describe the kind of bifurcation that the modern world has experienced over the past several centuries. Its results have been to smash the religious world into “sacred” and “secular” and to make believing both harder and disbelief more natural. Thus, to many atheists their world view seems obvious, while believers try to make leaps of logic and argument that…
Glory to God for All Things
The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe - Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Jesuit priest (a convert from Anglicanism) and perhaps the greatest modern (?) poet of the English Language (ok, he’s my favorite). My second daughter, Khouria Kathryn, made me aware of this poem. Hopkins is wonderfully sacramental in his poetry – God permeates his words and the world his words come from. Thank you Kathryn. Wild air, world-mothering air, Nestling me everywhere, That each eyelash or hair Girdles;…
Glory to God for All Things
Speaking of Christianity - Part 4 of the Meaning of Words
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Some years back, the Evangelical-convert-to-Rome, Thomas Howard, wrote a book, Splendor in the Ordinary. In it he argued for a sacramental world view and spoke of how that might effect the local home. I recall the book because it came out while I was in seminary and caused a minor stir. Some of us were interested in a more sacramental life – but we as yet had no idea either of the…
Glory to God for All Things
The Meaning of Language - Part 3
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Having pointed out that much of popular Christian language (and some images in sacred texts) lend themselves to the notion of a “two-storey” universe – and having noted that the second storey as the dwelling place of all things spiritual has almost insurmountable problems – how should we speak about such things? First, it seems that it’s worth thinking about what the words we use really mean in the first place. Perhaps…
Glory to God for All Things
The Dormition of the Mother of God
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In giving birth you preserved your virginity, In falling asleep you did not forsake the world, O Theotokos. You were translated to life, O Mother of Life, And by your prayers, you deliver our souls from death. Troparion of the Feast – Tone 1 It is easy to be put off by Orthodox devotion to the Mother of God when coming at Orthodoxy from a Protestant background. Both because of a fear…
Glory to God for All Things
The Meaning of Words - Part 2
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I have taken this discussion of life in a “one-storey” universe to that of language, precisely because I think that much of our language (as we presently define it) presumes “two-storey” meanings. One of the places I will press language is our speaking of God’s Providence. In the “Morning Prayer of the Last Elders of Optina,” we have a version of a prayer that can be found in similar form by other…
Glory to God for All Things
Worth Taking Time to Read
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I confess I do not read near as much as I once did. Writing takes time – and is a way of slowly digesting a lot of years of reading – and, I hope, to some benefit. Today, however, I came across an article of Frederica Mathewes-Green, written last June, that was deeply moving. I was looking for material on Fr. Roman Braga, the Romanian priest who is a survivor of the…
Glory to God for All Things
What Do Words Mean in a One-Storey Universe?
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It seems to me that much of our religious vocabulary, defined many times within the past 500 years, is enculturated to speak a two-storey world (see the previous post for an explanation of two-storey world). Words such as “faith,” “believe,” and their relatives belong somehow to a portion of the world that is not first-storey. They are keys to the second storey, and are therefore unconvincing to the ultimate modern one-storey folk,…
Glory to God for All Things
Death in a Two-Storey Universe
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I have written before about the two-storey universe that is part of our cultural inheritance in the modern world. I have noted that the default position of our culture is secular protestantism. I have explained that I mean not that we do not believe in God, but that in our dominant cultural metaphor the God we believe in is removed from our everyday affairs. Often what we are left with is a…
Glory to God for All Things
More on the Mystery of Salvation
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I am almost always caught off guard by the number of readers an article on very simple (from an Orthodox point of view) matter of our salvation seems to generate. I forget that the treasury of doctrine that we live in is not part of the daily treasure that others know. I find tremendous comfort, particularly in everything taught by the Orthodox Church regarding our salvation. It is probably my favorite topic.…
Glory to God for All Things
The Mystery of Salvation
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There is a song I recall from my childhood – sung by John Hartford – in which the operative phrase is, “I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been there…” It runs the permutations on life’s possibilities. One thing leads to another. It is this connectedness that always seems to trump the power of choice that adds one of the greater mysteries to life. I know that I “chose” to marry my…
Glory to God for All Things
Akathist Hymn: Glory to God for All Things
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I have seen several translations of this hymn. This one comes from the site of St. John the Baptist Cathedral (ROCOR) in Washington, D.C. I have edited it only typographically. It was composed by Metropolitan Tryphon (Prince Boris Petrovich Turkestanov) +1934 – but frequently attributed to Father Gregory Petrov, who died in a Soviet prison camp. It continues to grow in its popularity within the Orthodox Church. In my parish’s usage, we…
Glory to God for All Things
Finding the Problems at Home - Its All in Your Mind
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If you like history (as I do) then there is always a temptation to look to history for answers. It is certainly the case that the present has much of its situation from the givens it inherited in its history. But we are none us completely explained by our forebears. I certainly have aspects inherited from my parents, but my personal world is still not the sole result of long historical forces…
Glory to God for All Things
Theology, the Slavophiles, and the Parish Church
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Ivan Kireevsky was born on April 3, 1806, and became in the course of his lifetime one of the leading intellectual forces in the group who would later be called the Slavophiles. They were interested in a revival in Russian thought, particularly along lines they considered distinctly Russian – in comparison to Western thought. Many have noted their errors: sometimes they went too far in making distinctions with the West; sometimes they…
Glory to God for All Things
A Good Word on the Feast of the Transfiguration
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The following excerpt is from Ocholophobist’s Website, as always well-written. It’s an excellent meditation for the feast. Fr. Hopko speaks of the fact that when one encounters holiness, if it is indeed holiness one is encountering, one will be filled with both fear and a desire to stay in the presence of that holy place, thing, or person at the same time. If one encounters something which causes all fear, or all…
Glory to God for All Things
Another Wall Street Journal Article on Belief in the Modern World
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Glory to God for All Things
An Interesting Read on the "New New Atheism"
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