Father Bill's Blog
80. On the Road Again: 2010 Trip, Part 1 - Athens, Saint Nektarios and some rambling Comments
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I don’t care if you read this Post or not. Well, actually I do. My trips to Greece meant so much to me in so many ways that I’d like to share them with you. But this one is mostly for me. In a trip journal long ago I wrote that I was keeping those daily records so that when I got old and couldn’t travel overseas any more, I could read…
Glory to God for All Things
Irony and Belief
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Irony is probably too much to ask of youth. If I can remember myself in my college years, the most I could muster was sarcasm. Irony required more insight. There is a deep need for the appreciation of irony to sustain a Christian life. Our world is filled with contradiction. Hypocrisy is ever present even within our own heart. The failures of Church and those who are most closely associated with it…
Faith Encouraged
Listen!
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“Um, sorry, what did you say?” That’s the response I get many times when I’m talking to my younger brother. His hearing took a beating years ago when he was working at a car body repair shop. The steady noise combined with his serious work ethic to damage his hearing, so now, I have to repeat myself a few times sometimes when there is a lot of ambient noise around us. And of…
The Morning Offering
Acquiring a Grateful Heart
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Giving thanks to God for everything Whatever the circumstances in which we find ourselves, God is giving us an opportunity to gain the freedom that comes from acquiring humility. Whatever our job, which ever task we are asked to perform, whatever life places before us, all is an opportunity to give thanks to God. Whatever difficulty or struggle we face,…
Faith Encouraged
Humble AND Obedient
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“We are of one mind about this.” I heard his words and I understood each word and its meaning, but I had never heard this put this way before – “of one mind.” What did he mean? But, hey, I was a kid of 22 and the situation was such that I was hoping he meant we were in agreement. Too embarrassed to ask, I assumed (dangerous, I know) we were, in…
The Morning Offering
The Monk
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And the acquisition of a humble and a contrite heart When the monk attempts to rely on his own strength to do battle with his fallen nature, he will be defeated. The arena, his field of battle, takes place in his own heart, and will be a life long battle. The monk must manifest his word in deeds, and his…
Faith Encouraged
Fr. Gregory and Kh. Frederica Mathewes-Green On Sunday!
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Faith Encouraged
A Divided Heart is Defeated
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Growing up as a young man in the 1970’s meant I heard some of the best music in the world! One song I remember that got the whole car singing along was the anthem “United we Stand” by the Brotherhood of Man. The chorus was “For united we stand, divided we fall. And if our backs should ever be against the wall, we’ll be together, together you and I.” Unity is a…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Who Wrote the Bible and Why Does it Matter?
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The first question in this post’s title may seem an obvious area of discussion. There have been articles, books, and documentaries with the title ‘Who Wrote the Bible?’ In any modern commentary on a book of the Bible, a significant amount of space is devoted to discussing the authorship of that book. Introductions to the Old and New Testaments, the latter in particular, will devote a large portion of their text to various theories of authorship for different texts. Beyond just the identity of an author for the text, texts of the Old Testament are frequently split into various source documents with various authors then proposed for various portions or layers of the text. In the debates between liberal and…
The Morning Offering
Pride
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And the monk’s quest for humility Struggling with his pride, the monk focuses on bringing his own will into conformity with the will of God, through monastic obedience. This obedience is not limited to obeying the directives of his abbot, but taking up a standard of humility that takes seriously his adherence to the 102 canons of the Sixth Ecumenical…
No Other Foundation
A Secure Altar
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Like many other neat-freaks, I appreciate the motto “a place for everything and everything in its place”. Things that have no place or are out of their place look cluttered to my neat-freak soul, and I feel the universe will run much more efficiently if the misplaced item is returned to the place it belongs. Canonically speaking the same principle obtains in the Church when it comes to clergy. Every clergyman ordained…
Faith Encouraged
Crazy!
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St. Anthony the Great once said “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’” Of course, that “time” St. Anthony warned us about has been with us since our mother and father believed the insanity of the snake in the garden! And this madness, this insanity, doesn’t just exists…
The Morning Offering
Happiness
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All we need for happiness is right in front of us It is easy to resist taking care of oneself if we run at full speed as though we are the only one who can get things done. We all need to set priorities, making sure we focus on Christ and not let that which is transitory rule our lives.…
Glory to God for All Things
A Mediated Presence - Thank God
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For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, (1 Tim. 2:5) There is no way to adequately explain priesthood without reference to mediation. A priest is a mediator between God and Man. From time to time over the years, I have had the verse from 1 Timothy pointed out to me with the argument that there cannot be any mediator other than Christ, and,…
Faith Encouraged
Real Love Is Matched By Action
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The word gets thrown around a lot today. “Love” seems to be everybody’s goal, and it seems to have been this way forever. I’m reading a great book now called “How Dante Can Save Your Life” by Rod Dreher, and in it, Dreher gives me some wonderful background on the author of the great poem “The Divine Comedy.” It seems that Dante was a poet in line with many of his day…
The Morning Offering
The Transfiguration
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The Feast of the Holy Transfiguration of Christ Sunday was the Feast of the Transfiguration for those of us serving on the Julian Calendar (Old Calendar). The Transfiguration of Christ is the episode in the New Testament narrative in which Our Lord is transfigured and becomes radiant with bright rays of light. At that moment the prophets Moses and Elijah…
The Morning Offering
A Consuming Fire
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God is a consuming fire and His fire scorches everything That God would allow evil to exist in the first place is a mystery, for the scriptures do not explain this. Yet we do know through the scriptures that true love must express itself in action, and in the face of evil and suffering, a Christian is called to action…
Eastern Christian Insights
Humble Faith, Not Legalism: Homily for the 12th Sunday After Pentecost, the 12th Sunday of Matthew, and the After-Feast of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos
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1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Matthew 19:16-26 A common temptation for religious people is to fall into a form of a legalistic self-righteousness. It is appealing to assume that what God requires may be boiled down to a simple code of behavior such that those who obey it earn a reward, while those who do not merit condemnation. People who are not religious may certainly have their own forms of legalistic self-righteousness, but…
The Morning Offering
Loving Support
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The reason for my blog articles and podcasts In today’s world, it is more important then ever for we Orthodox Christians to support one another in any way we can, that we “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). My reason for writing each day is to try and lend support to fellow believers…
Father Bill's Blog
79. "Weeping Icons? Get Serious..."
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That would have been my reaction when I was a Protestant long ago, even when I was an Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian. We didn’t disbelieve in miracles. We knew there were miracles in New Testament times and afterwards. Roman Catholics claimed to have them. But this just wasn’t part of our experience. Not us. Not here. Not now. And then I saw one. I think it was in the spring of 1987 that an…
Faith Encouraged
The Reason for Fasting
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When I was just learning about the Ancient Faith, I was struck by the wisdom of fasting from certain foods. You see, I had been raised to think that a fast was no food at all, just water. And I would hear stories of Pentecostal pastors “fasting” for a month or even 40 days and “great miracles” occurring because of their fasting. So, of course, I tried that and failed every time…
The Morning Offering
Narcissistic Clericalism
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Clericalism shouldn’t have anything to do with Christianity The recent release of the findings of the District Attorney of Pennsylvania, have resurrected the memory of the failure of the hierarchs of the Roman Catholic Church to properly address the problem of the continuing sex abuse in the Catholic Church. As a priest, I am deeply shocked, almost beyond words, and…
Faith Encouraged
A LIVE Q&A with Fr. Barnabas on Patreon.com
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Faith Encouraged
Abandon the Faith? Really?
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Why do people stop practicing the faith? Why are we seeing so many young people abandon the faith of their youth? Countless studies have been done trying to answer this question. Every time I travel to speak around the country in parishes big and small, I get asked this question as well. And there are as many answers as there are studies. All of these articles and writers usually have some good…
The Morning Offering
The Struggle
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Our struggle against the passions and our victory in Christ As we struggle with anger, gluttony, with judging others, sexual impurity and a myriad of others passions, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless. We find ourselves feeling defeated and tempted to give up the battle. Sometimes we even tell ourselves that we have no choice, for we were…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Is the Book of Revelation Canonical in the Orthodox Church?
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To ask in the present day whether or not any book of the New Testament is truly canonical in the Orthodox Church may seem odd. While the history of the canonization process of the Old and New Testaments took place over several centuries and is neither neat nor tidy, it is an issue, particularly in the case of the New Testament, which has been settled for more than a millennium at this point. It is taken for granted that the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Protestants all share the same list of 27 canonical New Testament books. Delving into the history of the book of Revelation in particular, however, and the arguments for and against its canonicity, reveals…
Faith Encouraged
Blessed Are You Among Women!
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“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” This saying has been around a long time and been attributed to several famous and not-so-famous people, but it rings true, doesn’t it?: It’s hard to communicate AND easy to miscommunicate, especially if both speaker and hearer want to misunderstand! We are a people strongly shaped by an inherent mistrust of all…
