Category: Mystical Theology

The Secular Mind Versus the Whole Heart

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 99 Leave a Comment on %s

Thinking is among the most misleading things in the modern world, or, to be more precise, thinking about thinking is misleading. For a culture that puts such a great emphasis on materiality, our thinking about thought is decidedly spooky. The philosophy underlying our strangely-constructed modernity is called nominalism (of which there are many formal varieties). Its imaginary construct of the world consists of decidedly separate objects, united only by our thinking about them. There…

The Spiritual Life in Depression and Anxiety

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 76 Leave a Comment on %s

A very poignant question was sent privately to me after my last post. It asked how I was able to go about my parish work when I was battling with depression and anxiety. I have pondered the question over the past week. On one level, I felt a sense of personal astonishment that, in hindsight, it had all been possible. There were very few days through the decades where I was unable to…

Giving Thanks for All Things – The Cruciform Life

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  “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live…” The Cross is the heart of our salvation. It is on the Cross that we see the fullness of God’s love and it is in the Cross that we are united to that same love. Every Christian shares the commandment, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” (Matt. 16:24) This commandment long…

The Work that Saves

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“Do not be careless. Pray as much as you can – more frequently and more fervently. Prod yourself – force yourself to do so, for the Kingdom of God is taken by force. You will never attain it without forcing yourself.” ~ Saint Innocent of Alaska Do we cooperate in our salvation? Do our efforts make a difference? These questions lie at the heart of a centuries-old religious debate in Christianity. Classically,…

Saving My Neighbor – Just How Connected Are We?

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If you are in the “helping professions,” confronting problems in people’s lives, it doesn’t take long to realize that no one is purely and simply an individual. The problems we suffer may occasionally appear to be “of our own making,” but that is the exception rather than the rule. Whether we are thinking of economic or genetic inheritance, or the psychological and social environment, almost all the issues in our lives are…

The Community We All Need

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I once read that the Russian instinct, when under pressure, was to gather with other people, while the American instinct was to flee. Thus, the Russian landscape was marked by villages, while America was marked with isolated homesteads. My Russian knowledge is just hearsay, but I know that Americans like to homestead and to be alone. The American suburb is not a village, it is streets filled with little homesteads, islands of…

The Loneliness of Shame

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  …shame thoughts are quintessentially alone thoughts. They are produced by the felt impossibility of communion, and they produce realities that have no primary communion in them. Patricia DeYoung, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame +++ What does it mean to be lonely? We could pool our collective experience and quickly generate our own Wikipedia entry on the topic. There is probably no one who is a complete stranger to loneliness. The definitions that…

Goodness and a Word in Due Season

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There is an old mystical Jewish belief that when God created all things, He did so by speaking their names (in Hebrew, of course). It was further believed (and here’s the mystical part) that if you could manage to speak that name in the right way, you, too, could cause it to be. The instinct behind this is true, regardless of our inability to do such a thing. That instinct is that…

Speaking the Words of God

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Nothing is as difficult as true theology. Simply saying something correctly is beside the point. Correctness does not rise to the level of theology. Theology, rightly done, is a path towards union with God. It is absolutely more than an academic exercise. Theology is not the recitation of correct facts, it is the apprehension and statement of Beauty. Words have a divine origin, having preceded all of creation. They have a right…

Shame in the Public Arena

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In 401 AD, twenty-nine Saxon “slaves,” strangled each other to death with their bare hands in their prison cells. They chose this death rather than being forced to fight one another in Rome’s arena. Better death than shame. Their “owner,” the Senator Symmachus (famously known as the “Last Pagan”), wrote of them that they were a rebellious “band of slaves, worse than any Spartacus.” In the pages of the New Testament we…