Category: Fasting
-
Forgiveness – Do We Know What We’re Doing?
The first service of Great Lent in the Orthodox Church is “Forgiveness Vespers,” served on the eve of Monday of the First Week. There is nothing unusual about the service itself – other than the “rite of forgiveness” appended to it. In this, the priest and the faithful ask forgiveness of one another. Often this…
-
Eating Your Way to Paradise
It is interesting that the story of mankind’s first sin involved eating. We didn’t eat too much, only the wrong thing in the wrong way. But as sins go, it seems rather mundane. Murder is more dramatic (that was a second generation sin). Betrayal makes for a better novel. But there it was – we…
-
Living in a Strange Land
The Scriptural narrative is littered with stories of “strangers in a strange land.” Noah, Lot, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Israelites and Moses in Egypt, Israel in Babylon, even Israel under the Greeks and Romans – beyond the Scriptures – Israel in the diaspora. It is perhaps among the most unifying threads in story of…
-
The Fast that Keeps
Corrie Ten Boom, the Dutch Christian who suffered in Hitler’s Ravensbruck for her work rescuing Jews, shared stories of her life within those death camps. I recall one of her remarks, “We did not keep the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept us.” Some years back I was filming a television show with the local Rabbi and…
-
Shopping for God
It is unfair that I write this post on the evening of “Black Friday.” This is the day in the American vernacular (always the day after our American Thanksgiving holiday) when the Christmas shopping season officially begins. It is marked by many enticing sales and stores opening at Midnight of Black Friday (and now increasingly…
Father, thank you once again. I should say that in the last few months I have been watching your YT…