No one, of course, can describe the fire that fell on the Apostles at Holy Pentecost. At most we are told that the Spirit appeared “like tongues of flame lighting upon the heads of the Apostles.” Not much a description. Other times in Scripture we are told of a Pillar of Fire and of the bush that burned but was not consumed. Again, this is very little information. To this day, there…
The following newsstory gives details of a congregation being received into the Antiochian Archdiocese from the Charismatic Episcopal Church, a Pentecostal denomination with many former Episcopalians, clergy and lay among their membership.
Part of the larger Christian context in which Orthodoxy lives today includes not only Catholics (of various sorts), Protestants (of even more sorts), but Pentecostals as well (of which there are quite a few sorts). Indeed, having come splashing onto the modern religious scene around 1900, Pentecostals have been by far the fastest growing of all Christian groups, and have had huge influences everywhere, with only the possible exception of the Orthodox.…
The following paragraphs are from the chapter on “The Life of the Spirit” in Fr. Sophrony’s We Shall See Him As He Is. St. Silouan’s method is to place us before the general principle and then leave us to work out and diagnose our own case. To give a few examples: ‘One should eat only so much as allows prayer and the feeling of the Divine presence to continue uninterrupted after food’;…
I could not resist using the title from the R.E.M. hit of a few years ago for this post, though it’s really not about losing one’s religion: it’s more about losing your soul. In one of my favorite C.S. Lewis novels, That Hideous Strength, Lewis tries his hand at the description of a soul in danger of being lost. His friend, Charles Williams, had, years before, masterfully done the same in his…
Everything is beautiful in a person when he turns toward God, and everything is ugly when is is turned away from God. Fr. Pavel Florensky I come to the end of a day that has been filled with other activity and little time for writing. But in my reading at bedtime I came across the above quote. It obviously contains a world of truth, indeed, from a certain perspective it contains the…
I am frequently impressed by the things done by youth these days (yes, they do many positive things). When I was in high-school summer was job time. In college, summer was again, job time. Of course, I had no international connections at the time. One of the youth from our parish, Ryan Erickson, is a student at the University of Chicago, active in the Orthodox Christian Fellowship (the college organization). This summer…
One of the questions that surrounds the knowledge of God, as spoken of by the Scriptures and the Fathers of the Eastern Church, is that of where the heart resides. By this, I do not mean where the heart is located (in the chest or wherever), but where the heart itself lives. Though the heart is by no means disconnected from our rationality, it is also resident in many other places of…
I have been viewing the movie, Ostrov, which I reviewed here, simply because watching it feeds me where watching something else would not. I think I have been particularly fed by mediatating on the actions of the character of Fr. Anatoly, who is something of a “fool for Christ.” He is not the most learned (not learned at all particularly) but he knows what a man must know: God. In that, he…
Prayer is infinite creation, the supreme art. Over and over again we experience an eager upsurge towards God, followed only by a falling away from His light. Time and again we are conscious of the mind’s inability to rise to Him. There are moments when we feel ourselves on the verge of insanity. ‘Thou didst give me Thy precept to love but there is no strength in me for love. Come and…
