Category: The Journey of Faith

Feeling Like a Fool

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 74 Leave a Comment on %s
No one wants to feel like a fool. When it happens, our faces flush, we turn our eyes away (usually towards the ground). We usually want to hide or disappear, and, just as likely the burn in our face quickly passes to the hot burn of anger. Often what follows are words or actions we regret later. Having felt like a fool, we often act like one, unable to muster the calm…

God By The Numbers

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 83 Leave a Comment on %s
Math is very strange stuff. A serious question within the community of science and math is whether math is an invention or a discovery. Is it something that we have just made up out of our head, or is it something we observed and discovered (because it is already there)? This might sound like a silly thing to wonder about, but it is indeed most serious. The ancients (Plato in particular) thought…

When Belief Is Complicated

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 55 Leave a Comment on %s
“It’s complicated.” This statement sums up much of the modern experience. I don’t think the world we encounter is actually complicated – but our experience is. Simplicity is the reflection of an inner world free of conflicts and undercurrents. The truth of the modern inner-world is that it is generally pulled in many directions. Modernity is a juncture in history – a place where many rivers meet to form one raging torrent. The…

A Faerie Apocalypse

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 51 Leave a Comment on %s
Somewhere in the late 60’s (my teen years), I found myself home recuperating from an appendectomy. In those days they actually recommended a period of convalescence before returning to normal activities (today’s medical advice, written in insurance offices, deems recuperation to be a needless bit of a money-drain). But I suddenly had extra time on my hands with little to do. I searched the bookshelves for something unread, or even worth re-reading.…

Atheism and the Imagination

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 59 Leave a Comment on %s
Einstein was famous for his “thought experiments.” He worked his way into radical new insights, not through careful research in a laboratory, but through careful work in the imagination. The same is true for almost all work in cosmology. You cannot simply observe the data generated from particle experiments and announce a conclusion. What is required is a work of imagination to describe a universe in which what has been observed makes…

The Poetry of God

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 21 Leave a Comment on %s
Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet. – St. Pophyrios of Kavsokalyvia St. Porphyrios made this statement in the context of love and suffering: That’s what it is! You must suffer. You must love and suffer–suffer for the one you love. Love makes effort for the loved one. She runs all through the night; she stays awake; she stains her feet with blood in order to meet her beloved.…

The Cross as the Way of Life

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 26 Leave a Comment on %s
Our lives make sense. This may not always seem to be true, but it is. For each of us, there are inner principles that guide our decisions and prioritize our actions. Life is not entirely random. Much of that inner sense of things is not conscious. The day becomes very busy, and we can’t stop and analyze each action and think about its meaning and purpose. Sometimes, you just have to drive the…

Messiness in the Modern World

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 79 Leave a Comment on %s
Salvation can be messy. I believe this with all my heart and so I state it at the outset of this article. As such, it marks me as a heretic in Modernity. I not only believe that salvation is messy – I believe that messiness is pretty much inherent to salvation. And along with that, I believe that our aversion to messiness (in all things) is a peculiar affliction of the modern…

Saved in Weakness

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 37 Leave a Comment on %s
We are not saved by our talents and gifts nor by our excellence – we are saved by our weakness and our failure. I have made this point in several ways in several articles over the recent past – and the question comes up – but what does that look like? How do I live like that? The question can be somewhat urgent for some because the message is so utterly contrary…

Does It Matter How I Feel?

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 47 Leave a Comment on %s
It is common to hear complaints about the materialism of our modern culture. For it is certainly the case that much attention is given to “things” – whether making them, purchasing them, wearing them, or simply owning them. The modern world enjoys material wealth beyond anything ever imagined in human history. But it is a mistake to describe us as materialists. Materialism professes a certain concept of material goods. Atheist materialism, for…