Tag: Knowledge of God

Saving Beauty

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 9 Leave a Comment on %s
Everything is beautiful in a person when he turns toward God, and everything is ugly when it is turned away from God. Fr. Pavel Florensky +++ In thinking about darkness and light – and their role in our apprehension of the truth – I cannot but think about Beauty, which is a primary place in which the light of God is made manifest among us (if rightly perceived). The heart that is…

Getting Past Religion

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 17 Leave a Comment on %s
My wife inherited a habit. It was her father’s not uncommon practice to sing his way through the day, especially the morning. A devout man, his songs were his favorite hymns. My wife’s habit is similar, only as an Orthodox Christian, her repertoir has grown to include the traditional hymns of Orthodoxy. It is not an entirely conscious practice (I think) – though her heart is clearly engaged in what she is doing.…

Mere Existence and the Age to Come

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 9 Leave a Comment on %s
C.S. Lewis, in his marvelous little book, The Great Divorce, uses the imagery of “solidity” versus “ghostliness” to make a distinction between those who have entered paradise, and those who have not. He clearly did not mean to set forth a metaphysical model or to suggest “how things are.” But the imagery is very apt and suggestive when we take a look at what it means for something or someone to exist. The nature…

Smashing Icons

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 31 Leave a Comment on %s
The first Sunday of Great Lent, on the Orthodox calendar, is set aside to remember the restoration of icons to the Churches during the reign of the holy Empress Theodora (9th century). It commemorates as well the gift of the entirety of the Orthodox faith. I reprint these thoughts in honor of the day. The opening quote is from an earlier posting. We have to renounce iconoclasm. In so doing, we inherently…

The Edge

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 26 Leave a Comment on %s
One of the peculiar marks of life in the modern world is the sense one has of standing on the edge. We are always (it seems) either standing on the edge of disaster or on the edge of some great discovery. Of course, a lot of this is simply the way we market the world to ourselves. But it is an inherent part of modernity to constantly look towards the future and…

To Cultivate a Forgiving Heart

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 12 Leave a Comment on %s
Nothing is more difficult to our heart than forgiveness of our enemies. Forgiveness of anything is hard for some, while forgiveness of everyone for everything is God-like. As we progress towards Great Lent, we progress towards the place where only forgiveness (both given and received) will move us closer to the goal of union with the Good God. I cannot think that any of my readers is a stranger to forgiveness, either…

Love and True Faith

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 24 Leave a Comment on %s
In the life and teaching of St. Silouan of Mt. Athos, it is interesting to note that what he considered to be “true faith” was the manifestation of the love of God in us towards all the world. It would have certainly been the case that as an Orthodox monk, St. Silouan would have believed all of the Church’s teaching without question. And yet when he spoke of the true faith it…

The “Crisis” of Modernity

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 25 Leave a Comment on %s
What do you call a Christian whose mind is so constructed that belief in God is almost impossible? Answer: a modern man. I occasionally make allusions to the crisis of modernity (in one form or another), as in a recent post in which I made reference to Florovsky’s term, the tragedy of Western Christianity. The crisis is not financial, though financial stumbles do reveal some of the cultural weakness within modernity. In many…

Risking Everything

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 21 Leave a Comment on %s
In the struggle to come to the wholeness of Personhood – to become the “true self” rather than to sink into the “false self” our very existence as spiritual beings is at stake. If you read across Orthodox books that center on the issue of Personhood – a common theme becomes visible. Our fall and our brokenness leave us vulnerable, even in our religious efforts, to the development of a “false self”…

Living Orthodox in the Modern World

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 35 Leave a Comment on %s
We live in the modern world – a fact for which we have no antidote. It is the moment in history that is ours. Christians before us have lived in the Roman world, various pagan worlds, the Byzantine world, the world of “Holy Russia,” but we are tasked by Divine Providence to live as Orthodox Christians in the modern world. It is a setting that has its own unique challenges and its…