I ran across a quote today from St. Cyril of Alexandria that really grabbed my attention. I read it in a pamphlet at a Roman Catholic bookstore. I did a quick google search to see if I could track down the exact source of the quotation—chapter and verse, so to speak. I don’t like quoting sources that I have not tracked down myself and verified. However, although this quote appears in many…
I’ve been reading through Andrew Louth’s Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology. It’s a challenging book, I find, but I’m quite enjoying it. In a section that discusses an Eastern Orthodox response to evolution, Fr. Andrew provides a translation of a few paragraphs from St. Gregory of Nyssa’s work, On the Creation of the Human and explains how St. Gregory and many of the Fathers of the Church understood the animal (and indeed plant-like) nature of…
“For even profitable words, spoken without measure, produce darkness, how much more so does vain talk.” (St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 48) I feel a little crazy sometimes, like an idiot—not a godly, holy idiot, just a plain, old-fashioned idiot: the kind that boasts of humility and speaks about the virtue of silence. It seems strange to feel compelled to talk about the virtues of silence. Perhaps I am my own negative…
I have a great six-year old German Shepherd named Kota. She is intelligent, obedient, and easily bored. I can train her to do almost anything a few times. She will fetch, roll over, play dead, spin around and do all sorts of dogie tricks—three or four times. That’s it. And unless you have some really good—and I mean really good—treat for her, she just won’t chase after that ball any more. Kota…
Every spring I muse on the weeds in my garden. A particularly demonic weed (from my perspective) is convolvulus arvensis: Bindweed. Once you’ve got it, you’ve got it. The only way to get rid of it completely is to kill everything using something like Roundup—and that’s only if it has not flowered. If it has flowered and produced seeds, well then you are looking at 20 years of volunteer bindweed. I am not…
I mentioned in a previous blog post that the fathers and mothers of the Church often use words differently, and that you can’t always pin down the exact definition of words like soul, mind, heart and spirit. But this inconsistency is not unusual among Christian spiritual writers. In English there are several ways we use the term ‘heart,’ and it is often unclear what exactly people mean when the say things like,…
In the comment section of a previous post, these questions were asked. I thought I would address my response in a full blog post. I hope it makes sense. Two questions Father: 1) Can you explain more how the passions can never fully be uprooted from the soul? I tend to think of the soul as only having good qualities, and now becoming Orthodox I see that this is not what the…
There are some in the Orthodox Tradition who have said that married couples should abstain from sexual relations during lenten periods. Some have gone so far as to say that this is the teaching of the Church. I am not an expert on such things, so I will not venture an opinion on whether or not it is the teaching of the Church or whether or not it is merely pious opinion. However,…
One of the temptations of being an Orthodox priest and pastor is to present a view of the spiritual life and the ascetic path by which one develops his or her relationship with God in the Church as if it were essentially one thing, as if there were only one way for everyone—and I knew what that way looks like. A lot of the reason for this, in my own experience, has…
In homily 47, St. Isaac introduces his famous three degrees of knowledge, which I have spoken about at length before. Today, I’d like to take a closer look at some aspects of the first degree of knowledge. St. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 8:1 that knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Because Paul sets up this contrast between knowledge and love, it’s easy to assume that they are somehow opposites, or tensions…