After Ancient Faith Ministries closes its blog platform, the Walking an Ancient Path blog will continue on its own website, with an easy-to-remember name: www.walkinganancientpath.com. It’s not up and running yet, but the next biweekly blog post for October 4th will appear there, along with all my archived content from the past five years. Subscribers should continue to receive notifications of new posts. The blog can also be accessed from…
Quick announcement: Walking an Ancient Path is available in both blog and podcast formats. The blog has been hosted on the ancientfaith.com website for almost five years now, but Ancient Faith Ministries will shut down its entire blog platform on October 1st. I will continue the blog by migrating it over to a Facebook business page. I have a very short time to figure all that out, but I hope to have…
News flash: Before we get to today’s topic, I want to tell you about a new book that I’m very excited about. Yesterday Ancient Faith Publishing released Behold a Great Light: A Daily Devotional for the Nativity Fast through Theophany. Some of you may not know that I’m an editor at Ancient Faith, and at Christmastime about two years ago I started thinking about how the Orthodox approach to Christmas is so…
Last time I promised an interview with my hubby Rob about our bumpy road to Orthodox Christianity. Well, we recorded the podcast version but had numerous technical problems, including a thunderstorm, a scared doggo whose fast panting in response to thunder showed up on the recording, a recurring buzzing sound, and volume control issues. After numerous delays and attempts to edit and fix the recording, we set both blog post and podcast…
Recently I received an email from someone who listens to the podcast version of Walking an Ancient Path. The listener wrote, Thank you for hosting this podcast! I’ve been listening since last year this time. It’s been very helpful in navigating my personal questions and struggles. My husband would like to convert to Orthodoxy, and I’ve been “looking into it” for about 2 years now. My husband won’t convert unless I’m fully…
I still remember a particular summer morning. Rob and I had discovered the Orthodox Church a few months earlier, toward the end of Great Lent, and had begun attending OCA services and talking to people from the parish during coffee hour. The Orthodox Christian Church was ancient but very new to me, and I was intrigued, edified by her consistent teachings, and drawn by the palpable sense of holiness in the services.…
A couple of months ago my hubby Rob contracted shingles. It was definitely not an experience he would recommend to anybody. Shingles is caused by the same virus that causes chicken pox, and it runs along nerve pathways. Rob said his rash wasn’t itchy but felt more like a bruise or maybe a burn—very sensitive to the touch. The sensation of his shirt touching the skin on his left side was exceedingly…
It happens numerous times throughout the year. At a worship service I’ll be listening and trying to sing along with the text, and suddenly a hymn about the three Holy Youths appears—the friends of Daniel who were thrown into a fiery furnace for refusing to worship King Nebuchadnezzar. The service continues, and we return to our regularly scheduled programming. To this gal in the pews, the insertion feels like an interruption—a lovely…
This post was first published almost four years ago, and because of its relevance for the post-Pascha season, I’m revamping it for new readers and also for podcast listeners. Christ is risen! —LH The midnight Pascha service ends, and the joyful but sleepy parishioners break out platters and crockpots for a parish feast featuring meats, cheeses, wines, homemade beers, vodka in OCA churches, and perhaps a bit of traditional dancing to bouzouki…
Today’s blog post was originally published in March of 2019, but it seems appropriate to revisit the topic of prostrations during Great Lent. — LH The Orthodox culture shock had been manageable so far. About 13 years ago my husband and I finally put down our introductory books on Eastern Christianity and approached the living, parish reality of Orthodoxy during something called the Triodion period before Great Lent. Because we had prepared…
