“The Church of God is a fearful place. Her work is not to socially rehabilitate and promote her members or provide them with psychological support. The diligent Christian goes to Church to divest himself of his limited mind, which fails to see anything beyond created, earthly things. He only seeks to acquire the mind of Christ and to b...

“O Lord of Hosts, be with us, For beside Thee, we have no other helper in adversity, O Lord of Hosts, have mercy on us.” - Great Compline Hymn, sung on the first four evenings of Great Lent During this Lenten season, a theme that stands out especially vividly for me is our need to cast ourselves more fully and exclusively on God, not o...

“the natural state of man's spirit is always to be in prayer, in constant dialogue with God. Certainly, how to achieve this is a burning question, an issue which concerns every man that truly thirsts and seeks after the living God.” - Elder Zacharias Zacharou, Hesychasm: The Bedewing Furnace of the Heart I chose this book to read durin...

Thy grace hath shone forth, O Lord: the grace which illumines our soul. This is the acceptable time! This is the time of repentance! Let us lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, that passing through the Fast as through a great sea we may reach the Resurrection on the third day of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Savi...

We are still in the week before Great Lent begins. But on Wednesday and Friday we do some Lenten services as a kind of warmup for what's to come. At Wednesday Matins, we found ourselves praying the Lenten Prayer of Saint Ephrem of Syria, practiced throughout Lent at weekday services and in the personal prayers of the faithful: “O Lord ...

Over the years I've been grateful to Fr. Stephen Freeman for reminding us, repeatedly, of the scriptural and patristic truth that Salvation is union with God in Christ, and not anything else. Not long ago, he wrote this: “The Orthodox faith teaches that we are saved by communion – in particular, communion with Christ. When a person is ...

This week our community grieved for the premature birth, and death, of an infant. Too young to survive, he lived long enough to be baptized and held in his mother's arms. He was buried at a nearby monastery, using the Service of Burial for an Infant. I didn't attend, but read the service afterward. I was especially affected by these fi...

“As I’ve written here before, when people don’t believe in demons, they start to demonize people. When people don’t realize that there are “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms,” they start to wrestle “against flesh and blood” (Eph. 6:12). We might even call that carnal wrestling “spiritual warfare.” But it isn’t. Real spiri...

PERIODICALLY I listen again to Fr Moses Berry's "Advice for Enquirers". Every time, I feel that I haven't lived up to the challenge that he lays before us. At least since the time of St John Chrysostom, we have treasured the image of the Church as a spiritual hospital (where we come to be healed, rather than a court where we come to be...

Christian tattoos. Here is a profile of a Coptic Christian family in Jerusalem that has been tatooing crosses on the wrists of Christian pilgrims to the holy land for several generations. I don't have any tattoos (so far); for years I've said that the only way I would get one would be if I visited the holy land, in which case I would b...

I had never heard of the French poet Francis Jammes, and loved discovering his "Prayer to Enter Paradise with the Donkeys". Jammes lived in the country and wrote religiously-inflected poems at a time when French poetry was dominated by Parisian Symbolists/Modernists. I've found very few English translations of his work. You can see Ric...

A while ago I came across mentions of a couple of Greek churches, each of which was claimed to be the biggest in Greece. What's the truth? It's not an easy question: there are many ways (height, square footage,volume, capacity) that a church can be "biggest." I found three churches about which the claim has been made. Biggest is rarely...

Things I've read (and watched) in the past couple of months. The Orthodox Faith, Worship, and Life: an Orthodox Catechism,by Hieromonk Gregorios of Koutloumousiou Monastery, Mount Athos. This is an elegantly written work, generously supported by passages from the Fathers on almost every page. It's also beautifully printed, as we've com...

On the Feast of Theophany, we not only bless Holy Water for use in the Church, but if possible hold an Outdoor Blessing of the Waters at a nearby river, lake, or ocean. This year, for the first time, our two local Orthodox churches were able to unite for a blessing service at Cayuga Lake. It was powerful. A couple of rogue faithful eve...