Forty days after His Nativity, Christ was presented to the Temple. Forty days after His Baptism, He was tempted and tested by the devil. And forty days after His Resurrection, He ascended into Heaven. Surely there is significance in the fact that each of these three all-important events in His earthly life was followed by …
Deep calls to deep
I’m thinking of three women in the Gospels, and a fourth: The woman with the flow of blood who touched the garment of Jesus and was healed, the Canaanite woman who pleaded with Jesus to heal her daughter, and the woman who anointed Jesus and was attacked for “wasting” money. Jesus replied that she had …
Beautiful Feet and Fingers
"How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news!" Paul quotes that line from Isaiah 52:7. My feet are not beautiful, especially when they hurt like they are doing today. And yet they are beautiful when they come to preach the good news to you. The quality of our shoes or clothes means …
A Christian Must Become A Poet (Saint Porphyrios)
All things around us are droplets of the love of God.... They are little loves through which we attain to the great Love that is Christ. Flowers, for example, have their own grace: they teach us with their fragrance and with their magnificence. They speak to us of the love of God. They scatter their …
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Grace is the Field of Existence
Πιστὸς ὁ λόγος, Paul wrote in his letter to Titus 3:8. “The saying is sure,” or ‘trustworthy.’ What is the saying, the word, logos, that is sure and trustworthy? It’s what Paul wrote immediately before his statement of trustworthy logos. And what he wrote is a statement of faith that I compare in importance to …
An irrelevant ancient saint
It's been a while since I last posted anything here. Many reasons for that. I'm still receiving physical therapy from a bad fall last August that led to hip surgery. And my church work load has increased in unprecedented scope as I've been doing catechesis with some very eager new entrants into the Orthodox faith. …
Taking Christ’s Humanity Seriously
The goal of the Christian religion is not the idolizing of Christ, not christolatry, but that we all "are in Christ," as the mystical expression goes, that we have a part in the life of Christ. This savior is a wounded healer, and he heals so that we may become as he is. Be as …
Translating 2 Corinthians 5:19
It hit me the other day, out of the blue, while driving: "For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself." I looked it up immediately when I got home. 2 Corinthians 5:19 expresses Saint Paul’s faith in concise and unprecedented simplicity, and yet it is one of the deepest expressions of theology anywhere …
What it means to take Christ seriously
The desert fathers and mothers were not learned theologians. They weren’t even deep spiritual guides. Their lives were simple and their teachings were simple and directly related to their circumstances in the desert. Sometimes their teachings provoke laughter in us who are more ‘sophisticated’ than they are. More sophisticated we might be, but are we …
A Forgiveness Worthy of Golgotha
In the spring of 1996, Christian de Cherge, prior of a Cistercian community at Tibhirine, Algeria, and six of his fellow monks were beheaded by GIA, the Armed Islamist Group. These men knew full well that their lives were in great danger, but they refused to leave the place where they shared so much of …
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