Sin messes people up, twists them, breaks them, fills them with delusion, in fact its the ultimate delusion. If, for some reason, a person is at the moment more sane than another, less caught up in darkness, they need to deal gently with those in a darker place. First because they understand their own sinfulness and take care to realize that even their best intentions may be touched by this. Second because they know from their own experience that the confusion, the sickness, and the pain of sin may be so deep that what seems obvious to the observer may not be clear at all to the one being observed. Sanity may have to be restored a little at a time, a process wrapped in grace and administered with a spirit of gentleness to avoid the cure being worse than the disease.
Category: Faith
Things I'm learning on sabbatical…
Sometimes the role of the people in the life of the church is patient, prayerful, endurance. Leaders are sometimes holy, sometimes flawed, and occasionally just plain evil but the patient faith and endurance of the people of God is where the holy are acknowledged, the flawed corrected, and the evil overcome by good.
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Things I'm learning on sabbatical…
character is more important than knowledge. I can learn every rubric for every service and be able to recite the Fathers by memory but its meaningless if my character is not in the image of Christ. First work on being like Christ and the knowledge will come.
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Wisdom…
I have consciousness of my sinfulness, but I live with hope.
It is bad to despair, because someone who despairs becomes
embittered and loses his willingness and strength. Someone
who has hope, on the contrary, advances forward.
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Wisdom from Isaiah 40…
28 Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
The everlasting God, the LORD,
The Creator of the ends of the earth,
Neither faints nor is weary.
His understanding is unsearchable.
29 He gives power to the weak,
And to those who have no might He increases strength.
30 Even the youths shall faint and be weary,
And the young men shall utterly fall,
31 But those who wait on the LORD
Shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint.
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Wisdom from St. Isaac…
“When you pray, bring to mind the ploughman who sows in hope. He Who causes to return twofold the seed that the ploughman sows with hope, Who has esteemed the seeking of His kingdom and His righteousness to be greater than temporal things, He himself will reward your entreaty according to His promise.”
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Civility…
is not silence. Civility is not the government monitoring everyone’s thoughts and speech. Civility is not simply a tool to stop differing views. Civility is not about the force of law. Civility is a virtue that springs out from the heart of a person, a combination of the qualities of humility, wisdom, and forebearance that allow one to examine their words before they are uttered.
Regardless of individual beliefs people whose hearts are darkened will express that darkness in their thoughts and words because they are drawing from the well of that darkness. If you wish to have civility you must change that darkness to light. Laws are easy to change but hearts are much more difficult because it takes grace, hard work, and a constant vigilance. It, takes, above all, the presence of Christ who calls us to daily die to ourselves.
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Just a thought…
If you’re a monk should you really be on Facebook?
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Its not just what…
a person sees that matters but how what they see is interpreted. Christian faith is more than the rites, rituals, or specific theological positions of its adherents. When the faithful begin to see Christianity as an interpretive grid for their perceptions they begin to understand its depth and significance. Being a Christian is, in part, a way of seeing and interpreting the world around us with Jesus as our example.
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Just so you know…
Jesus will return when He returns. The times and dates are not ours to know and everyone who has speculated about the topic has one thing in common, they were wrong. Maybe if all the Christians of the world, especially America, saw the troubles of the world not as an opportunity to engage in meaningless end time speculation but rather a call to holy living and reaching out to those in need things would be different.
The Beautiful Path 