of all authentic authority and authentic obedience is authentic love.
The Challenges…
we’re facing in the American Orthodox community may be a gift from God to help us focus on the essential and shed the unnecessary weights we’ve heaped on our shoulders. Perhaps our loving God is preparing us for a future He only sees but a future for which we need to get ready in the present.
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In the Church…
when loyalty to Christ comes first all other loyalties and obediences find their true meaning, their true place, and their true value. When anything less occurs the Church degrades into a political thing, a corporation, or worse a racket.
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Is There Anything…
nicer than a good night of sleep, rest for the body and soul, gift of God?
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Thoughts on the Fast…
What we gain from fasting does not compensate for what we lose through anger. Our profit from scriptural reading in no way equals the damage we cause ourselves by showing contempt for a brother. We must practice fasting, vigils, withdrawal, and the meditation of Scripture as activities which are subordinate to our main objective, purity of heart, that is to say, love, and we must never disturb this principal virtue for the sake of those others. If this virtue remains whole and unharmed within us nothing can injure us, not even if we are forced to omit any of those other subordinate virtues. Nor will it be of any use to have practiced all these latter if there is missing in us that principal objective for the sake of which all else is undertaken.
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Wise Thoughts…
O strange and inconceivable thing! We did not really die, we were
not really buried, we were not really crucified and raised again,
but our imitation was but a figure, while our salvation is in
reality. Christ was actually crucified, and actually buried, and
truly rose again; and all these things have been vouchsafed to us,
that we, by imitation communicating in His sufferings, might gain
salvation in reality. O surpassing loving-kindness! Christ
received the nails in His undefiled hands and feet, and endured
anguish; while to me without suffering or toil, by the fellowship
of His pain He vouchsafed salvation.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem, On the Christian Sacraments.
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Good Words…
Anger is by nature designed for waging war with the demons and for struggling with every kind of sinful pleasure. Therefore angels, arousing spiritual pleasure in us and giving us to taste its blessedness, incline us to direct our anger against the demons. But the demons, enticing us towards worldly lusts, make us use anger to fight with men, which is against nature, so that the mind, thus stupefied and darkened, should become a traitor to virtues.
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Wise words…
It is not only sin that is terrifying, but also the despair and defection bred by sin. Isaac the Syrian has this to say concerning such a condition: ‘Have no fear, even though you fall daily; do not abandon prayer; stand up courageously, and the angel who watches over you will honor your patience.’ Let us recall the words of Christ in such cases, ‘Go and sin no more.’ And that is all–no curses, no excommunications. We must not submit to the evil spirit of dejection that seeks to draw us ever deeper into sin. Again and again, we must fall at Christ’s feet, again and again He will accept us.
+Fr. Alexander Elchaninov, The Diary of a Russian Priest
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Bars Make Me Sad…
they just do. I love playing music. I enjoy being with friends. Yet if that entitles being at a bar it doesn’t take very long before the air feels heavy and the whole thing seems like a waste of time. I want to play but why should I entertain you as you’re killing brain cells and pretending you’re happy? Music is great but is it that good when it’s all about helping people whizz their life away? Every time I drop in to one to get some stage time I always promise myself “Never again” and I feel like I need to just sit in church for a couple of hours to get the bad juju off my body. The question seems to be how to be present in such places for all the right reasons without getting any of the smell, as it were, on me. I haven’t figured that out yet.
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I'm Watching Something Burn…
from my kitchen window, something I made in Middle School, something I hung on to all these years because I wanted to prove a point. I wanted to prove that I could make things. I wanted to prove that I was a survivor. I wanted to prove I was good enough.
So I kept that tiny little shelf I made in shop class, the one the teacher wasn’t so crazy about but ended up outlasting him. Times have changed. I have changed. God has forgiven and strengthened and made whole. Mistakes? I’ve made them. Struggles? Sure. Yet by the grace of God I am not who I used to be and while I’m a long way away from perfect I know that if I keep my eyes on Jesus I’m heading in the right direction.
So I started a fire this morning. A fire of sacrifice. For a while it has burned passionately and as it was I offered to God everything that was behind, pains, hurts, resentments, sins, everything, like that shelf, I may have kept close to me all these years. It was a bright, hot, and swirling fire.
But now the flames are only consuming the small remnants, the heat is gone for the most part and soon there will only be some quiet smoke drifting through the yard and into space. By the grace of God I am who I am and I refuse, with the same passionate stubbornness that made me keep that shelf, to let what Christ has died for and forgiven rule over me any more.
I have places to go, things to do, a mission to accomplish, and I’m tired of burning daylight…
The Beautiful Path 