“Thoughts in Christ”

Despite your sense of alienation, you are never alone. I find myself giving this advice over and over again, but especially within the confines of the holy confessional. Loneliness is a formidable weapon in the arsenal of Satan, and alienation follows soon after, paving way for depression and despair. We call the Holy Spirit “Comforter” precisely…

How many hundreds of times have I taken a handful of earth and as the final liturgical action sprinkled it on the shiny lid of a coffin and repeated that awesome pronouncement from the will of the Almighty: “Dust thou art, and to the dust shalt thou return.” Why, we ask. Why must we die? The cycle of life is complete—or is it? The Creator had…

The phrase, “The Lost Generation,” has been used more than several times to describe those out of touch with their roots. Gertrude Stein branded the young American expatriate writers in Paris like Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald with that definition. Later the label was applied in America to the generation living between the world wars that had…

Here is a statement from the only true God who demands to be worshipped exclusively. He permits no competitor. He insists on absolute loyalty. Nothing less will do. Elsewhere in the Bible the Lord states the same affirmation in even clearer terms. He insists: “I am a jealous God,” and “My beloved is mine, and I am his” (Song of Solomon 2:16). It…

The man and woman were to be the Lord’s stewards on the earth. They were entrusted with the care over all that exists—an axiom acknowledged by nearly everybody. How is it then that we have done so poor a job of it? We are arbitrary in our appreciation for the welfare of creatures. Some are dear to us; others are little more than suppliers of our…

The preacher or homilist, the iconographer and the composer of church music have a common goal—to reveal the sacred mysteries of the Lord. This is what each of them does in his field, whether it be in words, in icons or in music. Obviously if they are not in touch with the Holy Spirit, if they are blind and dumb to the presence of the holy in…

I don’t know if it’s the last days or not, but the above features describe many with whom we now share what is still called a culture. Read through the list and note how many of those negative characteristics have been demonstrated to you at one time or another.

One blessing in traveling out of the country is the realization that certain features…

We say that we offer bread and wine to be transformed into the very Body and Blood of Jesus Christ Himself, but they are not actually gifts from ourselves. Yes, human beings grew the wheat and baked the flour to bring Him the sacred bread, and the earth brought forth the vines that produced the grapes that were crushed into juice. Men fermented the…

Nobody can accuse our loving Lord of ambiguity. He sets it all out before us clearly in the beginning of His ministry captured in the Sermon on the Mount. We may say like the servants of earlier centuries: “I hear and I obey,” but do we? Each year after Great Lent, having heard countless confessions, I have the feeling that so many difficulties that…

I used to ride the New York City subways daily. Once, some zealous Christian with a magic marker wrote at the Times Square stop: JESUS SAVES. The next day someone else had scrawled underneath: MOSES INVESTS. Both phrases express the Protestant work ethic. Many Christians in America had the foresight to live frugally, and not only Jews but also all…

He kept his head, but he wasn’t able to keep it on, that glorious and most precious saint, John the Baptist, whom our Lord called the greatest of any born of woman (Matthew 11:11). But while it was attached to his body, it was always clear, direct and without compromise. There was no way to shut him up other than to put him to death.

The Orthodox…

We might get a preview of what the children of God will look like in the faces of infants and the icons of the saints: The babies in all their innocence and purity, and the saints who have attained their purposes as having been open to the action of the Holy Spirit in their lives. As for the rest, we should not want to have our faces frozen for all…

Blessed are those who live in the hope and faith in the Kingdom of God; or as the Creed concludes, “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” We hold in our hearts the ultimate life insurance policy, the reward and fulfillment of a life on earth serving, following and loving the Lord Jesus who invites us to the…

It takes just a bit of imagination to be with the Lord Jesus on the hillside at the time when the anemones and scarlet poppies, here called lilies of the field, burst into an array of exciting colors. They last but for a few days, then dry up, and they were gathered by the women to heat up their ovens. Why then bother to offer the world such beauty…

With the above phrases, the evangelist John begins and ends his gospel. He writes about the Word—not a spoken or written word only, but the Logos, the ever-living Word of the heavenly Father, and one of the Agents of all creation. Miracle of miracles, the Word became a man and lived on earth for a brief time. John captured that marvelous event as…

If we are to reach out to today’s young people with the word of God, we must first find where they are, and a good place to begin is with their passions. The motion picture sequence “Star Wars” third chapter, released in the theaters in May, helps not only adolescents but also all viewers to identify with Luke Skywalker battling the forces of…

In our ever more secularized society it ought to be pointed out that the founding fathers of our nation understood the existence of our Creator to be a truth so self-evident that no sane person would deny it. However, I would not be surprised if dedicated atheists are even now searching to find some appeal that would modify that salient text of our…

If we say, “Why do we meet again at an All American Council?” it means that we have forgotten the purpose of council. We can speak of agendas and problems, budgets and departments, reports and reviews; but the primary reason is to be together in Christ. We may occupy an entire continent and scatter over three nations our parishes, monasteries and…

In my junior high school civics class we were made to memorize those words. Ever since, I have mulled over the phrase “the pursuit of happiness.” Our culture not only permits but also encourages us to chase after whatever gives us pleasure, or in modern jargon, whatever turns us on—but within limits. In an earlier era those limits were well known…

Recently a tsunami of wrath and condemnation against America roiled up throughout the Muslim world, stimulated by a false report in “Newsweek” magazine that interrogators in the Guantanamo prison in Cuba flushed down the toilet pages from the Koran. The supposed intention was to provoke the prisoners and stimulate them to confess whatever they might…