Every year I try to comprehend the reason we as a spiritual community set out to make serious progress from Forgiveness Sunday through the Great Lent and Holy Week, making the ominous trek to the place of Calvary, experiencing once again the trauma of our Lord Jesus’ crucifixion, imbibing the overwhelming joy of His holy resurrection, then…
Esau the elder twin was a constant grief to his parents. They had no control over him. He insisted on running around with the local girls. Finally he took two of them to wife. The parents gave up trying to influence him. Mother Rebecca devised a plan to marry her obedient son Jacob to a girl of her own kind, somebody from her home country. He would…
I find it odd that the great and joyful feast of the Ascension is often not well attended by our faithful. Understandably they are yet not over the euphoria of Pascha. Even forty days is not ample time to greet one’s friends and family with the joy of the Resurrection of Christ, and maybe some of the paschal foods have yet to be consumed. Also,…
So much of the thrust of the Church teachings have to do with encouraging us to overcome worldly lusts. So much of our culture’s media is designed to do the opposite: To convince us that what the Bible and Jesus Christ warn against is in fact natural. Our young people especially are confused between the Church’s teachings and the society that…
The writer of the book of Hebrews was a Jew himself. He wrote to convince his people that they were wrong to dismiss Jesus Christ as Messiah, because He fulfilled and completed all that they had been prepared to understand about God’s will through them ever since the time of Abraham. And he uses a key word, better. Everything their ancestors had…
The great irony is that the city above all others in the world, venerated by three great religions and named “City of Peace” is anything but. Jerusalem is not where one goes today to find peace. On the contrary, it’s where a sensible person fears to be among any crowd that might tempt a human bomb to explode her or himself.
The other irony is that…
Frequently I’m asked: “Why does God let good people die, and so many sinners live to old age?” I resist replying that God has no need of sinners, coming up with a better response: So that the sinners will have an opportunity to repent and be saved, because God loves the sinners just as He does the saints.
I thought about it when I was waiting a…
I recall while in seminary reading The Diary of a Russian Priest, by Father Alexander Yelchaninov for the first time. In it he wrote of confessing a whole family, and in each year’s Great Lent the Lord would give him a single thought to share and convey. I thought of that quote often in my more than two score years of hearing the Great Lent…
The Lord meets us in a group, but again as an individual. As in the sacred services we are all one in Christ, and yet He comes to us as though we were the only person He ever created. It’s so clear in the relationship between our Lord Jesus and Judas Iscariot. We notice several significant moments:
1. Judas is treated with deference. He cannot say…
When you are asked about the Russian style third bar at the foot of Christ’s cross, say that it is for all who look upon it. It speaks to us about our own lives and death. It shows the way either from death to Paradise or to an eternal damnation. It describes the passage from this lifetime to wherever we will spend eternity. For all humans, whether…
The media journalists enjoy reporting various “appearances” of the sacred ones by Christians of good will who claim to find images of the Mother of God in a potato chip, on the reflection from the wall of a glass building, Jesus Christ in the knot of a tree, or some other odd location. The reporters declare the alleged sighting without comment,…
In all the obituaries in the newspapers one comes to the list of “survivors,” listing the members of the deceased’s immediate family. The term always fascinated me. My first thought is of an accident, where only one among them died, the others were spared; however, not often is that the situation. The deceased more commonly was the only person whose…
These questions were put to the prophet Job when he asked God why he had to suffer so much. Of course Job had no response to the Lord. These were unanswerable—far too profound for the limited mind of any human being. God used sarcasm to meet the prophet’s audacity for questioning the ways of the almighty Lord. Today, with the exciting discoveries…
“Why do we call the Virgin Mary ‘Mother of God’?” we are asked by the visitor to our sacred services, “God has no mother.” Of course not, but the only-begotten Son of God, equal to the Father and the Holy Spirit, entered the world through Mary’s womb, and for that we celebrate her as the bride of the Holy Spirit. The Greek term Theotokos means just…
The simple yet productive way to progress in union with the Holy Trinity is to pray slowly enough so that you will listen to what you are communicating to the Lord. Sometimes we make a habit of saying our prayers by rote, reciting them without thought of what the words mean. That’s what our loving Lord Jesus means in the above quotation. We don’t…
Within the halo of every icon of our Lord, God and Savior, Jesus Christ, you may notice three Greek letters, an “o” with a backward comma above, a fat “w,” and a “v.” They mean, “He who is,” the Septuagint [Greek translation] of the four Hebrew consonants that mean: “I am Who I am,” or “I am ‘He who is.’” [YHWH]. When the Almighty appeared to Moses…
To understand what St. Paul means by unveiled face we must recall Moses descending from Mt. Sinai where he had been speaking with the Lord (Exodus 34:33). His face shone with light, and it frightened Aaron and the people. So he wore a veil when talking with them, but he removed the veil when speaking with God. Paul takes it to mean that the glow of…
We members of an earlier generation were raised in a culture that lifted up the best a person could be in life. We were inspired by greatness in all walks of life. This generation will laugh at the myth of George Washington and the cherry tree episode: “I chopped it down. I cannot tell a lie.” Or that Abe Lincoln borrowed a book and put it in the…
It is impossible to conceive of a gift more precious and valuable that a human being can possess than to be freed from the disintegration of our essential being and to share in that portion of divinity that is possible for created beings. Of course it is out of the question to have a share in whatever the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are in their…
What does it mean, thinks no evil? {KJV} Another translation has it as resentful. A person filled with agape love holds no evil thoughts about other people, and he or she is not resentful about anything they do or say. But the Greek logisesthai suggests somebody who keeps score on all persons with whom he has dealings. You know the type, and Lord…