“Thoughts in Christ”

In the churches of the renowned monasteries of Mt. Athos, ostrich eggs are hung from ribbons. Some would think that they represent Paschal eggs at their largest size. Not at all. They dangle before the eyes of the monks as a reminder that the female ostrich guards her egg intensely, permitting nobody to come near and snatch it away. What the egg is…

Are Christ’s friends our friends? Not necessarily, and not always. We gather each Sunday at the Divine Liturgy and share the sacred meal offered to us by Him. And we come not as strangers, not even as guests, but as family. It’s why we are commanded to love one another; otherwise it becomes more of a secular gathering than the anticipation of what…

Most of us can identify with Martha. We are worried and troubled about so many things not only every day, but also all the daylong. If we are employed, we worry about job security and all the tasks that are assigned to us during our working hours. If we are at home, there’s never an end to what needs doing. If we are school children, we can always…

We know the outcome. The daughter of Herodias would perform a sensual dance that ended in the decapitation of St. John the Baptist. Why did he stick his neck out? What prompted him to shout to heaven and the people that their king was an adulterer and perhaps even a pedophile? Noblesse oblige. Royalty has its obligations. The Windsor’s of England…

Our Lord’s words are clear: “Let your light so shine before others, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). The great saint Symeon the New Theologian added a vivid image that takes this idea even further on the way to spiritual understanding. He calls on us to imagine a lamp filled with oil, and in it a…

A sublime moment in the vision given to the apostle John that Sunday morning on Patmos Island—the appearance of a wounded Lamb in the middle of the throne area. He’s at the very center of the whole scene of the throne surrounded by four living creatures and an outer ring of twenty-four elders.

We know that Lamb. He is the One that St. John the…

Of course I don’t know how to pray on my own without the Holy Spirit’s help. I never will know how, and the only wise statement I can make about it is that I realize my spiritual limits. I’ve been praying, or listening to my mother pray before I could hardly talk, and though I’ve been doing it all of my life, nevertheless I cannot pray without help.…

I’m told that as a person ages, he requires less sleep. I’m there now, but I never was a sound sleeper. And of course, it’s worse when one is not in his familiar bed. Western Europe is a good place for insomniacs like me. Europeans think about those still awake, and they feel sorry for us. They have several ways to try and get us to shut our eyes.…

The iconographer created a grouping of the twelve men presently canonized as the saints of North America. They occupy the rear wall of our nave. How different this icon is from all the other icons throughout our temple. The most striking feature is that many are nearly our contemporaries. St. Nicolai of Zhitza, the Serbian saint who had ended his…

The Bible has produced three great religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity, with differing relationships to space. And the differences impact upon the United States. At enormous cost in money and effort including sacrifice of human life our nation has set Iraq free of an oppressive dictator, yet the very people who have been delivered from…

America is a puzzle even for us Americans. Imagine how we look to the world. We export the majority of what passes for a universal culture. Our motion pictures dominate the screens on six continents. Our television studios have invaded other countries with our TV shows, movies and sitcoms. Indeed, our version of perversion is one of our major…

In the early days of the immigration of Slavs and other Orthodox Christians to America, many of them succumbed to the lure of the Episcopal Church. They felt it to be non-papal and yet having an external form of devotion much like they remembered in the Old World—structure, liturgical ceremony with choirs, incense, vestments and the other external…

We can only imagine what was going through the mind of our Lord, Jesus Christ at the time. He was leading His disciples to Jerusalem. He had been preparing them for the ordeal that He would endure there at the hands of their own people and the Romans. Then two of His inner circle approached to ask for a special favor—that they be given positions…

On my shelf are four thick volumes of prayers for special occasions. They are called “Books of Needs.” They include prayers for ewes and cows that cannot give birth, wells that run dry, blessings of fields and barns, but for our times and life styles, other such prayers that may no longer appear relevant. Clearly there may be little call for many of…

Today’s computers claim to offer instantaneous information on any topic imaginable. One need only to access a topic using the search engines, among the best being Google, the contemporary version of the old-fashioned encyclopedia. It’s actually a parody of the encyclopedia. Remember the old song: “Barney Google with the goo-goo-googley eyes?” Same…

To be a genuine Orthodox Christian is to share in the joy of fellowship gathered around the holy Mother of God, Mary the ever-virgin one. Yet in America a hesitancy arises even with the Church among the faithful. What is so normal and self-evident an attribute of the Church as family must be explained, even defended in our nation. The uncertainty…

O my poor, brave wonderful Serb brothers and sisters. In little more than a decade you have lost to Muslims and atheists so much of your precious territories in Bosnia and Kosovo. My own nation duped by the crafty and relentless led the plunder of those lands via NATO. I thought of the Serbs as I read one of their great poets who died in 1991, Vasko…

For three years a seminarian will be praying in the chapel of the institution dedicated to equipping him for the life of the holy priesthood. He will read those words above that are written on the scroll that Christ holds on His icon to the right of the Royal Doors of the holy altar. At least twice a day he will remind himself of the reason he is…

The prophet-priest Ezekiel is explaining the vision given to him by the river Chebar when he was in exile with his fellow Hebrews in Babylon. This gift was an encouragement to have faith in the Lord who would return them to their own land.

Angels are categorized in three sets of three types. The highest group is the Seraphim, the Cherubim and the…

It has always been true that the Christians were to pray for and to obey the civil authorities. That is both consistent through Church history and the official doctrine of the Church. It’s the official teaching, even when the ruler is a tyrant or a persecutor of Christians such as Diocletian and Nero. St. Paul insists on this rule for several…