Reflections in Christ

Father Alexander Schmemann famously said that Christianity is “the end of religion.”  But if Christianity is not a religion, what is it?  In a word, it is the source of a new birth, a new nature, a new kind of human being.  Apart from Christ, all people share a human nature that is weak, fallen, darkened, vulnerable to evil spirits.  As Saint…

When infants are brought to the baptismal font, they not only come with parents and friends, but also their sponsors—traditionally in churches of the Russian tradition, a man and a woman.  These sponsors have liturgical duties to perform during the service, such as holding the child, and making the responses when the priest requires that the child…

One of the benefits of reading history is that it enables one to compare one’s own era with other eras, and so identify the blind spots of former times and as well as the blind spots of one’s own time.  As C.S. Lewis once pointed out (in his essay On the Reading of Old Books), “Not that there is any magic about the past. People were no…

On the eve of the commemoration of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea on Sunday, June 1, 2014, there are three Old Testament lessons read at Great Vespers.  Two of them are not unexpected.  From the Book of Deuteronomy, we have one lesson about Moses’ call to appoint elders to govern the vast numbers of Israel, and another lesson…

You have probably noticed that we are no longer in the fourth century.  In that century, the great rival of Christianity was paganism—the worship of the old gods, still worshipped by much of the population, a few of whom were powerful and well-heeled.  Some scholars estimate that when Constantine declared himself on the side of the Christians…

One wonders sometimes about why the Gospel story of the healing of the paralytic was chosen for the Paschal season.  One understands why the stories of Thomas and the Myrrh-bearers were chosen, but the paralytic?  Perhaps our incomprehension is rooted in our modern separation of Pascha from baptism.  In the early Church from at least the time of…

Saint Thomas, it seems, can never catch a break, at least in popular culture.  Our culture knows him as “doubting Thomas,” and one single and uncharacteristic lapse has forever labelled him as a doubter and made him the patron saint of sceptics.  He is regarded as suffering from an innate tendency to doubt and to faithlessness, as if he somehow…

In recent months I have come to the conclusion that the best place to appreciate the significance of Pascha is in a cancer ward, or a hospice for the dying, or by a deathbed.  When one stands in any of these terrible places, one enjoys an immunity from the lies of the world, for the world tells each one of us that we are a race of immortals,…

Every year during Lent, we invite into our churches a great pastor, Saint Andrew of Crete, and listen while he leads us in a meditation on sin and repentance.  That is, we listen while his Great Canon is chanted, and in response we reply over and over again, “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me!”  Some things in this long poetic work might…

During the mid-point of Great Lent, on the Sunday of the Veneration of the Cross, the following verses are sung at the Alleluia just before the reading of the Gospel:  “Remember Thy congregation which Thou hast gotten of old.  God is our King before the ages; He hath worked salvation in the midst of the earth!”  The verses are from Psalm 74,…

What do you expect will happen at Liturgy on a Sunday morning?  Why do you rouse yourself from your comfy bed, pile into the car (possibly with sleepy and unruly kids), drive to church, and stand there for an hour or so?  What do you hope to experience?

For some, the gain comes in terms of ethnic identity and a sense of belonging to one’s…

Everyone you meet and have ever met wears a mask.  You do too.  From the time we were children, we have been taught that certain things were acceptable and certain other things were definitely unacceptable.  For example, when confronted with infuriating people or situations in which our will was thwarted, sarcasm was acceptable.  Falling to the…

We’ve all had moments like that—the moment when you wake up and realize you’ve been a complete moron.  The Prodigal Son had one such moment when he realized he was being idiotic and stupid, (or in the more elegant language of the parable, “ when he came to himself”).  He had left home for a far country in a fever of determination to break…

I would like to share with you an easy technique for avoiding moral accountability.  Whenever you are caught and called to account for doing something wrong (that is, when you are “busted”), you simply invoke the figure of the pharisee.  Tell your accuser that he is being judgmental and pharisaical, and that he has no right to judge you.  After…

With the possible literary exception of Tarzan, real men do not climb trees.  At least they didn’t in the Middle East in the time of Jesus.  Neither did they run.  Running was for children, professional messengers, and soldiers.  Adults who were neither professional runners nor soldiers did not run.  They strolled at a leisurely pace, as befit men…

A Protestant friend of mine who is sympathetic to Orthodoxy and likes icons recently felt he had to draw the line.  On a weekday service in church he saw an Orthodox friend bowing down in prostration before an icon of a saint, and he thought this was a bit over the top.  Kissing icons of Christ, sure; and of His saints—um, okay.  And prostrating…

Since St. John the Forerunner and Baptist adorns every icon-screen in the Orthodox world it is hard to imagine that he was ever scandalously controversial.  But he was.  And what was it that made the child of desert so controversial?  What did John the Baptist do that was considered so scandalous?  Odd to say, it was his baptizing.  Specifically,…

If you are at all like me, it is not Christmas until you have seen the holiday special A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has been shown seasonally every year since it first appeared in 1965.  I have watched it faithfully every year since I can remember, and have the whole wonderful thing more or less memorized by heart.  Who can forget Charlie Brown…

If the Christmas story has a villain, it would be King Herod.  In the passion story, the main villain would be Judas Iscariot, with possibly the High Priest Caiaphas and his Sanhedrin running a close second.  But there is no close second in the Christmas story when it comes to villains.  Herod has the field all to himself.

Even children seem to…

In a piece published in the Telegraph at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10458380/Christianity-at-risk-of-dying-out-in-a-generation-warns-Lord-Carey.html, we learn that a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, warned a Christian conference in Shrewsbury that the Church of England was “one generation away from extinction” and that all of…