SACRAMENTAL LIVING

Had a wonderful time serving as the retreat speaker at Holy Taxiarhai and Saint Haralambos yesterday. What a wonderful community. It was a real blessing. Thank you to Father Dean, Father George, Presbytera Diana and everyone else who made me feel so welcome.

“Our quest for communion with the everlasting God reorients our vision, directing it toward the eternal destiny of all mankind. We understand history and each person’s life from the perspective of our ultimate goal of union with Him.” (Dynamis 4/11/2014) “Our surrender to the Lord must include our whole heart, soul, and mind (Mt 22:37), if we are to unite our spirits to Christ our God. When we are truly joined to Him, He gives us the grace to obey Him. We are to strive to be

“God’s ways always exceed our comprehension and our capacity to predict…God’s ways ultimately defy our human reasoning and calculations… God can overcome impossible conditions…God overcomes what we cannot defeat, attains what we cannot achieve, and provides what we lack.” (Dynamis 3/29/2018) “God’s ways are not our ways. God has a way of turning things upside down. He has a way of bringing us to Himself even when things don’t turn out the way we expect.” (Father John Zeyack)

“When we read Scripture as a whole, we discover that God is engaged in a building process: he first reveals, then allows time to elapse, then reveals more details before ultimately fulfilling his revelation…God reveals Himself to us a little at a time, as we are able to bear it.” (Dynamis 3/20/2018, 3/28/2018) “In prayer, we speak to God. In the Scriptures, God speaks to us. Yes, there are many ways to hear God’s voice, but the best way is through reading the Scriptures. One

“Only an obedient heart can truly pray, for the end of prayer is not speaking to God, but hearing and heeding what He is saying back to us…It is in obedience that we find the means of destroying the ego, which separates us from Christ...obedience is our way of surrendering to the will of Christ…Following Christ means total submission to Him…” (Archimandrite Vassilios Papavassiliou, Abbot Tryphon, Life Application Bible, Luke 14:27) “God responds to His obedient children…When

""Independent thinking is an important goal of our education system. We want our children to grow up thinking for themselves so that they can make rational judgements and not be led by the impulses of emotion. We want them to question the information placed before them and weigh up evidence in order to reach conclusions. This applies to the Christian faith as much as to anything else. We do not want what is sometimes called “blind faith” from our congregations, where anything

“…an open-ended obedience to God’s call constitutes the nature of true faith. First, we obey. Only afterward do we grasp what God intended all along. Faith is stepping forth into the unknown so that we may learn to experience directly the mind of God. Genuine faith…consists in trusting God over the course of many years of seeming contradictions. True faith waits on God for the outcomes that He promises… To have faith means acting obediently, with open-ended trust in God, neve

As part of the Greek Orthodox Church of St. George (Bethesda, MD) lecture series, Michael delivered two lectures on Wednesday March 14: 1) Fasting is About Hunger Not Eating; and 2) Falling into the Hands of Mercy.

"…the Name Jesus as His proper Name is ontologically connected with Him. For us it is the bridge between ourselves and Him [cf. Jn. 20:29]. It is the channel through which divine strength comes to us. Proceeding from the All-Holy, it [His Name] is holy and we are sanctified by invoking it. With this Name and through this Name our prayer acquires a certain objective form or significance: It unites us with God." (Elder Sophrony Sakharov) “Praying Jesus’ name is not meant to inv

“Christ said it in a timely fashion: that in this life we must be warriors, even within our own family; our own people will behave as enemies, because we follow the Christian life. Real peace is to be found only in the meeting of man with God. By having this divine peace, we have everything and become fearless before every aggression and every enemy. By having the peace of God, we can then have peace with our fellow human beings.” (Blessed Moses the Athonite) “The true Christ