SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“The love of beauty and our desire for it are the most fundamental parts of our being. This is particularly true if we use the word “beauty” in the fullest sense of its meaning. Beauty encompasses being and truth as well. It is God’s word for His creation (usually translated as “good,” the word in Scriptures also means “beautiful”). That which is beautiful and good is reflective (iconic) of the God who created it. All of creation longs for union with this Beauty and groans fo

“Another reason for the dullness of mind is the over-familiarity that breeds complacency. It is possible to go from one Christmas to the next without growing in our understanding of the incarnation of the Son of God. In that case, our mind is like a knife that keeps cutting the same thing until it loses its edge. The remedy for this loss of sharpness is not a novelty. Rather, we should pay more attention to what is sung, prayed, and proclaimed and probe more deeply into its m

“None of us can entirely separate ourselves from who we are. Our culture, education, family, nation, and religious background affect the way we view the world. We all accept as true many common presumptions of our era and culture. They are so deeply ingrained that we do not recognize them as cultural presumptions that may in fact not be true.” (Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou) “There is a model of what it means to be human that is simply wrong, regardless of its elements o

“…secularity is the negation, the evacuation from life, of the experience of the world as sacred reality, as “participant” in divine reality and “participated in” by the divine.” (Vigen Guroian) “Though the secular world denies all invisible spiritual forces, the Scriptures testify to their existence, pervasiveness, and impact on the world.” (Fr. Basil) “It is very simplistic to say that emergencies make people pay more attention to God and reawaken religious feelings. We mig

“We go to church… in order to have our eyes opened to see the goodness which God bestowed upon creation… We begin to see God revealed in and through God’s own creation… It is this vision which we lost through sin – it is not the case that the world is totally depraved because of sin but rather that we have lost the ability to see and to have our proper place in creation.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh) “We see the world of God’s creation spread before us, its splendor awakening us to offer

“Each of us is born into this world with an instinctive desire to find meaning and purpose in our lives…I say, as do all Christian men, that it is a divine purpose that rules, and not fate…Many people have accepted that life must be meaningless on the basis of the secular worldview, but hardly any of them live consistently with that belief. People who believe life has no meaning or purpose and that objective truth is a delusion will actually take on convincing you that it is

“Seth was begotten from Adam and Eve. This threefold relationship illustrates, to a certain extent, the Holy Trinity. Adam had no human father. He was begotten by no one. Thus, he was unbegotten. Seth was begotten from Adam. Eve was neither unbegotten nor begotten. Instead she proceeded from Adam (Genesis 2:21). Therefore, Eve and Seth were related to the unbegotten Adam, but each in a unique manner—Eve proceeded from Adam, but Seth was begotten from him. Each person had his

“If you would enter into the mystery, then, like Christ Himself, you must become small, weak, poor, misunderstood, and willing to be broken. You cannot know Him if you refuse to be like Him. This is the only path that is truly Christian. Outside the mystery, there is nothing to be known, nothing that will save.” (Father Stephen Freeman) “And what do we make of the changing of the water into wine? Our limited ability as human beings is contravened by the grace and love of Chr

“In all its most ancient traditions Christianity is a sacramental religion. Sacraments form the very life of the Church through which the Spirit of God flows into the world...[a] sacramental view of the world is a world suffused with the grace and love of God. It is a world view as warm as the rationalist view is cold, as profound as the rationalist view is superficial, and as full of meaning and hope as the rationalist view is pointless and despairing.” (Archpriest Lawrence

““Sin works in the soul and heart, but most terribly in the mind (Romans 1:28) or nous, which is the center or eye of the heart according to the Church Fathers. Sin corrupts and distorts the governing of our being at the very core so that our inward faculties become deranged. If we allow sin to rage freely, we risk become fully debased. As this inward struggle unfolds, it leads us to physical acts of the flesh. Sin always begins inside us, within our interior life; only secon