SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“Fasting needn’t be limited to abstinence from food alone, because true fasting is departure from evil deeds. Forgive your neighbor any insult, abstain from causing your neighbor offence, abstain from irritation, from senseless sorrows, from fear, wrath, and so on. ‘True fasting is alienation from evil, temperance of the tongue, setting aside of wrath, casting out of lust, idle talk, lies, and oath-breaking’…This is a true and pleasing fast for the Lord. Departing from these

“Sonic seeds of teeming individualism…now chokes new growth on both side of Christian divide…The path of “each man for himself” or “by myself” is the road to destruction. It is much easier the roaring lion, who walks about seeking whom he may devour, to destroy us one by one than to confront a united flock. Only by bearing one another’s burdens can we become like Christ, who bore the burdens of the whole world—and thereby enter into that joy which God has prepared for those w

“Understood accurately, asceticism is about Beauty; it’s about attempting to be the sort of artists who won’t betray what they have seen of the beautiful. For example, we don’t fast in order to be good, but rather so that our devotion, our eros for Christ’s Beauty, will be absolute. Moral effort only matters when it expands that ascetic effort into the arena of Goodness. Moral struggle has to be an amplification of asceticism, never a substitute. It has to be the working out

“In a culture where materialism is not seen as unusual, it’s fascinating how immaterial the spiritual life is for many…When one’s material needs consume all one’s attention, nothing more will be sought after; the demands of physical life can totally colonize the mind.” (Father Stephen Freeman, Matthew the Poor) “This is important to bear in mind as we go through a world that boasts of its objectivity and commitment to what’s “really there.” To the average modern person, objec

“So there is always the law of God or the law of destruction in our human mind and heart. That would be a teaching of St. Paul in the letter to the Romans, very clearly, the seventh and eighth chapters. There’s always another law working in a human being. We’re never simply autonomous. So when people ask, “Was it me or was it the devil in me?” or “Was it me or was it the Holy Spirit in me, or Christ in me?” Sometimes people ask that. St. Paul says, “When I do good, I can do a

“An evil person is not someone who is nothing but evil, someone with no redeeming features or virtues whatsoever. An evil person is not a...

“God is He of Whom no questions would arise within us if we weren’t sinful, if we hadn’t fallen from Paradise, as chicks fall from their...

“To be made in the image of God is a sign of highest dignity; so high, in fact, that outside of Christ no human being can even be said to...

“Human life consists of two components: one is internal, invisible, and the other external, visible. The first is all the spiritual...

“We relish this concept of unfettered freedom. But, of course, it is absurd, even for a secularist. For whether we choose to admit it or...