SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“God’s goodness is greater than our goodness. His wisdom is wiser than our wisdom. His knowledge of what we need for sustaining our body and healing our soul is more discerning than ours. Therefore, in the spirit of the petition of the Lord’s prayer, “Thy will be done,” we leave the concerns and desires of our prayers to the mercy of God. Our Heavenly Father knows what we need before we ask (Matthew 6:8). Accordingly, it is a great comfort to cast our burdens on the Lord and

“Self-importance, according to St. Basil, is a spiritual disease that “matures,” that gets stronger over time. It is a disease that becomes “rooted by habit in the mind” for those who suffer from it. It begins, in my experience, after life thrusts us into a position of authority or importance. At first, we are timid and uncertain, we know our weaknesses, we know we can only try to do our best. However, almost right away, others begin treating us differently. Others seek our a

“The…Divine Liturgy…includes the following phrase which is a stumbling block for common sense: “remembering then this saving commandment, the Cross, the tomb, the Resurrection on the third day, the Ascension into heaven, the sitting at the right hand and the second and glorious coming again, offering to Thee Thine own of Thine own, we hymn Thee,” etc. To remember past events (the Cross, the Resurrection etc.) is “natural.” But to “remember” something that has not yet happened

“Christ does not simply die on our behalf, or instead of us, He becomes sin in order to destroy sin (2 Cor. 5:22). Christ is without sin, and yet He becomes sin. There is nothing “noble” in such an action; nobility would be a deeply unjust accusation. It is self-emptying love…This act of self-emptying is known as kenosis. It is the ultimate act of love, the ultimate act of self-giving, self-forgetting…We are Baptized into the self-emptying love of Christ, for this is the only

“In the Feast of the Holy Cross, the hymnography…makes the statement, “The Tree heals the Tree.” It is one of the marvelous commentaries on the life of grace and its relationship to the human predicament. It refers to the relationship between the Cross of Christ and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The latter was the source of the fruit that Adam and Eve consumed that was the source of their fall from grace. The “Tree that heals” is none other than the Cross of Chr

“In our culture, love has often been reduced – even abused in its over-definition. Almost totally lacking, however, is a practice of honor. I recall a retired colonel (WWII) in my first Anglican parish. He had a deep sense of honor and held matters of the Church in a regard that seemed rare. I enjoyed being with him. I trusted him. On reflection, I can see that he learned honor in the same manner as the Centurion whose servant Jesus healed. The military of his day carried a d

“Acknowledging our emptiness and brokenness, our failures and weakness, is an exercise in confronting shame. It can be quite painful – something we either avoid or cover over with self-loathing. Shame is not self-loathing. Indeed, the energy behind our self-loathing is simply pride (ϕιλαυτία). Self-loathing is consumed with the self and driven by its unwillingness to be that person. Bearing our shame is the willingness to acknowledge the truth of ourselves and our lives as a

“To be meek means to be gentle and kind, to be empty of all selfishness and earthly ambition. It means, in a word, never to return evil for evil, but always in everything to overcome evil by good (cf. Rom 12.14–21). Meekness means to distrust and reject every thought and action of external coercion and violence, which in any case can never produce fruitful, genuine and lasting results. Meekness is to have the firm and calm conviction that the good is more powerful than evil,

“One of the amazing things about our God is God’s willingness to empty Himself in love for us and for our salvation…Though He is the King of Heaven, Christ comes to earth as a servant of humanity….not only does God suffer pain for us through being flogged and then nailed to the cross, those wounds and scars have become a permanent part of His body, even His resurrected body. In fact, Christ cherishes that He was able to suffer for us in order to save us.  His wounds which hea

“The difference between obligation and obedience is more than mere semantics. An obligation is imposed on us, but obedience, as the Church uses and understands that term, is self-chosen…The Greek word for “obedience” is hypakoe. It comes from the root word akouo (“to hear”). The relationship between hearing and obedience is clear in the Scriptures: one obeys when one hears the word of God and does it.” (Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou) “While knowing that the people you ar