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

“…the goal of the Christian life is the acquisition of love for God and others. The Lord Himself speaks of only two commandments, upon which hang all the Law and the Prophets. These are: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind and Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself (Matt. 22:37, 39). Christ didn’t say these are just two of ten or twenty other commandments, but rather: On these two commandments hang all the Law and

“When it comes down to it, this non-iconographic way of seeing the world is by nature unfaithfulness. When I look at creation and I don’t see God, it is like looking at the physical body of a woman in loveless lust and not seeing the fullness.” (Andrew Williams) “The Enlightenment comes directly out of Scholastic theology and the medieval notion that there is a nature that is all right on its own, to which grace is then added. That is totally heretical, just nuts….no existing

“How do we experience God? Do we hear voices? Do we sense a presence? Are there physical sensations involved? Should we see light or feel warmed? Some may be surprised to hear that our belief in God is not based in an interior human experience. Such things stretch across an incredible variety (such is the nature of human experience). However, none of these are definitive, none of them meet the standard of canonical authority, and none of them make the stuff of persuasive reli

“Someone begins to lose faith when his mind lacks the knowledge of God. A very common excuse, “How can I believe in God if there is so much evil in the world?” shows that the person in question knows very little or even practically nothing about the true faith. Evil appeared in people’s lives with sin, and the cause of injustice, betrayal, murder and other horrors is precisely sin. Let’s recall the First Epistle of the Apostle John the Evangelist: We know that we are of God,

“Everyone is familiar with that “voice in the head.” By this, I mean the negative voice. It is mean, judgmental, angry, jealous, envious, salacious, just bad. Sometimes it goes quiet. Sometimes it is so overwhelming that it drowns everything else out. One simple question we can ask: “Who’s doing the talking?”… The voice in our head, the self-talk, is not the voice of a demon. However, it has a very dark origin and is utterly contrary to our well-being. It is the voice of the

“Do we refuse to forgive? God, too, will refuse to forgive us. As we treat our neighbors, so also does God treat us. The forgiveness or unforgiveness of your sins, then, and hence also your salvation or destruction, depend on you yourself. For without forgiveness of sins there is no salvation. You can see for yourself how serious it is…Our Lord Jesus gives us the teaching regarding forgiveness. He tells us that forgiveness is an integral part of the kingdom of heaven, and the

“Two fundamental truths were incarnate in the Person of Christ: the truth of God and the truth of man. Without Christ, the truth of God would remain foreign to man’s mind and distant from his emotions. God would be an entity utterly removed from man’s experience; the only grounds for extolling Him would be His stark otherness, His sheer separation from our meager, sinful state Without Christ, the truth of man would likewise be obscured. For man would see himself only as a cre

“A conference participant once asked the speaker, "What is the best way for a father to love his children?" The speaker replied, "The best way for a father to love his children is to love their mother." I reflect often upon that superbly accurate statement. And I think the reverse is equally true: the best way a mother can love her children is to love their father. More than anything else in the world, children need a loving family and parents who support each other, even if

“In the Christian context, we do not mean by a "mystery" merely that which is baffling and mysterious, an enigma or insoluble problem. On the contrary, a mystery is revealed for our understanding but we never understand it exhaustively because it leads into God's depth or darkness. The eyes are closed—but they are also opened.” (Metropolitan Kallistos Ware) “The Greek word, mystery, originally meant "initiation," "secret," or "revelation of a secret." Christianity inherited t