Asceticism
“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
Freedom
“But we hear the word limit in much the same way we hear the word quiet: as a form of subtraction, a curtailment of what could or ought to be ours. We despise it as old-fashioned, a diminishment of personal freedom,…But what is freedom to begin with? Something boundless we’re born with, innate to human existence? Are we truly free, mired as we are in nurture and inheritance, the strictures of our time, the limits of science? Or is freedom a gift, something we do not own and c
Thoughts (Battling Them)
“I once confessed to an experienced priest that sinful thoughts were torturing me, and this is what he advised me: “Think of the thoughts...
Invitation
“...God comes into our lives when we invite Him with all our being, opening the gates of our heart from the inside. He will not come...
Stories/Storytelling
“All truth is God’s truth, wherever it is found. This is explicated well by both St. Basil…and also by St. Justin Martyr in his doctrine...
Contagious Faith
“Sin remains an affront to the holy God. It alienates us from God again as if Christ had not reconciled us to our Creator. So it puts us...
Thoughts and Feelings
“The abstraction that we call “thinking,” etc., in the contemporary world is a diminishment of what it means to be human. We have learned...
Giving and Receiving
“ ‘So let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not grudgingly or of necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver. (2 Corinthians 9:7)....
Respond/Responding
“ ‘And we labor, working with our own hands. Being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we endure’ (1 Corinthians 4:12). The apostles...
Prune/Pruning
“Life in Christ is never a bed of roses. He promised pruning. But if we respond to the Gardener’s tending as fruitful branches, yielding...