SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“Ancient people (and most non-Western societies today) did not think in this way. They acknowledged that there were both physical and spiritual elements to the world, but far from seeing them as separate domains, they viewed them as fundamentally interrelated. The idea is that there is a physical component to all spirituality and a spiritual meaning in all physical things.” (Dr. Zachary Porcu) “Ancient people did not believe that the lights in the sky were angels, whereas now

“The whole of the Law and the Prophets can be summarized in the commandment to love God and neighbor (Mt. 22:40). God descends from Heaven and identifies Himself with our neighbor. He calls Himself “prisoner,” “sick,” “stranger,” “hungry,” and “naked,” and says that whenever we visit a prisoner, a sick person, a beggar, we visit Him (Mt. 25:35–40). In our neighbor, we find either salvation or perdition. That’s why encountering our neighbor—that is, the challenges that come fr

“He [man] is the only being that is distinguished from all else in creation, because he is the only one which can become a god. The phrase “in His image” describes the gifts which God gave only to man in order to complete him as an icon of God, and not to any of His other creatures. These gifts are: a logos related nous, conscience, and individual sovereignty, i.e. freedom, creativity, eros, and the yearning for the absolute and for God, personal self-awareness, and anything

“Our yearning for renewal knows no limits. Even the seemingly mundane things can reflect, like in a drop of water, something truly great… An encounter with God always results in renewal. It has been this way for centuries, throughout the history of Christianity… What is spiritual renewal? It is when you are no longer weighed down by the burden of past traumas and mistakes, your present is filled with joy, and you anticipate the future without fear. We are happy people, becaus

“…true beauty, true spiritual beauty, can never be made artificially. There isn’t enough gold in the world to buy the cleansing, transformation, and remaking of our spirit. The price for that was already paid by the One sent to save our souls and cleanse us from our sins…Perhaps there is nothing so powerful as a testimony of a life transformed. I don’t believe it’s necessary to suffer so deeply that one’s life is crushed seemingly beyond repair, broken into a hundred pieces,

“In today’s reading we see that Our Lord Jesus Christ has completed His long day of teaching, healing and feeding the multitudes. He dismisses the crowds and then He does something that we would not expect in our human logic. After a long and exhausting day outside, in the elements and with the many people and their many pains and struggles, we would very likely be drained. We would probably want to sit down and rest. We would want to eat and possibly go straight to bed. That

“Christ himself did not preach “faith alone,” but a rather more complex picture of salvation that also involved repentance and self-denial…The foremost question we must resolve is one of desire (Mark 8:34-35)…we declare that our foremost desire is to follow Him [Christ]. But let us ask ourselves if this truly our heart’s desire. Our criteria for determining whether or not this is so can be found in the three conditions that the Lord stipulates in these verses: self-denial, ta

“Christianity is not a religion. It is a spiritual path towards union with God. Jesus did not come to usher in a new system of how to get what we want. He “emptied Himself,” and repeatedly invited us to do the same. That emptying is the path of union, and the very definition of love. If unfulfilled desires can be of use to us, then this world becomes the perfect arena of our salvation…we can describe two essential actions within that life as it has been passed down to us by T

“The Tradition of the Eastern Church largely avoided the concept of the guilty man that came to dominate the Christian West. Instead, sin was largely understood in terms of disease, a force that comes from outside us and yet is within us, corrupting us like a cancer. Sin is a “disease,” and the ministry of the Church is the “science of spiritual medicine…the sacraments and life of the Church are more accurately understood in a medical model. What truly takes place within the

“In my view, the category of happiness is hardly ever discussed in the Church, and for me it is a puzzle. We have nine Beatitudes: blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are the peacemakers... If we translate the word “blessed”, it means “happy”. Happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, happy are the meek, happy are the merciful, and so forth. These are the commandments of happiness. But, unfortunately, in Orthodoxy happiness is not s