SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“To continue growing requires watchfulness, or inner attentiveness (nepsis), which is necessary for replacing the vices with virtues. We must know what is happening inside ourselves. Most of us are in a state of inner sleep (hypnos). We think of ourselves as conscious, but the Fathers call it sleep—an unawareness characterized by self-centeredness. What we need is a detached awareness of what’s happening inside in order to be more aware of the promptings of the conscience.” (

“…humans weren’t created as perfect beings but rather had the potential to choose perfection or move away from it. So too Paradise was not a perfect world but had the potential to become that if the humans made appropriate choices and decisions. The world from the beginning had great potential as did the first humans. Perfection was something that was to be realized by the humans who were capable of choosing the good and moving towards perfection or choosing the evil and movi

“Before speaking of the sinfulness of consumerism, it is important to understand: consumption in itself is not evil. Consumption is a natural element of our human life. Man is a dependent and needy being; therefore it is natural for him to take and consume, especially in childhood. But as he matures, man increasingly begins to give to others—to create, to help, to care. A mature person is a responsible, creative personality who loves God and his neighbor and is guided by the

“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

“I consider it both a strange mystery and a settled matter of the faith that God prefers not to do things alone…He acts in a manner that...

“…it does not help that our image and sound rich society creates a living space that is extremely noisy. All around us there are...

“From a world held hostage by the idea that the quantifiably big, the numerically great, and the visibly expansive accurately describe...

“On some level we feel that we can’t trust others, that we can’t trust God to do what is right, and that we have to be in control by...

“My experience within social media is that any observed problem within our culture that is presented will attract an immediate flood of...

“We humans have a very limited perspective on life, the cosmos and the divine. Our perspectives are limited by our own personal...