SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“Creation has a sacramental purpose: it reveals God….the…rejection of sacramentalism is the beginning of naturalism, or it at least opens the door to its possibility. It is also the beginning of a certain evacuation of the sacred as a presence in the world.” (Father Stephen Freeman, James K.A. Smith) “In the modern world, we have largely lost this sacramental way of looking at things. One of the reasons so many people become victims of disordered pleasures, such as drugs, imm

“When we desire to grow in the spiritual life, we might be tempted to disregard and even denigrate the body. We might treat it as the seat of the passions and the source of the corruption of our soul. However, Paul says that we should “glorify God in your body and your spirit” (OSB 1 Cor. 6:20). In itself, the body is neither moral nor immoral. But the body can be either sanctified (1 Thessalonians 5:23) or defiled (1 Cor. 3:17). The body is God’s creation meant to be the “te

“…every material reality has a spiritual aspect to it, that the seen and the unseen are deeply intertwined… If we had stood at Golgotha on the day of the Crucifixion, our material eyes would have seen Roman soldiers nailing Jesus to the Cross. But our eyes of faithfulness would have seen the young Warrior, ready to do battle, about to use this Weapon of Peace, the Trophy Invincible, as His means to enter into Hades, smash down its doors, and to defeat the devil and death. If

“Reading the Scriptures, studying the church fathers, attending worship, praying, and meditating are all good and godly things. But they are not ends in themselves. When we engage in these holy activities, our sincere and fervent goal should be to encounter the Lord Jesus Christ. We may be the most informed and even enthusiastic students of the Word. We may be devoted to the teachings of the church. We may excel in Christianity as Paul excelled in Judaism. But all that we thi

“God is a God of order, That is what He is doing when He creates the world as we read in Genesis. He is ordering it, moving things from disorder to order. Moving from evening to morning, night to day, darkness to light, is a movement from disorder to order. In the Hebrew Old Testament the word for evening is erev (air-rev). The root of this word is disorder or chaos. The word used for morning is boker (bo-kare) and it comes from the root or words that means “being orderly” an

“As we tend to center our world (and ourselves) in the question of our choices, we are constantly tempted to justify those we feel were wrong. By the same token, we bring an anxiety about the choices that are yet to come. The power of goodness is not within our choice. We do not create the good – it is given to us. The impossible reality that surrounds our choices is seen when we examine the limits of our existence. We cannot see the consequences of our actions (beyond the mo

“Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights He was hungry. The tempter came to Him…” (Matthew 4:1). The same Spirit will lead you into a desert that you must fashion by separating yourself from whatever prevents you from self-discovery. You need not go anywhere, but you have to put a distance from your routine way of life.” (Fr. Vladimir Berzonsky) “The Russian word, “Poustinia”, means “desert”, and t

“…even good deeds, if they are done apart from Christ, are futile. “God’s all-saving will, consists in doing good solely to acquire the Holy Spirit, an eternal, inexhaustible treasure which cannot be rightly valued . . . Every soul is quickened by the Holy Spirit . . . and mystically illumined by the Triune Unity.” (St. Seraphim of Sarov) “The Kingdoms of this world” [Matthew 4:8] is not a temptation to fantastic wealth...I believe it is similar to the idylls we whisper to ou

“God has created us for Himself and our hearts are designed to find their end in him, yet many spend their days restlessly craving rival gods, frenetically pursuing rival kingdoms.” (James Smith) “Our interior life can be extremely noisy (for some of us, it is an unavoidable artifact of the brain). Finding the heart is thus far more complex than merely looking for a “quiet place.” It is the place of the true self, which is far more than the absence of noise. The stillness of

“The indwelling of the Holy Spirit…is God’s ultimate gift to every true Christian. The Holy Spirit is an inestimable divine endowment which we must strive to retain, submitting all that we are and all that we have to Christ as King and God…However, such an unqualified surrender runs against the grain of American values, which emphasize personal independence and “doing one’s own thing.” It runs contrary to our ego’s deep desire for self-actualization and self-expression…We oft