SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“…when you have fear and uncertainty and you want to calculate, define, and control everything, then you’re not living in reality. You become a neurotic and cowardly person. Remember the Parable of the Talents. The man who hid his talent, who hid his charisma, hid from life—he was afraid to live. What do we do? We fear living. We’re afraid to be. We’re afraid of everything. And so, we don’t live, we don’t exist. This fear of not losing anything will not give you a peaceful li

“If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple (Lk 14.26). This is the extreme and terrifying warning against all passionate attachments stronger and more powerful than one’s passionate attachment to Christ alone. And the greatest passion of all which keeps one from the love of God and the love of one’s neighbor is the sinful passion for oneself. Sinful sel

“Struggle is inescapable, for if we are not struggling in the service of Jesus, we will be struggling in the service of sin…In Christ, by contrast, we have a relationship with the living God. He loves us, illumines us, stands with us, and forgives us as we struggle to have Him and His being formed within our hearts and souls.” (Robin Phillips, Dynamis 9/7/2018) “There is an ascetic imperative, an utter necessity to enter into the struggle that is Christ’s own struggle. We fas

Quotes of the Day for November 14, 2025 – Thoughts on unity and division “Without unity, there can be no diversity (for on what common basis could we then establish difference itself?) while without diversity, there can be no unity (for what would then be left to be unified?)…Unity is good because the Church is One (as is affirmed in the Creed). But it is not good because it is “useful.” Indeed, I suspect that God has allowed our disunity for His own purposes – including savi

“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

“It is not incorrect to describe our relationship with the passions as an addiction. The fathers described the passion-driven life as a constant swing between pain and pleasure. We experience boredom as a pain and seek to replace it with pleasure, which will only yield more pain later on. This movement, as it dominates our experience, draws us away from the opportunity to grow in noetic experience. As such, it tears us away from God other than as an entertaining idea or a con

“…God Himself takes on human form to reveal man’s vocation and meaning as divine. From this moment onward man is free. Nothing stands over him, for the very world is his as a gift from God to fulfill his divine destiny….Tragically, too many people do not hear this voice of Jesus as the voice of Love Incarnate calling us to repent, to sacrifice, to have sacrificial love in order to have the greatest joy, to have our deepest desires fulfilled, to find our true selves, to fulfil

“But Holy Scripture speaks sufficiently simply—it speaks about how man accepted evil…, accepted evil according to his freedom, which God had given to him. God did not limit man’s freedom, but where there is choice there is always freedom, and if there is no choice, there is no freedom. Man according to his own personal freedom, as we see, in violation of the family hierarchy, transgresses God’s commandment, goes outside of God’s commandments…The limits of freedom really were

“There’s a lot of fear circulating these days. Fear in the secular realm, and fear, I think, in the Christian too. We are cowed by the violence and brutality of a fallen world. We’re drawing in, we’re identifying what we’re against. That’s natural. We were made for safety and joy, and the wild danger and grief of the world is not natural. And in a way it is necessary: I am not saying that evil must not be countered or truth spoken. But I think we are in danger of slipping int

“Why was the entire dispensation of history and work of Christ necessary? Could not God simply have saved humankind by fiat?...The solution God has provided is to heal our nature from the inside out. By joining His divine, eternal life to human flesh, Jesus Christ has overcome the power of death; hence mortality will be abandoned in the grave when the universal resurrection dawns. If this explanation is not sufficient for the inquirer, ‘Say something like this to reasonable p