“I want to press the point of the mistaken notion that outward things, material things, have an inferiority to inward ideas and attitudes. The judgments in Joel, Isaiah and Amos are not judgments on actions themselves, but on the disconnection between outward action and inner thought or intention. The commandment to us is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and all your strength.” Heart is an inward matter – strength is an outward matter. Soul is the union of the two.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“The fuller form of detachment is dissociation—in which I cut off my internal reality from my external reality. Dissociation is a psychological condition which usually arises as a result of overwhelming trauma or torture—when the only way to protect myself from what is happening to me (over which I have no control) is to subconsciously disconnect my internal life more or less completely from external reality. Dissociation, then, is disappearing completely behind my mask, from where I can make no real contact with others and where the world outside can no longer reach me. And as I have said, to stay behind my masks, cutting myself off from the world and the possibility of relationship in an unchanging individualism, is in the end death.” (Andrew Williams)
“Godly life is joyful. Secular life is sorrowful…Not surprisingly, the more secularized we have become, the more sorrowful we have become. Now here is an amazing disconnect. Why is it that America has never been so Christian and yet so joyless? A greater percentage of our population self-identifies as Christian than at any time in our nation’s history, yet we are by all observable phenomena radically depressed. How are we to explain such an anomaly?... While there are many contributing factors to this epidemic of joylessness, I would like to suggest the primary cause: isolation.” (V. Rev. Josiah Trenham, Ph.D.)
“Christ is not condemning the actions of the pharisee. The Lord is not telling us through this parable that the pharisee – or anyone else, and that includes us – is wasting both time and energy by going up to the temple to pray, by fasting and by tithing. These are not being condemned as empty practices, consigning all such practitioners to the barren realm of hypocrisy and religious formalism. We, as contemporary Christians, are encouraged to enter the church with regularity and offer our prayer to God, to practice the self-restraint and discipline of fasting, and to share our financial resources with the generosity implied by the biblical tithe… we would do well to imitate the outward actions of the pharisee in practicing our Faith! Yet, on a deeper and far more significant level, the pharisee got it all wrong…The pharisee was self-centered, but not God-centered. Something went wrong, and the self replaced God as the center of his energy and passion. The exterior forms of piety that he practiced were disconnected from the interior realm of the heart, where God is meant to dwell and, again, transform the human person from within, so that each person becomes less self-centered and more God-centered with time and patience.” (Fr. Stephen Kostoff)
“And this is an experience that we ourselves often have. We can be in the presence of Jesus, perhaps here in Church or somewhere else, and yet remain disconnected. It could be because God has decided to withdraw our sense of His presence so that we might reach more earnestly toward Him. Or it could be that we are so self-focused that we do not see Who is in front of us.” (Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick)
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