Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Orthodox Christianity’ Category

Byzantine Chant is stark for a reason; it eliminates all the excess in the music and cuts to the core. Constantine Cavarnos has written of its “inner essence…its pureness…its mystical quality, its power of evoking contriction.” One may compare harmonizing chant to colorizing Ansel Adam’s photography. It may add visual richness, but there is a [...]

Read Full Post »

I’ve added a new link,  Heart Beat, to my blogroll. Yudhie, a young Indonesian Orthodox Christian, has been inspiring many of us lately with his honest relations of the events of his own life, a truly Christian life. I don’t wish to endanger his peace with undue praise, but thanks be to God, through this [...]

Read Full Post »

I finally finished The Monk of Mount Athos. It is not the sort of book that it’s wise to gobble up at a sitting, though I could have done so as it is rather short. It’s more like the Gospel, that you can slowly absorb a few paragraphs at a time.
Needless to say, and no [...]

Read Full Post »

Today I wonder:
Why is my scanner not working?
Will I ever finish the plays and stories I’ve started? Do I really have it in me to be a writer or am I just a dilettante?

What is the next step to getting the mold smell out of that one area of my carpet?
Should I give up writing [...]

Read Full Post »

The more that happens and becomes clear to me, the less there is to say. It would be easy to speak of the unease I feel at certain trends in the Church; far more difficult to speak of the immeasurable river of grace I find there. Easy to criticize individual or parish or even jurisdictional [...]

Read Full Post »

I’m always trying to think of ways to contact and minister to the inner city folk, without hosting Operation This-Time-We’re-Hip-Enough or whatever. What are we, after all, if we can’t help the worst off ones?
It struck me that we might hold events in which Priests bless inner-city children. We could let mothers know that they [...]

Read Full Post »

My dear readers,
Forgive the incoherence that follows; hopefully it explains itself.
We celebrated Epiphany a day early for various reasons. I botched the early part of the Liturgy; all the changeables threw me off and I grew more and more flustered and kicked a stack of offering plates accidentally and also knocked over a stool by [...]

Read Full Post »

Dear Readers,
The arrival of Eastern Christmas and its aftermath blew apart my plans for daily correspondance with you all. Apparently there is no such thing as a smoking break in the Church year; rest up yonder, the calendar seems to say, but seek no leisure here.
I have a few random thoughts to plaster on this [...]

Read Full Post »

One of our lovely Arab churches in this area, St. George’s by name, boasts a very learned presbyter, Fr. Joseph Antypas. Having attended there for a few months, we still get their newsletter, in which one of Fr. Joseph’s sermons is printed weekly.
Here’s an excerpt from this week.
It is the conviction of the Orthodox that Christ is the [...]

Read Full Post »

Good day, my fine friends. This morning finds me full of hope that you woke alert and pain free at a decent hour. I was in bed by eleven and since I forgot to buy wine the new year arrived in a very small, slumberish kind of way.
Yesterday, despite my good intentions, I never had enough free [...]

Read Full Post »

Well, it’s obvious that this blog in its present format has been more or less squeezed out of my life. I’ve become actually busy, something I thought would never happen to someone like me.
Normally what would happen at this point is that I’d shut the blog down and then months from now when I became [...]

Read Full Post »

All Christians are gullible – it has to be striven against. This is something that I observered long ago.
I wonder if Orthodox societies are particularly vulnerable to the lie of Communism/Socialism. Or is it, rather, Societies that try to blend Orthodox and Western thought that are so at risk?
A few years ago I concluded that [...]

Read Full Post »

As I mentioned before, the criteria for being on my blogroll is that I feel a certain blog has proved to be a noticeable influence on whatever I’m doing in my own blog. There are a long list of blogs, however, that I read just for enjoyment. Here are four of the best-written of that long [...]

Read Full Post »

What song can I sing?
I have not a word to say;
Full of emptiness,
in wordless prayers I pray
toward formless forms and heatless burnings
toward Flyers In The Heaven without wing
and know – it is not You! You are not these!
O! (Whom shall I address?)
To what bright center shall I press,
and truly say: Ah, it is you! At last?
(When will I be [...]

Read Full Post »

Mark 14 (NASB)
3 While He was in Bethany at the home of Simon the leper, and reclining at the table, there came a woman with an alabaster vial of very costly perfume of pure nard; and she broke the vial and poured it over His head.
 4 But some were indignantly remarking to one another, “Why [...]

Read Full Post »

I found the English-translated website of a Russian women’s monastery. The website is such a treasure of blessing and piety that I can only imagine what the place itself must be like.
There are some recordings of chant, both Russian and Byzantine, which the sisters have made a serious study of. These recordings may be of [...]

Read Full Post »

A: If our world had been formed and filled by some lesser god, I think he would have made the vast mistake of laboring with too straight a back.
His steely arrowed finger would stab the depths, jolting them to fertility. Then he’d raise his dripping arm, and glaring across the sudden plains, he’d loose a lightning lash of life.
Oh, I have some idea in what anguished, [...]

Read Full Post »

“Deamons fear the words of holy men and cannot bear them; for the Lord Himself is in the Words of Scripture and him they cannot bear.”
(Words from Athanasius On the Interpretation of the Psalms.)
I think this is what you might call a sacramental view of scripture, and I do find it a “higher” view than [...]

Read Full Post »

Orthodox Christian prayer is a little different than the prayer I practiced as an evangelical Christian.
I suppose I should start by saying that, like the early Church, the Orthodox have an ideal that God ought to be praised unceasingly, day and night. So part of the point of having a “rule” (or schedule) of prayer, with written prayers to recite, [...]

Read Full Post »

A philanthropist was walking on the sidewalk and met a fool going along in a weelchair.
“How did you become crippled?” he asked.
“I loved a girl, and wanted to win her heart. So I bought a weelchair like the one her crippled father uses, and I always went about in it, so that I would feel familiar to her.”
“How [...]

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »