Our Encounter in Prayer

"The God we encounter must be as true as we who seek Him. But is not God always true? Is He not always Himself, unchanging? Of course.
But it is not only God as He is in Himself who is involved in our prayers. It is also the image we have of Him, for our attitude depends not only on what He is in Himself but also on what we believe Him to be.
If we have a false image of God, our attitude towards Him and our prayer will alter accordingly. It is important that throughout our life, from day to day, we learn to know God as He is."

+ Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

 “Our opinion is in accordance with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn establishes our opinion” 

+ St Irenaeus 

 

"Lex orandi est Lex credendi. The rule of prayer is the rule of belief. And only insofar as we return to this rule, can we recover the true foundations of Orthodox Christian Education." 

+ Fr. Alexander Schmemann 

 

"What concerns the eucharist concerns the Church, and what concerns the Church concerns the eucharist, so that any ailment in the liturgy reflects on our faith and on the whole life of the Church." 

+ Fr Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist

The Liturgy Lived: The Divinization of Man

This article is an excerpt from The Wellspring of Worship (Ignatius Press, 2005) by Fr. Jean Corbon
Source http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.ca/2010/02/liturgy-lived-divinization-of-man-jean.html

If we consent in prayer to be flooded by the river of life, our entire being will be transformed; we will become trees of life and be increasingly able to produce the fruit of the Spirit: we will love with the very Love that is our God. It is necessary at every moment to insist on this radical consent, this decision of the heart by which our will submits unconditionally to the energy of the Holy Spirit; otherwise we shall remain subject to the illusion created by mere knowledge of God and talk about him and shall in fact remain apart from him in brokenness and death. On the other hand, if we do constantly renew this offering of our sinful hearts, let us not imagine that our New Covenant with Jesus will be a personal encounter pure and simple. The communion into which the Spirit leads us is not limited to a face-to-face encounter between the person of Christ and our own person or to an external conformity of our wills with his. The lived liturgy does indeed begin with this "moral" union, but it goes much further. The Holy Spirit is an anointing, and he seeks to transform all that we are into Christ: body, soul, spirit, heart, flesh, relations with others and the world. If love is to become our life, it is not enough for it to touch the core of our person; it must also impregnate our entire nature.