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.

The Melody of Theology

The Melody of Theology

Fr. John Shimchick (from: Jacob's Well, Fall 1996)

"Without ceasing and without silence, they praise the goodness of God, in the venerable and thrice-illumined melody of theology." -- Nicephorus of Constantinople

Life Liturgical

"If salvation in Christ is the unique aim of our life, everything we do becomes liturgical, an act of prayer."

+ Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) of Essex, Words of Life, Translated by Sister Magdalen of Essex (Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 2010) 56

Pointing Towards a Cure

Very humbling reminder...

"Father Alexander’s unique gift as theologian and critic was his refusal to unmask the demons without pointing to a cure. Unlike many theologians today who are engaged in a relentless critique of church life and culture with their all-too-familiar attacks on secularism, Father Alexander always lifted his audience in the direction of a solution."

+  Fr Alexis Vinogradov, Revisiting Father Alexander Schmemann’s Work on the Problems of the Church in America: The Liturgical Problem

Does the Blessing of Icons Agree with or Contradict the Tradition of the Orthodox Church?

An interesting article by Fr. Steven Bigham posted at Orthodox Arts Journal:

Does the Blessing of Icons Agree with or Contradict the Tradition of the Orthodox Church?
by Fr. Steven Bigham
http://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/does-the-blessing-of-icons-agree-with-or-contradict-the-tradition-of-the-orthodox-church/

On History

"...historical research is not to discover the past, much less to imitate it, but to recover the integrity of the pristine tradition that the past may well have obscured. The aim is not to restore the past but to overcome it. For history is not the past, but a genetic vision of the present, a present seen in continuity with its roots. It is precisely those who do not know their past that are incapable of true, organic change. They remain victims of the latest cliche, prisoners of present usage because they have no objective standard against which to measure it."

+ Archimandrite Robert Taft

On Pain of Heart

"First of all, Elder Paisios tells us that, for love to blossom in the heart, we must pray with pain of heart. Once he was asked, "We pray, Elder, and our thoughts go here and there. Why?"

"Because it is prayer without pain!" replied the Elder. "To pray with the heart, we must hurt. Just as when we hit our hand or some other part of our body, our mind (nous)  is gathered to the point we are hurting, so also for the mind to gather in the heart, the heart must hurt."

The Elder was then asked, "How can we preserve ourselves in this state when we don’t have some problem, some pain?"

He replied, "We should make the other’s pain our own!! We must love the other, must hurt for him, so that we can pray for him. We must come out little by little from our own self and begin to love, to hurt for other people as well, for our family first then for the large family of Adam, of God" " 

Source: Athanasios Rakovalis, Talks with Father Paisios (Thessalonica, Greece: Orthodox Kypseli, 2000), pp. 123-24.

Orthodox Catechesis

ORTHODOX CATECHESIS
http://www.goarch.org/archdiocese/departments/religioused/resources/orthodoxcatechesis

1. THE PURPOSE OR PHILOSOPHY OF ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

The purpose of Orthodox Christian Education (catechesis) is to help build up the Church, the Body of Christ, by nurturing every person in the life of personal communion with the Holy Trinity (theosis), and thus, through this ministry, to bear joyful witness to God’s loving and redeeming work in the world.

Being only one part of the total life of the Church, Christian education is effective in the context of living faith in the home and the local parish. Living faith is concretely expressed through all believers – bishops, priests, parents, teachers, parish leaders, youth leaders, and all Orthodox Christians seeking to know and to live the new life in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Beauty and Gift of Translation

"Translation is an art that involves a certain ascetic discipline. It requires one to enter so fully into the language to be rendered into another tongue that the original language and its meaning becomes one's own.

A good translation does not simply render a text word for word, nor does it consist of a paraphrase that reproduces only an approximation of the original meaning. This is especially true with translations of sacred texts. To produce a "good" translation of the Holy Scriptures - one that conveys beauty as well as sense - the translator needs to approach the text globally, holistically, in order to penetrate to the depths of its intended message. That message, however, is only partially expressed by words, sentences, and all the components that make up a literary unit. While remaining faithful to the generally accepted meaning of words, the translator will find meaning beyond the words themselves through a process of "communion." One takes the text into oneself, as it were, in order to grasp its ultimate meaning at the level of the heart as well as of the mind. Truly to understand the text, and thus to be able to render it into another language, the translator needs to hear and even "feel" its meaning. In the case of Scripture, this implies that one move beyond a rational understanding of the message conveyed by a given passage, to embrace and be embraced by the Subject of that message.