A Memory That Saves

"You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation."

+ Alyosha in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov

Hope of the Resurrection

"...the very accomplishment of a liturgical celebration of the mystery of the resurrection floods the light of hope into our hearts, which produces generosity. It is the person who does not hope, and is tethered to temporality, who concludes he might as well eat, drink, and be merry if this really is all there is. If we are really only flickering bits of consciousness that will be snuffed out tomorrow, we might as well focus on the little pleasure we can squeeze out of today. (How simple life must be for a hedonist!) 

But hope in the resurrection allows us to take the proper measure of our brief time in this world, and this does not make us neglect our neighbor, it stirs up greater generosity. We have seen this in the lives of many mystics. The saint with a soul soaring upward into heaven does not forget the world; to the contrary, he or she is in the most radically free position to transform it. 

Chesterton said his first attractions to Christianity came when he realized that Christians were the only ones to preach the paradox that one must be “enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it.” 

Hope allows us to love the world radically, without practical calculation or cost analysis. Hope gives courage. Hope gives fortitude. Hope lets us love recklessly."

+ Dr David Fagerberg, "Liturgical Mysticism", Steubenville : Emmaus Academic, 2019. 122.

Beyond Articulation

"The divine essence is beyond articulation; the words of Scripture point beyond themselves and reveal the absurdity of any fundamentalism. To insist on "literal truth" in theology is to make a fool of oneself, whether one articulates theism or atheism. In doing so we "know not what we do," because any articulation taken literally is at best a reduction of ultimate truth to what a finite intellect can grasp; it is an idol."

Fr David Starr

Seminary: Pointing Towards Beauty

"Remember what a significant part of the means for this holy enterprise was given by foreigners. We must show them the beauty of Orthodoxy. May this church be a place of brotherly intercommunion and the rapprochement of all Christians … Here prayer shall be unceasing, not only for all Russian peoples labouring and heavy-laden, and scattered abroad in the sorrow of exile, but for the peace of the whole world, for the welfare of God’s holy churches, and for the union of them all." 

+ Metropolitan Evlogii, At the Consecration of Institut Saint-Serge in Paris, France, July 18th, 1924. (Lowrie 1954, S. Sergius in Paris: the Orthodox Theological Institute, p. 11.)

"For peace in the whole world, for the stability of the holy churches of God, and for the unity of all, let us pray to the Lord." 

+ From The Great Litany, The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom

The Church and the Journey

“When preparing for a journey, we try to learn as much as we can about our destination; the climate, the history, the special attractions, etc. We buy special clothes, travel books, we explore the internet.  In other words we spend a great deal of time in preparation for the trip with great enthusiasm and anticipation.

Exactly the same can be said about our life’s journey to the Kingdom.  The same joy and anticipation can and should take place as we prepare for our final banquet with the Lord, with the Theotokos and with all the saints…

Having laid aside all earthly cares, having detached ourselves from concrete petty thoughts and emptied our minds in order to give enough room for the Spirit to fill, I would like to stand with you in silence, stillness and solitude – solitude with Christ.  Then we can concentrate on our journey, the one that is taking place as time moves inexorably forward, upward, and, we hope, towards the gates…

But we know Christ, we partake of His Body and His Blood, we stand at the foot of His Cross, we know His Love…Love Him back! Always and forever, this is the answer: love Him back!

The Church provides all the tools that this journey requires…”

+ Matushka Juliana Schmemann, The Joy to Serve, pp. 85-88, Published by: Alexander Press, http://www.alexanderpress.com/downloads/APB_Dialogue-6_Schmemann_Joy.pdf

What are Christians?

"What are Christians? Christians are Christ-bearers, and by virtue of this bearers and possessors of eternal life, and this according to the measure of faith and according to the measure of holiness which is from faith. The Saints are the most perfect Christians, for they have been sanctified to the highest degree with the podvigs of holy faith in the risen and eternally-living Lord Christ and no death has power over them. Their life is entirely from the Lord Christ, and for this reason it is entirely Christ's life; and their thought is entirely Christ's thought; and their perception is Christ's perception. All that they have is first Christ's and then theirs. If the soul, it is first Christ's and then theirs: if life, it is first Christ's and then theirs. In them is nothing of themselves but rather wholly and in everything the Lord Christ."

+ St. Justin Popovich

The Royal Martyr on Marriage and Family Life

A humble and encouraging reminder by Royal Martyr Empress Alexandra Fedorovna...

On Marriage and Family Life
Excerpts from notes made by the Royal Martyr Empress Alexandra Fedorovna
http://www.holy-transfiguration.org/library_en/fam_marriageAlex1.html

Our Dialogue with Doubt

"True faith is a constant dialogue with doubt, for God is incomparably greater than all our preconceptions about Him; our mental concepts are idols that need to be shattered. So as to be fully alive, our faith needs continually to die."

+ Met. Kallistos Ware of Diokleia, from “The Inner Kingdom: Volume 1 of the Collected Works”

Hart on Philosophical Atheism

"I do not regard true philosophical atheism as an intellectually valid or even cogent position; in fact, I see it as a fundamentally irrational view of reality, which can be sustained only by a tragic absence of curiosity or a fervently resolute will to believe the absurd. More simply, I am convinced that the case for belief in God is inductively so much stronger than the case for unbelief that true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one's own hopes or conceptual limitations.

Having said this, though, I have to qualify it, because it is a much more limited assertion than it at first appears to be. I do not mean that there is anything intellectually contemptible in being formally “godless”— that is, in rejecting all religious dogmas and in refusing to believe in the God those dogmas describe. One might very well conclude, for instance, that the world contains far too much misery for the pious idea of a good, loving, and just God to be taken very seriously, and that any alleged creator of a universe in which children suffer and die hardly deserves our devotion. It is an affective— not a strictly logical— position to hold, but it is an intelligible one, with a certain sublime moral purity to it; I myself find it deeply compelling; and it is entirely up to each person to judge whether he or she finds any particular religions answer to the “problem of evil” either adequate or credible. I also do not mean that there is any deep logical inconsistency in an attitude of agnostic aloofness from all theologies and spiritual practices; one either finds them plausible or one does not. When I say that atheism is a kind of obliviousness to the obvious, I mean that if one understands what the actual philosophical definition of “God” is in most of the great religious traditions, and if "consequently one understands what is logically entailed in denying that there is any God so defined, then one cannot reject the reality of God tout court without embracing an ultimate absurdity."

+ David Bentley Hart, "The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss" 

(Yale: Yale University Press, 2013) 16-17

Orthodox Mission: The Liturgy after the Liturgy

THE LITURGY AFTER THE LITURGY
BY Fr Ion Bria
http://www.iocc.org/orthodoxdiakonia/index.php?id=7



In recent years, there has been a strong emphasis in Orthodox ecclesiology on the eucharistic understanding of the Church.