‘Pleasures’ are those things which ‘give pleasure’ ηδονή) and sweeten our lives. They are dual like our human nature. As we possess a body and a soul and each one of us have his senses and his body, in the same way pleasures belong to both the physical and the mental nature. There are the physical pleasures, which are felt through the body; there are the mental pleasures, which belong to our rational and spiritual world. The pleasures are mostly the result of our performance and they either console or disappoint us, in accordance with our correct or wrongful deed. If our plan and the goal of our motions is in ‘accordance to God” and His Will, the emotions and the ...
From our own mistakes and the rubble of our lives, our good God arranges for something good to emerge. These days we’re lacking faith, but also toughness.
Labor is for the body, humility for the soul. Both together, labor and humility, are for the whole person.
Share the love, joy, pain, healing, and whatever else it may bring It was a colorful, sunny, fall morning at the resort in Florida. The night before, I had enjoyed a dinner and reception for the conference I was in town to attend. It had been an encouraging experience. As a resident physician, I was often working long hours and finding little time to visualize the future that lay ahead. However, at this conference focusing on breast-feeding medicine, I was surrounded by physicians (many of whom were mothers) who were doing things with their lives that were inspiring. As I talked to them about their practices, I remember feeling as if I were at a dinner tasting the appetizers…and I could ...
Supernatural Assistance (Michael Palairet, British Ambassador to Greece at the time of the war, in 1940) No. 306 From the British Embassy, Athens December 9, 1940. Dear Sir, In my letter No. 293 of 23 November, I mentioned the widely-held belief that the Greek Army enjoys the protection of Our Lady of Tinos and that its victories, which may, indeed, be termed miraculous, are due to her intervention. This belief has now become a conviction and there are countless stories of appearances of the Blessed Virgin to soldiers at the front, encouraging them in the battle and promising that the desecration committed by the Italians in her church on the feast of the Dormition would be punished with a great defeat…. . It may seem unusual that I ...
How fortunate we Orthodox Christians are! What a God we have! People who don’t know God are in a sorry state. They don’t see the eternal light and after death they go into eternal darkness. We know this because the Holy Spirit informs the saints, through the Church, as to what happens in heaven and in hell. Deluded people are pitiable. They can’t know what real joy is. Occasionally they’ll enjoy themselves and laugh, but the laughter and enjoyment they experience will turn into lamentation and sorrow. Our joy is Christ. Through His passion, He’s written us in the book of life, and in the kingdom of heaven we’ll be with God for eternity. We’ll behold His glory and will ...
Saint Demetrius, byzantine mosaic from his church in Thessaloniki, 8th Century Another point of interest is that the church of Saint Dimitrios, for 60 years (1430-1490) remained as part of the local Church, when almost all the other churches in Thessaloniki had been turned into mosques after the fall of the city to the Turks in 1430. This was because the governor of the city, Loukas Spandounis, paid a great deal of money to the conquerors to prevent the church becoming a mosque. In order to honour this great benefactor, after he departed this life, the church allowed a Renaissance-style sarcophagus containing the body of this benefactor of the Church and nation to be placed in the N.W. wall of ...
A young man who comes here to become a monk does so because he’s been stricken with the fire, the fervor of Christ. And when he comes, he doesn’t reject humanity. A monk who leaves and comes into the desert, does so because he rejects the unwholesome spirit of the world, but not the human person.
Saint Dimitrios is the protector and patron saint of Thessaloniki, a saint from whose relics myrrh flows and also a Great Martyr. There are actually conflicting accounts in the sources, but the overwhelming view is that he was born and bred in Thessaloniki. As a young man, he rose through the ranks of the Roman army because he was a very talented soldier. How he came to be introduced into the Christian faith we do not know, though it was not as usual as one might think for a high official. There were Christians even in the Roman imperial family: Theodora, the wife of Galerius, for example, who was beheaded in Thessaloniki on the orders of Emperor Licinius (ca. 315). Saint ...
Patiently bearing sorrows and not blaming other people for our own disasters is a sign of true knowledge. Sorrows come upon us either to teach us something, to expunge previous sins, to correct any negligence there might be or to prevent future sins.
For spiritual people struggling to acquire and retain the knowledge of God, understood as entry into the energy of divine eternity, intellectual scientific learning is insufficient, no matter how empirical and apparently irrefutable a character it may have. Human science provides the means to express the experience of existential knowledge, but is incapable of transmitting this knowledge in an authentic manner without the co-action of grace. Were this not so, then our ‘ascents’ into the spheres of the Divine existence- of real Truth- would depend on secular education and intellectual capacity, which is not the case. At this point it becomes clear that Elder Sophrony is operating within the current of Orthodox Patristic thought, which rejected the possibility that the ...
Being a monk means ‘a mind contemplating God’.
Rev. Patrick H. Reardon Finally, a third brand of philosophy against which divine revelation should put us on guard is, I submit, the nominalism that appeared in the eleventh century, at exactly the time when the Eastern and Western churches became divided. The villain in this case is John Roscelinus. Since Roman Catholics, after his condemnation at the Council of Soissons in 1092, had the good sense to burn most of his writings, we are obliged mainly to rely on secondary sources to study Roscelinus, which is often enough the case in the history of philosophy. And surely it is significant that the sharpest contemporary critic of Roscelinus was that most real of Realist philosophers, St. Anselm of Canterbury, himself ...
It has been claimed by some that Christianity is not merely no help to the family, but that it actually contributes to its breakdown. In other words, it has damaged the prestige of paternal authority within the context of the small family. This reasoning has been put forward with references to certain excerpts from Christ’s words, but these have been rather superficially interpreted, taken our of context and made to stand on their own. The texts which have been mobilized in this way come from the Evangelists Matthew and Luke . Let’s look at the most typical: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. ...
If you want to teach the love of God, don’t use speech. Try to be polite, always, and to be loveable yourself.
