Ξένες γλώσσες

Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” is one of my favorites. It is a formally perfect composition, and its vision of death is chilling. The poem is bitter, dark, and thoroughly unsentimental in its view of death. This is the first of its five stanzas: I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. Larkin was not a believer (he considered religion a “moth-eaten” ...

Virgin of Vladimir The first thing we sense about an icon is its great seriousness. Compare an icon in your mind a great Western religious painting, one that moves you to deeper faith or even to tears. You’ll notice that there is a difference in the *way* it moves you, however. A Western painting—which is undeniably going to be more accomplished in terms of realism, perspective, lighting, anatomy, and so forth—moves us in our imaginations and our emotions. We engage with it like we do a movie or a story. An icon hits us in a different way, though. In comparison, it is very still. It is silent. We find ourselves coming to silence as we stand before it. An icon ...

Still, whether incompatible or not with the modern sense of the self and of identity, The Ladder of Divine Ascent remains what it has long been, a text that had a profound influence, lasting many centuries, in the monastic centers of the Greek-speaking world. As such it deserves at least a hearing, if only to ensure that the awareness of the Christian past is not impoverished…        Hardly anything is known of the author, and the most reliable information about him can be summarized in the statement that he lived in the second half of the sixth century, survived into the seventh, passed forty years of solitude at a place called Tholas; that he became abbot of the great monastery of ...

Let’s pay for our soul to acquire discernment with the coin of contempt for the transient things of life on earth. Let’s seek spiritual gifts, ‘the greater gifts’, and free ourselves, through constant struggle, of our corporeal outlook, which drags the soul into irrational urges and makes people completely dumb animals.

Our theme for the fifth week of our 40 Day Challenge is Humility and Living a Saintly Life. After all, as Christians we are called to become holy; “Be holy, for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16). Last week we wrote about the greatest virtue: love. A necessary ingredient, however, to cultivate authentic Christian love is humility. Just like bread without yeast will not rise, love without humility will remain only half-baked and not reach its full potential. Have you ever thought about the relationship between love and humility? Have you ever considered the correlation between these two virtues? Who had and showed the greatest love for humanity – towards the sick, the infirm, and those in need? It was the God-man Jesus ...

Patience over a long period of time engenders humility. Humility leads to the health of the soul. Health of the soul brings knowledge of God. Knowledge of God brings love of God. And, finally, love of God attracts God’s grace, which is the sweetest of all.

In today’s Epistle, Saint Paul calls hope ‘a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul’. A ship without an anchor runs the risk of being dashed against the rocks along a coast. When people without hope are faced with the adversities of life, they’ve got nothing to lean on. What an anchor is for a ship, or air for the lungs, hope is for our spiritual existence. Hope is the anchor of the ship of life. Hope becomes our support in times of sorrow and of trials, of pain and failure. Hope urges our tired footsteps forward, illumines the dark and uncertain path of life and expels confusion, stress and turbulence from our heart. Naturally everywhere we turn our gaze around us, ...

St. Gregory of Nyssa, in an extensive homily on 1 Co 15:28, written to challenge the heresy of Eunomius, explains the various meanings of the word ὑποταγή (submission) in Scripture. He clarifies that the word is used in the case of war to indicate subjugation to the victor, as well as the power of humans over nature and other living creatures. With regard to subjugation, he also mentions slavery where there is unavoidable necessity, and finally, the faithful who submit themselves to God for the purpose of salvation. His point is to differentiate these meanings from that of submission (ὑποταγή) of the Son to the Father. Interestingly enough, in the entire homily St. Gregory does not mention the case of ...

To Western eyes, the monk, increasingly, is a figure of yesterday, and the commonest images of him are of the kind to make easy the patronizing smile, the confidently dismissive gesture, or that special tolerance extended to the dotty and the eccentric. Around Friar Tuck, with his cheerful obesity, and Brother Francis, harming no-one as he talks to birds and animals, vaguer ghosts manage to cluster, gaunt, cowled, faintly sinister, eyes averted or looking heaven-wards, a skull clutched in a wasted hand, with gloom arising, and laughter dead. Somewhere in the background there are bells and hymns, and psalms chanted well after midnight; and, as if to confirm that these are only the leftovers of a past surely and mercifully gone, ...

In Great Lent, the Orthodox Church, through its long, penitential services, seeks the mystical experience and approach of the Passion and the Resurrection. With this in mind, the hymns of this period are of an appropriate content, and present the events of our salvation to us the faithful. The joyful sorrow of Great Lent is introduced into the liturgical cycle of services by Penitential Vespers which is celebrated every Sunday evening. At this service the Great Prokeimenon is sung: ‘Do not turn away your face from your servant, for I am afflicted. Hear me speedily; attend to my soul and deliver it’. (Ps. 68, 18). Sung here, in tone plagial 4, by the late master of the art of church chant, Matthaios ...

I’ll accept any form of death. You can kill me in any way you want, but, without Christ I don’t want anything. I don’t want myself, I don’t want God Himself, in between. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t!

During its long historical past the Great Holy Vatopedi Monastery has proved to have played a double role in its spiritual activities. It pursued both a  hesychastic life and freedom from worldly care, that are the basics to achieve theosis, and it also sent its saintly children out on missionary work  to be the living examples of the Orthodox Athonian Tradition  and thus support the people of God, something not alien in the life of the Church through the centuries. We can here say that it excelled in this role so much that the lot of missionary work fell on it not only within Greece but out of it too. St. Maxim Vatopedinos, known as “St. Maxim the Greek”, was one ...

If you want to make a special ascetic effort for Lent, you could always eat what the Prodigal Son wanted to. When he was away being prodigal, I mean. I’m not suggesting you go out and slaughter a fatted calf to help you through fifth week. We’re told that, when he was looking after the swine, ‘he would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; but no one gave him anything’ (Luke 15, 16). Of course, we don’t know the exact word that Christ used for ‘pods’, but the Greek translation, keration, strongly suggests the Ceratonia siliqua or carob tree. The carob is native to the Eastern Mediterranean and we know that, today, the pods and ...

Great Lent is a period of repentance, during which our stony hearts must become, through God’s grace, softened in the flesh, and move from being callous to being sensitive, from cold and hard to warm and open to others, particularly God Himself. Saint John of the ladder with his companions, 11th Century byzantine manuscript Great Lent is a time of renewal when everything, as is the case every spring, makes a new beginning and our sunless lives are again brightened by all the intensity that God can give us, making us His confidants, through the Holy Sacraments and His costly gifts. This reconciliation is a joy; for both us and for God – a new beginning. The fourth Sunday of Lent is ...

Church is a spiritual locus for us to find communion with God, and this is very, very important. This is why, if we want to be calm, if we want to be peaceful, if we want to find our inner harmony, we have to communicate properly with God. And how do we do that? By observing the commandments. The commandments are the way in which we’re cured. If we keep the commandments, we receive the uncreated divine energy, as Saint Gregory Palamas says.

All of this (see Coercion and violence are the basic characteristics of the patricidal society, also by Bishop Amfilohije) is inevitable, because necessity and violence beget only violence and enslavement. This is clear from the waves of organized terrorism today, which have now assumed global dimensions. The root of this evil lies in the thirst for liberation from the overarching coercion which is evident in all the structures of modern ‘bourgeois’ society. It also lies in the deep disappointment regarding the effectiveness of other revolutionary movements so far, which bind themselves to the norms of a previous form of state coercion, violence and ideological elitism. So, behind this new wave, is there not the despairing cry of a generation which ...

The soul of a child should feel death as the threshold of life in heaven, a stepping-stone towards eternal life with Christ’, that is, paradise. The main role in the Orthodox spiritual development of a child is played by the family in which it grows up. The notion of Paradise, however, is of great importance for psychology, even in cases where there is no religious input. The deceased live happily in Paradise, that is a beautiful place which we can’t see, but from which they can see and hear us. Particularly in pre-school years, the presentation of life after death is not merely important but actually necessary. Teaching children about life after death and the presentation of Paradise and Hell must ...

Today Gabriel, who stands before God, came to the pure virgin, announcing the glad tidings: ‘Hail, you who are full of grace’. She tried to think what kind of salutation this might be. But the angel went straight on to say: ‘The Lord is with you. Do not be afraid, Mary. You have found favour with God. You will conceive in your womb and give birth to a son and you shall name Him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David, and He will reign over the house of Jacob unto the ages And of His kingdom there will ...

What darkness, what delusion, what weakness and what a terrible, deathly power sin is. Is it other people’s fault that they’re different from us and so we hate them, or that they disagree with us or that they don’t play to our egotism and don’t flatter our passions? Don’t we all have our own free will, our own idiosyncrasy, our temperament, habits and little ways? We should be understanding towards others and respect other people’s freedom, which even God Himself doesn’t infringe.