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Bishop Pankraty of Troitsa with Metropolitan Jonah If one is the type that is easily discouraged, one can find today much that is discouraging—secularism is making inroads, even in the Orthodox Church, men of power scorn and minimize the insights proffered by Christians, the Church makes up a small fraction of society, and our bishops are sometimes not up to meeting the multitude of challenges faced by the Church.  The temptation for those easily discouraged is to look back fondly and nostalgically to an imagined Golden Age for the Church.  There are a number of contenders for this Golden Age.  One of the most enticing contenders is the fourth century.  After all, this century saw two ecumenical councils (Nicea in ...

People labour and struggle to acquire knowledge which is of only little importance and is applicable for only a limited period of time. This is knowledge which contributes to meeting the needs, comforts and peculiarities of earthly life. We entirely neglect the essential, necessary knowledge and work, which are the only reason we’ve been granted earthly existence. That is, the knowledge of God and our good relationship with Him, through Christ our Redeemer.

For approximately 2,000 years, the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ has continued uninterruptedly in the world according to His promise. If He should return today, would He recognize His Bride, the Church? If the faith and the traditions of His Church have remained constant, He would certainly be able to recognize the Church which He established. Have those traditions and the faith remained strong in America? A number of holy people of our Church, including Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios of Constantinople and Patriarch Elias of the Patriarchate of Antioch, both of blessed memory, did not think so when they visited the United States a few years ago. They immediately perceived that the spirit of materialism and secularism had infiltrated the lives ...

The benevolent will of God is not merely that each of us should be saved, but that we should enter into the perfection of knowledge, that is deification, which is the absolute will of God, for which He came to earth.

The Ravens of Farne: A Tale of Saint Cuthbert by Donna Farley published by Conciliar Press ISBN: 978-0-9822770-5-8 Softcover, 32 pages, $14.95 Two years before this story about the ravens of Farne was released, my family went on a pilgrimage to Europe. One of the stops along the way was the small tidal island of Lindisfarne, a stony piece of land in Northern England. We had to venture out of our way to visit there, traveling first by train, then taxi, and timing our adventure just right so that the tide was low when we crossed from mainland to island. It was undoubtedly worth all the effort. Even hundreds of years later there remains an aura of holiness, a lasting beauty that is not just ...

Ascension of the Lord The time between the Ascension of Christ and the Day of Pentecost marked something of an “in-between” period for Christ’s disciples. They had been instructed at the time of the Ascension to remain in Jerusalem and wait “for the promise.” Ten days later the promise was fulfilled and the Holy Spirit filled the fledgling Church with the Holy Spirit. It has been a fairly common treatment by preachers of the gospel to compare our own times to those of the Church-in-waiting. It is pointed out that we live “in-between” Christ’s first and second coming, and therefore live in an in-between period. The conclusion of such sermons is to speak about various strategies of waiting. The conclusion ...

‘Whoever observes the whole of the law, but errs in one thing, is guilty of everything’ (Jas. 2, 10). And the damage is unimaginable! You lose eternity, that is, everything. This is what happened to the young man in the Gospel, and is the case with so many others in life. The devil binds people with so many ropes. But whether we’re bound by one rope or another, the fact remains that we’re bound to the devil. Say that the devil’s bound us with a hundred ropes and, through our struggles, we manage to free ourselves of ninety-nine. We’re still not free. We’re still bound, even if it’s only by one rope. To be free of our bonds, we have ...

We all need to wake up and become spiritually vigilant. Spiritual vigilance is an important thing. We have an immortal soul. We have to go forwards, we have to find Christ. Saint Porfyrios used to say that Christ is everything, Christ is love, He’s the Father, He’s our friend, He’s the essence of our life.

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The Resurrection continues. This is shown by the feast of the Rendition of Easter. The same messages from the night of the Resurrection are also heard at the Rendition of Easter, which is celebrated one day before the Feast of the Ascension. Every great feast in Orthodoxy has its ‘rendition’. Every feast is a living event which is repeated in the life of the Church and in the life of the faithful. But the re-celebration of the feast, its rendition, also takes place for another reason: so that we can again enjoy its beauty. When a spectacle’s enjoyable, we want to see it again. When a meal’s tasty, we want to have it again. The celebration of an event in the life of ...

The whole series can be read here: The Theology of Gender The Church of Christ is a divine-human institution which the Holy Spirit keeps alive and inspires throughout the ages. Canon Law expresses this twofold essence of the Church and its aim is to guide Christians to live the reality of the Kingdom of God in this world. Trying to fulfill this mission the Church’s law is faithful to the Christian teaching of equality between man and woman, without ignoring the environment and circumstances to which these laws apply. The Church, with wisdom legislated for men and women according to historical circumstances. She never compromised her ethos or legislated in a way harmful to the salvation of her followers. In the same ...

Equally typical is the interpretation of the Passion and the Resurrection during the walk to Emmaus: Then he said to them, ‘Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures…They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’… Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I ...

Arrogance is a very bad passion and is the cause of many evils in societies. It fills everything with noise, brings discord, provokes conflicts, overturns the established order, shatters peace, sparks conflicts and ignites wars. It causes all sorts of hardships.

Last December, Christianity Today magazine graciously provided a forum for me to answer a question I posed in the title of my article: “Will the twenty-first be the Orthodox century?” I answered, “Yes. The twenty-first will likely be a century that witnesses a theological rebirth of the Orthodox vision within Protestantism, regardless of whether or not the Orthodox Church itself grows numerically.” I explained the ways in which mainline and evangelical Christians are retrieving the Great Tradition of our Church as a resource for reconstruction and renewal. I documented evidence for the rise of a new kind of ecumenism that is basing itself on a revival of the ancient approach to worship and theological decision-making. However, there was one very important ...

a) Women played a decisive role both in spreading the Christian message of the Resurrection as well as in the practical application of the supreme Gospel commandment of love. From the lambent day of the Resurrection of Christ, when the Myrrh-Bearing Women went to the tomb ‘very early’ and heard from the ‘radiant angel’ that ‘He has risen, He is not here’, until our own day and age, women have adorned the calendar of saints, have nurtured saints, have served in the worship of the Church and have led the way in works of benefaction. b) The Church honoured women and raised their status morally. From being chattels and possessions men, the Church regarded them as human persons made in the ...

What’s the good of fasting if your mind’s full of wickedness?

The Great Week of the Passion arrives. And in honour of Christ, to the glory of God, human efforts become even more intense. The divine services become longer and with shorter intervals between them, food even more frugal, time for sleep and rest even briefer. The moral dictates of the conscience with an ascetic bent become ever more relentless. This is when we see more clearly how strong faith and ascetic training can affect an exhausted body. There were a good number of us lay pilgrims to the Holy Mountain back then in 1971: farmers, merchants, priests from Russia. Two or three noblemen, and a couple of young lads who had come from a long way away- one from Moldavia on the ...

Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer: Experiencing the Presence of God and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of an Ancient Spirituality by Norris J. Chumley, Harper One, 2011, 224 PP, $26.99 What’s so mysterious about the Jesus Prayer? It’s one of the shortest and simplest prayers you can find: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” It’s one of the most ancient prayers, too; think of how often in the Gospels people ask Jesus for mercy. A prayer for mercy would likely have been one of the variations when the Desert Mothers and Fathers (AD 2nd-5th c), who sought to pray constantly, were trying out different short, repeated verses of Scripture to discipline the wandering mind. (St. Augustine reports that they ...