“Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy — meditate on these things..” (Phillipians 4.8)
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6 Prior to my trip to the 1998 Midwest Parish Life Conference I had been working on another meditation for this month's Newsletter, but being so moved by the talks and sermons given … [Read more…]
“…you should be living a good Orthodox Christian life, one with a level of asceticism proper to your station as lay persons. Asceticism comes from the Greek (ahs-kee-tees-mos) meaning ‘a whole system of personal discipline for the purpose of combating vice and developing personal virtues.’ In the Orthodox Tradition, such a system includes a personal … [Read more…]
“[People] are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that [a person] can be induced to make, the more often they will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.” … [Read more…]
“First of all, it is important to remember that prayer is an encounter and a relationship, a relationship which is deep, and this relationship cannot be forced either on us or on God. The fact that God can make himself present or can leave us with the sense of His absence is part of this … [Read more…]
“In modern Christian writings, though I see much (indeed more than I like) about Mammon, I see few of the old warnings about Worldly Vanities, the Choice of Friends, and the Value of Time. All that, your patient would probably classify as “Puritanism”—and may I remark in passing that the value we have given to … [Read more…]