Formulate a goal today!

Posted on by

Have you set any goals for the new year? I do think that it is important that we set, in particular, spiritual goals for the coming year. When we do this we are reminded that there is truly nothing more important than our spiritual growth. To do this will help you to become serious about your faith and spiritual life.

Think about this! Our faith tells us that life is immortal and that we will live forever and that how we spend the future is dependent upon what we learn during this lifetime. So, can we ever be too concerned about our spiritual life? Think about it.
Formulate a goal today!

Athanasius of Alexandria – 20140112

Posted on by

In a discussion of the idea of Theosis in the Bible, based largely on Maximos the Confessor, Jaroslav Pelikan (a noted author on the Eastern Church), points out that the idea goes beyond individual passages of Scripture. He writes:

The purpose of the Lord’s Prayer was to point to the mystery of deification. Baptism was “in the name of the life-giving and deifying Trinity.” When the guests at the wedding in Cana of Galilee … said that their host had “kept the good wine until now,” they were referring to the Word of God, saved for the last, by which men were made divine. When, in the Epistles of the same apostle John, “the Theologian,” it was said that “it does not yet appear what we shall be,”: this was a reference to “the future deification of those who have now been made children of God.” When the apostle Paul spoke of “the riches” of the saints, this, too meant deification.”  

Even when the objection is raised that often these texts are taken out of context, exegetes are not overly concerned. Even nowadays, Eastern theologians feel much more comfortable with the idea of  the   spiritual interpretation of Scripture.
Eastern theology is lived theology rather than analytical speculation. In fact, definite limits are set on human inquiry into things divine by apophatic theology, very characteristic of Eastern theology, that proceeds mainly by negation.
Apophetic theology is an approach to the study of God which proceeds by saying what God is not. It is an approach which believes that we can never truly know who God is, since comprehension of Him is truly beyond the capacity of our understanding. We can only, with any true assurance, say what He is not (example: God is not limited – He is beyond any limitations).
What theology is able to say about God and God’s dealings with humanity are mainly what these things are not rather than what they are.
The idea of theosis permeates much of the liturgy and prayer life in the Eastern Church. A good example is the Canon for Matins of Holy Thursday in which the church confesses in its worship: “In my kingdom said Christ, I shall be God with you as god.” The ancient liturgy of St. James proclaims:

Thou has united, O Lord, Thy divinity with our humanity and our humanity with Thy divinity. The life with our mortality and our mortality with They life; Thou hast received what was ours and has given unto us what was Thine, for the life and salvation of our souls, praise be to Thee in eternity.

For me personally, the Eastern approach is much more acceptable. Think about this! How presumptive of humanity to think that it can, in some way, define God. Our western society, because of the scientific approach, seems to need to define God. Let us not presume to know Who God IS. Let us praise Him!

The Spirituality Of the Christian East – 20140112

Posted on by

Christ is the new and true Adam of mankind, the head of the body of the Church. The Pauline affirmation of the Body of Christ is found frequently in patristic texts. Cabasilas summarized the tradition when he wrote that “We are joined to him in the same body and share his life and are his members.”  Then, Cabasilas also added a new expression: Christ is the heart of the mystical body, the intimate principle of the life forces of the Church and each individual Christian.
You will recall that it was Paul who first conceptualized the Church as the Body of Christ extended in time with Christ being the head and members of the Church the members of the body. In and through the Firstborn of all creation (Christ Jesus) the sanctification of the world ultimately results in the unity of the created order. The Fathers called this last state the final restoration of things, an idea which may be explained by the simple statement of Irenaeus: “In him, all became one’.
Think back on Sophronius’ Prayer for the Great Blessing of Water that we just prayed on Theophany. What the prayer says, in effect, is that all things have been made anew and united through the incarnation of God in the Person of Jesus Christ. We are joined together with all created things in worshipping Almighty God.
Maximus the Confessor often pondered and wrote about the consequences for the world of the victory of Christ over the forces of    disunity. For him, ’Christ is the center where all lines converge.’ True Byzantine church architecture places an icon of the Pantocrator (the creator of all things) in the very center of the church where it is seen as the center of all the other iconography and of the cosmic orb.
Eastern theology thinks of Christ as the principle of unity. The incarnation of God sustains the universe so that it does not collapse.

Being a Vibrant Parish – 20140105

Posted on by

CaptureIn this article I have been sharing ideas about how to practice the presence of God, an extremely important practice if we are to become vibrant Christians and, therefore, assisting our parish to become a vibrant community. Practice the presence of God by placing yourself deliberately before God every day in your prayers and especially during the Divine Liturgy, by praying the Jesus Prayer many times during the day, by wakefulness and inner attention to each word you pray, and by shutting the doors of the senses to be alone with God for a few minutes each day. It is by practicing the presence that the presence becomes real.
Recently a successful businessman shared with me his secret for preventing tensions (I have found that many high-powered businessmen, even men who are not religious, practice moments of meditation through-out the day to relieve tension). He needed to be renewed at least twice a day, he said, so he had a short period of meditation at 10 and 3 o’clock. This did not take the usual form of prayer for he did not think about his problems but dwelt upon God’s power and peace. He placed himself deliberately in God’s presence: he thought of the spiritual strength of Christ flowing into him. He reported that those few minutes a day spent practicing God’s presence resulted in complete renewal of energy and clarity of mind. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on three” (Isaiah 26:3)
“Close your cell door to your body, the door of your lips to words, the interior door to spirits. Hesychia is worship and uninterrupted service to God” (St. John Climacus).
Like a person in a telephone booth with the door open, we are bombarded daily by the many conflicting voices of the crowd. What we need is to close the door on the crowd daily and listen top the voice of God Who is trying so hard to speak to us.
Perhaps one of the most difficult things for modern people to do is to become interiorly still. We usually have the radio or television playing and people around us, or we ourselves, are constantly talking on cell phones. We have to learn how to hear God speaking to us, knowing  that He does if only we believe.

A Look at the New Testament – St Paul – 20140105

Posted on by

In the major cities there were a number of Gentiles who were strongly attracted to Judaism but who were unwilling to convert to Judaism. Known variously in ACTS and other ancient sources as God-fearers, God-worshipers and God-lovers, they were Gentiles involved in but still on the fringe of Judaism. They often attended synagogue services and thus knew quite a bit about Judaism, its scriptures, rituals, festivals, yearnings and vision. Some became benefactors. No doubt they had Jewish friends. But the men did not get circumcised and households may or may not have observed Jewish food and purity laws.
That Gentile God-lovers were Paul’s primary audience not only is affirmed by ACTS and implied in his letters, but also makes good sense. The Gentiles to whom he had the most immediate access were the God-lovers whom he would find in synagogues. So when Paul arrived in a new city, he went first to the synagogue – not because his mission was to convert Jews, but because Gentile God-lovers would be there.
Paul sought to enlist these God-lovers into communities of Christ-followers either by creating a new community in that city or by integrating them into an existing community. Christian groups existed in some cities before Paul got there, including Ephesus and Rome. In others, they were Paul’s creation.
Other then synagogues, the other context in which Paul encountered  Gentiles was in his work. Paul supported himself by tent-making, an umbrella term that included making awnings, in great demand in the Mediterranean world, and perhaps more generally in making leather goods. Paul’s skill gave him great mobility and self-sufficiency. The basic tools could be carried in a waist bag. He could travel light and find a job in any significant city. No doubt Paul met some of his Gentile converts while working next to them in a shop.
This understanding of Paul’s audience should affect our image of how Paul preached Jesus. Because of modern images of preaching, we tend to think of Paul standing in front of a crowd, large or small, and proclaiming the Gospel. ACTS sometimes portrays Paul this way; he preaches in synagogues and even in a theater filled with 20,000 people. But it is unlikely that Paul preached in synagogues or to crowds of strangers who were completely unfamiliar with Judaism. What would his message, which make so much use of Jewish language and tradition, have meant to Gentiles who knew nothing abo0ut Judaism?
We need to imagine Paul’s approach as much more conversational. This, I believe, is essential if we are to come to a true understanding of Paul and of his writings, ministry and preaching.

Getting to Know Something About Our Eastern Catholic Faith – 20140105

Posted on by

The Orthodox attitude to the Papacy is admirably expressed by a twelfth-century writer, Nicetas, Archbishop of Nicomedia:
My dearest brother, we do not deny to the Roman Church the primacy amongst the five sister Patriarchates; and we recognize her right to the most honorable seat at an Ecumenical Council. But she has separated herself from us by her own deeds, when through pride she assumed a monarchy which does not belong to her office. How shall we accept decrees from her that have been issued without consulting us and even without our knowledge? If the Roman   Pontiff, seated on the lofty throne of his glory wishes to thunder at us and, so to speak, hurl his mandates at us from on high, and if he wishes to judge us and even to rule us and our Churches, not by taking counsel with us but at his own arbitrary pleasure, what kind of brotherhood, or even what kind of parenthood can this be? We should be the slaves, not the sons, of such a Church, and the Roman See would not be the pious mother of sons but a hard and imperious mistress of slaves.’
That was how an Orthodox felt in the twelfth century, when the whole question had come out into the open. In earlier centuries the Greek attitude to the Papacy was basically the same, although not yet sharpened by controversy. Up to 850, Rome and the east avoided an open conflict over the Papal claims, but the divergence of views was not the less serious for being partially concealed.
The second great difficulty was the Filioque. The dispute involved the words about the Holy Spirit in the NiceneConstantinopolitan Creed. Originally the Creed ran: ‘I believe … in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and together glorified. This, the original form, is recited unchanged by the east to this day. But the west inserted an extra phrase ‘and from the Son’ (in Latin, Filioque), so that the Creed now reads ‘who proceeds from the Father and the Son’. It is not certain when and where this addition was first made, but it seems to have originated in Spain, as a safeguard against Arianism. At any rate the Spanish Church interpolated the Filioque at the third Council of Toledo (589), if not before. From Spain the addition spread to France and thence to Germany, where it was welcomed by Charlemagne and adopted at the semi-iconoclast Council of Frankfort (794). It was writers at Charlemagne’s court who first made the Filioque into an issue of controversy, accusing the Greeks of heresy because they recited the Creed in its original form.

The Great Schism is truly fascinating, lbeit, sad history and we are still living it.

Iconography and Worship

Posted on by

Till the fourth century portraits of Christ were rare. The earliest iconographic representations seem to have been of the apostles, especially of Peter and Paul, though Christ was shown in scenes from the Gospels.  Towards the end of the third century there appeared a kind of collective     portrait of Christ seated among the apostles, an image based on a common classical form depicting the teacher and his disciples, or a group of learned men gathered round their leader.
There is little doubt that Christians followed contemporary practice in having funerary portraits painted of distinguished church members. These portraits showed the bust of the person, facing forward, often enclosed within a medallion. There may have been some reserve on the part of the church leaders towards these images in the early centuries, for fear of idolatry. But when the pagan ancestor cult was  declared illegal at the beginning of the fifth century such portraits of saints survived to become portable icons

The Great Blessing of Water

Posted on by

The ceremonies of the Great Water-Blessing took hundreds of years to develop. The primary prayer for the blessing of water is from Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem (+641). The form of the rite was developed between the 14th to 16th centuries. In most    parishes the form is shortened to be celebrated immediately after the Prayer behind the Ambo (i.e., the one said by the priest in the center of the church), and is mainly the Prayer of Sophronius.
Our current liturgical books allow for two blessings: the blessing of water on the Eve as a symbol of the former practice of baptizing converts and the blessing of water on the feast as a  celebration of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, thus manifesting to humankind that He IS God in human form.
The three-fold blessing of water, as we currently practice it, was found first in the Book of Services of Metropolitan Peter Mohyla (1646). This three-fold blessing involves the use of a three-branch candle, the priest’s breath and then the priest’s hand. The rite of water blessing is then concluded with the plunging of the hand cross into the     water three times. This rite is not uniform throughout the Eastern Churches. The symbolism of the three-fold blessing, each which is  performed three times, is, of course symbolic of the power of the Holy Trinity being called down to bless the water.

Remember, water is a symbol of life

Athanasius of Alexandria – 20140105

Posted on by

It is critical, I believe, to once again reiterate Athanasius’ understanding that the redeemed person may become a son/daughter of God only by participation, which implies that far from being mechanical or automatic, the sonship of the redeemed is contingent and mutable: “From this it clearly appears that men can lose their sonship which they have by participation.
Although Athanasius is one of the key Fathers in the development of the Eastern spiritual idea of Theosis or deification, his thought is complex and, because of this fact, we need to step-back and take another look at this whole idea.
The Bible offers a sufficient number of passages about human participation in God for it to be taken as the important image of salvation. But perhaps it does not speak about it as much as the Eastern Fathers of the Church who presented cardinal texts for a foundation of Theosis. The two tests are 2 Peter 1:4 and Psalm 82:6 which Jesus cites in John 10:34-36a:

Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires (Peter)

I said, ‘You are gods; you are all sons of the Most High (Psalm)

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, “I have said you are gods’?” If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came – and the Scripture cannot be broken – what about the one whom the Father set apart as he very own and sent into the world? (John)

The passage in 2 Peter accentuates one of the leading motifs in the Eastern Church’s understanding of salvation, namely release from the corruption and mortality caused by the evil desires of the world. Eastern theology does not focus so much on guilt as on mortality as the main problem of humanity. In addition, in the East, the concept of sin is viewed as something human beings do and choose for themselves rather than something “hereditary” as a result of the first human beings’ sin in the distant past. Cyril of   Alexandria comments on this passage from Peter to note that we are all called to participate in divinity, not just a few “saints”. Although Christ alone is God by nature, all people are called to become God by participation. In such participation we become likenesses of Christ and perfect images of God the Father.
The Eastern Church finds this doctrine of deification (Theosis) not only in the explicit texts just mentioned but elsewhere in the Bible, beginning with the Old Testament. To begin this quest, read Exodus 34:30 where Moses’ face is described as shining or Exodus 7:1 which reveals that Aaron became a god to Pharaoh. Also reread Matthew 17:4, another classic text.

The Spirituality Of the Christian East – 20140105

Posted on by

The New Testament does not often use the term ‘mediator’. One also looks for it in vain in the Apostolic Fathers and the Apologists. Jesus Christ does not stand between God and his people, nor is he God’s representative, as an angel could be, but he is himself ‘the author of eternal salvation’ (Hebrews 5:9). We do not wish to diminish the value of Christ’s mediation, quite the contrary. We realize, however, that such a doctrine differs from ancient teaching in two respects:

1. In the philosophical systems it was God who, because of his absolute transcendence, needed a mediator to communicate with the world. By contrast in Scripture such communication is made possible only by virtue of God’s condescension. Jesus stands explicitly on the side of God. It is God himself who performs the work of salvation through the man Jesus Christ, his Son.

2.This salvation could become effective only by means of a complete taking on by God of the human condition. The axiom ‘What is not assumed cannot be saved,’ which underlines the development in Irenaeus, is already found explicitly in Origen: ‘The whole man would not have been saved unless he had taken upon him the whole man.’ The union between the human and the divine is a ‘mixture’, a ‘blending’, but of a special type: indeed, the two natures remain unconfused. Christ is the only one to bring about the encounter of the divine transcendence with the hu-man finite,    without sacri-ficing the one or ignoring the other. Jesus    belongs au-thentically to the two orders of existence,   that of God and that of man. ‘God and man have become one.’ The mystery of  mediation is therefore the mystery of union, realized by the Son who is ‘one’ with the Father.

The Church struggled for years to come to a clearer understanding of the mystery of God’s Incarnation. In most ways His incarnation is beyond human comprehension. All we can say is that Jesus is truly God and truly man.