“Life in Christ”

The Gospel accounts of Jesus’ Transfiguration differ in some small but significant details. With typically colorful language, St Mark emphasizes Jesus’ garments, describing them as “glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them.” St Luke adds that “the appearance of his countenance was altered”; and St Matthew declares, “his…

An elderly woman recently broke down during Confession and began sobbing. She had attempted to offer to God what she felt was her sinful neglect in raising her son. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, she had taken him to church services on Sundays and feast days, and each day she had prayed with him and for him. Apparently, she had done all…

There’s nothing particularly serious about cracked ribs, as long as fragments of bone don’t attack your lungs or some other vital organ. But they leave you feeling like the apostle Paul: shipwrecked, beaten and lapidated.

I came about mine in a superlatively stupid way. The ceiling-high curtains were open at the top, letting more light than we…

Atheists, it seems, are finally coming out of the closet. Books, open letters, magazine articles and talk shows are providing a public forum for what is still the least respected “religious” movement or coalition in the country. According to a recent article in the New York Times, the Secular Student Alliance now has some 146 chapters in colleges…

Symbols of the resurrection [of Christ] are clear and intelligible: guile and jealousy have been banished, quarrels have been suppressed, peace is honored, and war is finished. No longer do we torment ourselves over Adam, the first-formed man, but we glorify the second Adam. No longer do we blame disobedient Eve, but we declare as blessed Mary, the…

The very heart of Orthodox life is the Church’s celebration of Holy Pascha or Easter: commemoration and reliving of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. The evening matins service of that feast includes a beautiful and poignant homily by St John Chrysostom on the mercy of God—displayed in Jesus’ parable of the workers of the eleventh hour—who…

The final Old Testament reading for Holy Saturday vespers—Daniel 3:1-57, the story of the three young men in the fiery furnace in Babylon—is composite, drawing upon both Aramaic and Greek (Septuagint) traditions. The latter modifies and amplifies a detail the Church’s patristic witnesses consider essential. That small detail is a typological…

The preceding column in this space spoke of finding beauty in the little things of our daily life, including in their imperfections. In some cultures, children are imbued from birth with sensitivity toward the visually unusual and appreciation for its deeper meaning. From a jagged crack in an ancient vase to the radiant smile of a Down’s syndrome…

“Ever since the creation of the world,” the apostle Paul declared, “[God’s] invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20). To those qualities of Power and Deity, we can add divine Beauty.^[1]

Beauty is an all-encompassing term that is nearly synonymous with “truth” and…

A good many years ago Conciliar Press published a brochure, written by Frederica Matthewes-Green, entitled 12 Things I Wish I Had Known, meaning before her first visit to an Orthodox church. It’s very much worth reading by all of us, long-time Orthodox parishioners as well as first-time visitors.

Something similar needs to be written for persons…

On January 6, Christians of Western tradition (Roman Catholics and Protestants) commemorate the Epiphany or manifestation of the newborn Christ to the Magi. To Orthodox Christians, this day celebrates the Theophany or revelation of the Holy Trinity, not at Christ’s birth, but at his baptism in the Jordan River. It marks a significant interruption in…

A woman in the parish recently buried her husband after his long and losing battle with cancer. A thirteen-year old girl still cries herself to sleep each night several months after her parents’ bitter divorce. A man off the streets, recently chrismated into the Orthodox Church, is waging a tentative battle with alcoholism, trying with too little…

Christian life and faith are filled with all kinds of paradoxes. The Church Fathers called these “antinomies,” meaning thoughts and ideas that seem contradictory but aren’t. They simply refuse to fit into the usual categories of human reasoning. The most obvious is probably the praise we offer to Mary, the Theotokos: she who bore God in her womb. We…

The hand of God moves through Israel’s history, to create and shape persons, events, institutions and rituals into prophetic foreshadowings or prefigurations of the coming salvation. Through a careful, contemplative reading of the writings of the Hebrew Bible, early Christian theologians and mystics discovered—amid scenes of warfare and revenge as…

In the preceding column I raised questions about the terribly difficult issue of euthanasia, and specifically, whether in an Orthodox Christian perspective there could ever be a morally acceptable way to hasten the death of a dying person, when that person is consumed by uncontrollable pain and suffering. Fortunately, such cases today are rare.…

“Your mother has a very strong constitution.”

The nurse is right. She does have a strong constitution. Four days ago they stopped giving her food and liquids. (Along with a DNR she had insisted, “No tubes, no forced feeding!”) Since then she has been fitfully asleep or semi-comatose, her emaciated body resting uneasily in the bed. Despite the extra…

In this and the following two columns, I would like to share some thoughts on what is perhaps the most poignant and difficult experience in human relationships: the dying of someone we deeply love. These are not explorations of the mystery of death. Rather, they are attempts, fumbling but earnest, to think about the process of dying and our most…

In our Orthodox tradition we are usually very careful to distinguish between the “Dormition” of the Mother of God and her “Assumption” into heaven. The former, we feel, is properly Orthodox, while the latter strikes us as a purely Western designation, derived from a Roman Catholic “misunderstanding” of the meaning of this feast, celebrated…

Some years ago a close family friend passed away in a nursing home. She spent the last months of her life in what appeared to be a state of semi-consciousness, rocking back and forth in her chair and muttering to herself, “Waiting, waiting…”. We never did learn just what she was waiting for, other than death. She was, though, a fervent and faithful…

The news media have been having their heyday with the so-called “Prosperity Gospel.” It gives them a chance to mock religion, particularly Christianity, and to attack it at the same time.

It’s not that the “Gospel of excess” doesn’t deserve mockery or that it shouldn’t be aggressively attacked. There’s no question that it seriously taints authentic…