Home / Work of the Church / Reflections in Christ
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…
Does anyone give credence any longer to the idea that God is Lord of heaven and earth? Heaven perhaps. But the earth appears to be wholly autonomous, on its own, devoid of any transcendent presence, power or value. Among the peoples of the earth, none have special status, none seem chosen or elect. None are exempt from conflict, tragedy and ultimate…
In his letter to the Galatians, the apostle Paul declares that Christ has set us free for the sake of freedom itself (5:1). Our life in Christ is characterized by freedom, eleutheria, meaning essentially freedom from the constraints of Mosaic law. It is a freedom in the Holy Spirit, which enables us, by grace alone, to live not “according to the…
The Book of Exodus is a story of liberation and salvation accomplished through God’s “mighty acts” on behalf of His people Israel. Beginning with the Lord’s self-revelation to Moses, it constitutes a remarkable epic, not merely of “deliverance,” the meaning of the Book’s title, but of oppression, faith, covenant fidelity between God and His people,…
Some five hundred years before the coming of Christ, the people of Israel found themselves scattered among the nations of the ancient Near East. Their exile into Babylon had come to an end, yet many remained in the diaspora, the great dispersion of God’s elect flock. What united them above all was their longing to return to their homeland, to…
In the prologue to his Gospel, the evangelist John takes up the account of creation given in the first chapter of Genesis, in order to illustrate the story of redemption accomplished by Jesus Christ, the eternal Son and Word of God. “In the beginning,” out of His infinite otherness, with God and as God, the Word comes forth, to create the world and…
In the very beginning, there was nothing. Nothing at all.
There was neither time nor space, neither matter nor energy, neither life nor death. There were no galaxies, no stars or planets; nor were there molecules, atoms, or any of the vast array of subatomic particles that constitute physical reality as we know it. There was nothing.
The concept…
Back in the early 60s I had to catch the subway each morning on the east side of Manhattan, to get to my seminary intern position. From our tiny 6th floor walk-up apartment on York Avenue, I passed by a run down tenement building not far from the mouth of the station. Two or three times a week two guys were huddled against the stoop of the building,…
Often
in our spiritual life we experience a strong and at times overwhelming tension between evil and good, temptation and grace.From at least the time of Zoroaster (6th century B.C.), down through the Qumran community (1QS) and into the early Church (1 John 4:6), these forces have been identified as warring spirits that dwell within the human heart…
Thanksgiving is over and we are moving toward what one of our wise and dedicated priests refers to as “Getmas.” He is as frustrated and dismayed at what exuberant commercialism and American popular religion have done to Christmas as I am with the relentless efforts to transform our national feast of Thanksgiving into “Turkey Day.” These campaigns…
According to the polls, most Americans seem reasonably content with their lives. They are both proud and relieved to live in what many proclaim to be “the greatest nation in the world,” although immigrants aside, most have never lived anywhere else. They take it for granted that free-market capitalism is fundamental to true democracy, and that the…