Reflections in Christ

Newspapers are always happy to cover bad news—as the old saying has it, “If it bleeds, it leads.”  Stories of kindness and heroism are not considered news in the same way as are stories of atrocity and disaster—and massacre.  Consider the coverage given to the slaughter in Paris of late associated with the Charlie Hebdo magazine.  Consider…

Christians read the Hebrew Scriptures with different eyes than do their Jewish neighbors.  For Jewish readers their Scriptures are primarily about—well, themselves.  That is, the goal of their sacred history remains the nation of Israel, established and secure in their own land, each one sitting under his vine and fig tree, and worshipping in the…

Christianity makes no sense.  Just ask self-proclaimed intellectual giants like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.  They will tell you that Christian claims are crazy, outrageous, and intellectually scandalous.  The very idea that a man who lived in Palestine two millennia ago, who wrote not a single line that survives, who never travelled…

On the two Sundays prior to Christmas, we focus on the Old Testament.  Two Sundays before that blessed day, we focus liturgically upon all the Fathers of the Old Covenant, and on the Sunday before Christmas, we focus upon the actual ancestors of Christ, as reckoned through His legal father, Joseph.  Throughout all this time, we meditate upon the…

“The magic of childhood” is a phrase which has become so proverbial that there is a Pinterest selection dedicated to it.  Childhood is wistfully hailed and enthusiastically applauded as a magical time, golden with innocence and purity.  We view children with dewy eyes because of a special magical quality they somehow possess which enables them to…

On Saturday November 1, 2014, Brittany Maynard committed suicide.  She had been diagnosed last spring with a rare form of brain cancer and given six months to live.  She decided she did not want to live that time suffering from her disease with its increasingly severe seizures, and so she moved to Oregon with her husband and took the overdose of…

The apostles’ hearts were filled with rage.  The Master was heading toward Jerusalem, and He had sent messengers on ahead to secure lodging for Himself and His apostles.  Some of the messengers had entered a town of the Samaritans, but when the Samaritan villagers learned that Jesus was making for Jerusalem, they abruptly refused them all…

One of the Church most pressing needs today has nothing to do with money, or with weathering scandal, or with achieving greater importance in the eyes of the governing powers.  The Church’s most pressing need today is for its members to rediscover who they are.  I say this because there is every evidence that many Christians have forgotten who…

Richard Dawkins is blind.  Spiritually blind.  I say this not to pick on him especially; multitudes of people are spiritually blind.  In one sense, it is nobody’s fault; we were all born that way.  And unless our eyes have been opened through the Holy Spirit and holy baptism, we remain that way.

One of the many things Mr. Dawkins cannot see is…

In the translation provided in our official OCA Divine Liturgy book of the festal material for the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross there exists a puzzle.  All of the material there is quite appropriate to the feast—the psalm for the First Antiphon is Psalm 22, which begins with Christ’s cry of dereliction from the cross, “My God, my God,…

Father Alexander Schmemann famously said that Christianity is “the end of religion.”  But if Christianity is not a religion, what is it?  In a word, it is the source of a new birth, a new nature, a new kind of human being.  Apart from Christ, all people share a human nature that is weak, fallen, darkened, vulnerable to evil spirits.  As Saint…

When infants are brought to the baptismal font, they not only come with parents and friends, but also their sponsors—traditionally in churches of the Russian tradition, a man and a woman.  These sponsors have liturgical duties to perform during the service, such as holding the child, and making the responses when the priest requires that the child…

One of the benefits of reading history is that it enables one to compare one’s own era with other eras, and so identify the blind spots of former times and as well as the blind spots of one’s own time.  As C.S. Lewis once pointed out (in his essay On the Reading of Old Books), “Not that there is any magic about the past. People were no…

On the eve of the commemoration of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea on Sunday, June 1, 2014, there are three Old Testament lessons read at Great Vespers.  Two of them are not unexpected.  From the Book of Deuteronomy, we have one lesson about Moses’ call to appoint elders to govern the vast numbers of Israel, and another lesson…

You have probably noticed that we are no longer in the fourth century.  In that century, the great rival of Christianity was paganism—the worship of the old gods, still worshipped by much of the population, a few of whom were powerful and well-heeled.  Some scholars estimate that when Constantine declared himself on the side of the Christians…

One wonders sometimes about why the Gospel story of the healing of the paralytic was chosen for the Paschal season.  One understands why the stories of Thomas and the Myrrh-bearers were chosen, but the paralytic?  Perhaps our incomprehension is rooted in our modern separation of Pascha from baptism.  In the early Church from at least the time of…

Saint Thomas, it seems, can never catch a break, at least in popular culture.  Our culture knows him as “doubting Thomas,” and one single and uncharacteristic lapse has forever labelled him as a doubter and made him the patron saint of sceptics.  He is regarded as suffering from an innate tendency to doubt and to faithlessness, as if he somehow…

In recent months I have come to the conclusion that the best place to appreciate the significance of Pascha is in a cancer ward, or a hospice for the dying, or by a deathbed.  When one stands in any of these terrible places, one enjoys an immunity from the lies of the world, for the world tells each one of us that we are a race of immortals,…

Every year during Lent, we invite into our churches a great pastor, Saint Andrew of Crete, and listen while he leads us in a meditation on sin and repentance.  That is, we listen while his Great Canon is chanted, and in response we reply over and over again, “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me!”  Some things in this long poetic work might…

During the mid-point of Great Lent, on the Sunday of the Veneration of the Cross, the following verses are sung at the Alleluia just before the reading of the Gospel:  “Remember Thy congregation which Thou hast gotten of old.  God is our King before the ages; He hath worked salvation in the midst of the earth!”  The verses are from Psalm 74,…