Reflections in Christ

The Latin phrase e pluribus unum is found on the seal of the United States, adopted by an Act of their Congress in 1782. It was considered de facto as their national motto until 1956, when the motto “In God we trust” was officially adopted. E pluribus unum means “out of many, one”, referring to the many individuals and states becoming one…

In becoming incarnate as a baby in Bethlehem long ago, God revealed a change in His modus operandi. That is, in all His previous visitations (such as His appearance to Israel on Mount Sinai when He gave them His Law, or His theophanies to Isaiah in the Temple or to Ezekiel by the River Chebar), He came to us from the outside. While residing in…

Readers of my vintage (and historians) will recognize the above title as the first line in the song extolling motherhood, with each letter in the word “mother” standing for a particular maternal attribute.

(‘O’ means only that she’s growing old; ‘T’ is for the tears she shed to save me, etc. etc.)  The song was popularized by Eddy…

The good people of the “Come Receive the Light” radio programme wanted to interview me about St. Tabitha (whose resurrection by St. Peter is described in Acts 9:36f), so I found myself going to the Synaxarion to see what other information or traditions about St. Tabitha I could glean there.  The Synaxarion, a collection of stories about all the…

The Church has classically been described by four adjectives: one, holy, catholic and apostolic. If I were looking for a more concise way to sum up these attributes, I would choose one word: alien.

The on-line Oxford dictionary describes “alien” as, “belonging to a foreign country”, “unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful” and…

A wry joke was making the rounds in 1978. It went something like this: “Have you heard how the Catholics are electing Popes these days? They’re going to the polls!” The reference, of course, was to the then-recent election of the Pole Karol Wojtyla as the new Pope, elected after the untimely death of Pope John Paul I, who died after a…

Like many Orthodox, I am fascinated by God’s annual gift to His Church of the Holy Fire, which He kindles faithfully in the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem every Holy Saturday. (That’s “the Church of the Holy Sepulchre” for you tourists.) I first heard of the Holy Fire from reading (of all things) H.V. Morton’s famous travelogue of…

The year 2008 saw the release by Doubleday Press of a book written by (the cover reads) “His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew”, entitled Encountering the Mystery. (It is one of the few books I have read in which the author’s name is twice as long as book’s title.) It is intended as a guide for the average person to help their…

There is a swing-style song, written by Jimmy Kennedy and Irving Berlin in 1929, and popularized by “the Four Lads” in 1953 named “Istanbul Not Constantinople”. It begins:

“Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it’s Turkish delight on a moonlit night.

Every gal in…

Recently I began what I hope will become a dialogue with a fundamentalist. That is, I asked on-line for a free copy of the Quran, and in due time it arrived in the mail. After a decent delay, the people who kindly supplied it to me emailed me to ask what I thought of it. It was, of course, not so much an interested query as an attempt at conversion,…

Orthodox theology can pop up in some very unexpected places.  One hot night in July, the talented Jesus People performer Barry McGuire (of New Christy Minstrels and “Eve of Destruction” fame) was performing and talking about salvation.  Looking out at the vast audience, he introduced a song by saying, “God took His Kingdom and He tucked it…