I am not yet the spiritual person God wants me to be. Indeed, I know that the meaning of salvation is to be and become spiritual, filled with the Holy Spirit. At the beginning of a new year I reflect on what is required of me to move just a little closer to this divine […]
On this happy day, our Orthodox Church celebrates the Feast of the Wedding of Cana. It was the occasion of the first miracle that our Lord Jesus Christ performed. We sometimes think that being a serious Christian must be a miserable thing, but we see that our Lord Jesus, our God and our Saviour, shared […]
Where do we find the grace for repentance? It is not in hating sin, as if we could find within ourselves the strength to resist temptation. So much of our spiritual effort is wasted in prideful self-righteousness, and in the worldly despair which is rooted in self-centred shame that we are not as good as […]
One of the questions which are often asked about Orthodoxy by those who are investigating our ancient and Apostolic faith, is why it is that we call our pastors and priests, Father, or Abouna, or some other word in another language that has the same meaning, when it seems that the Lord Jesus Christ forbids […]
We should not imagine that the practice of unceasing prayer and the unfailing awareness of the presence of God is to be reserved only for a very few of the great monastic pioneers. That would be like saying that there is no point in trying to get physically fit unless we can compete at an […]
In the Gospel reading for today, the 25th day of the Egyptian month of Babah, we read the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, recorded in the 16th chapter of the Gospel of St John… 23, 24 And in that day you shall ask Me nothing. Truly, truly, I say unto you, If you shall ask […]
I was asked today… Abouna, why is it that some people have a deep connection with God for some time and then fall into sin, while they are very aware that they are breaking God’s heart? How does God see these people? I mean maybe before they experienced Him, they didn’t know Him at all […]
Some have imagined that in the resurrection our human bodies will be spiritual, like the angels, and even that the body of our Lord Jesus was of this nature, and was no longer physical after his resurrection. The passage of Scripture which is used to justify this opinion is 1 Corinthians 15:42-44, in which St […]
One of the most interesting and moving documents from the early Church is the small diary kept by Perpetua, a catechumen of the Church of Carthage, in the days before her martyrdom with other Christians in about 203 A.D. When we read her own words we find ourselves brought into the life of the earliest […]
In this post I wish to consider one of the works of the early Father of the Church, St Irenaeus. This Irenaeus, one of the most important of the second century teachers of the Church was born in Smyrna in about 130 A.D., and had been taught by the equally famous bishop of Smyrna, St […]