In today’s sermon (for St Thomas Sunday) Fr John drove home the doctrinal fact that Orthodoxy celebrates, today, the sacredness of the Human Body. It was not enough for Jesus to be a ghost, that rose from the dead, or, as the modern ironic and irreverent and blasphemous people say, “Zombie Jesus.” Jesus had to [...]

Lent starts for the Orthodox churches on Monday this week. Sunday night we start with the service known as “Forgiveness Vespers”. At the end of the service each person – clergy and laity, from most elder to the youngest child – going around in a big circle around the inside of the church, makes a [...]

I have to find my inner bully and put him to rest. As much as my personal sex issues seem to drive readership, I think I need to figure out what makes it possible for me to just snap, anger-wise, usually at people who don’t deserve the full thrust of my personal demons. While we [...]

Consider a less-passive form of the Serenity Prayer. Life appears to be divided into two kinds of events or, if youyou will, two sorts of points along the space-time continuum. There are points or events that we choose, and there are points or events that happen to us. Wisdom seems to be invested in, first, [...]

Right after 9/11 I began hoarding photographs of the Twin Towers off the internet: hundreds of megabytes of images in a folder called “Stuff”. I had no idea what it was for, mind you: when I finally threw out the folder into my trash, I did so without thinking… sometime in 2006. But I fixated [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot – never a good thing, I think – and I’ve realized I’m old. Not “really” old, you know, but older. I’m nearly 50 – will be in a couple of years. I’m saving up, in fact, for a trip to Rome on my 50th Birthday. Bringing the boys with me, [...]

I like watching patterns and then commenting on them. One pattern I noticed in sexual relationship is that they flare up and pass into embers. This passing into embers is of great concern to modern culture who seem to want to imagine that the great flare up is normal, is “real love” and that the [...]

It has become a hard habit of mine, recently, to question my assumptions and those of others around me: not because anyone is wrong or immoral, but rather because I find it amusing to compare the a priori assumptions in a conversation. As an hypothetical example take a conversation that may be imagined at a [...]

The thing about the feast of the Presentation of the Theotokos in the Temple is that we know it can’t have happened that way. Without knowing if there was a tradition to dedicate young women in the Temple (maybe, maybe not) we can make a lot of logical assumptions about the facts as offered in [...]

“Owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia…” There is great gain in godliness with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world; but if we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content. But those who desire [...]