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How to Establish a Prayer Rule

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Establishing and maintain a prayer rule does not have to be an onerous experience, one that is more likely to fail than succeed, writes St. Theophan the Recluse. We need a prayer rule because we need discipline, but that discipline has to be doable, one that delivers the fruits of prayer and not one that drives us to frustration, or worse, despair, because we don’t have the strength to maintain it.

In this short, simple, and eminently readable primer on prayer, St. Theophan teaches us how to approach prayer in ways the in the end will foster even deeper pray. “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you,” St. Paul teaches us in Scripture, and St. Theophan teaches us how to draw near.

Understanding Orthodoxy

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Dogma, Fr. John Romanides taught, exists to guide the faithful and to safeguard against false teaching. Dogmas don’t contain the substance of the encounter with God, they describe and direct it. Dogma itself must be experienced, lit with the fire of Divine Life to effect salvation — the healing, redemption, and restoration — of the believer. Theology, in other words, must be living, and a living theology is exemplified by a life in and with Christ as the Apostles experienced it in the early centuries of the Church.

So writes Dr. Christopher Veniamin, Professor of Patristic Theology at St. Tikhon’s Seminary, in this lucid and concise summation of Fr. Romanides’ teaching. Dr. Veniamin lays particular emphasis on the hesychast eperience first outlined by St. Gregory Palamas in the Late Byzantine Period (14th century) and revived more recently through work of Fr. Romanides.

Lay readers in particular will find the essay a useful introduction.

Recent Articles

Christ Has Risen Within Your Heart!

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In 1978, Fr George Calciu delivered seven courageous homilies, one on each Wednesday of Lent, addressing the youth of Romania, knowing that his defiance would earn him even more long years of communist imprisonment. These became monuments of resistance to the tyranny of communism, and stirred the heart of a nation with the words: “What do you know of Christ, young man? If all you know is what they have taught you in atheism classes, you have been deprived [of] the only truth that can set you free.”

He was rewarded for his faithfulness when in the midst of the harshest conceivable conditions in prison, God allowed him to experience the Uncreated Light.

Many years later, his land now open to Western influences, Fr George in this lecture once again addresses Romanian youth with renewed urgency, but this time warning of different dangers emanating from the Western world, perhaps even more treacherous than before since they assume a mask of faith.

Now he asks those who had once found Christ: “Who stole God from you? Which gardener has hidden Him from you, so that now you are alone and crying?” His message is just as compelling to us today.

It’s Pascha, Not Easter!

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The right word can make the meaning of something clear, and the wrong word can obscure or even hide its real meaning. The right word for the celebration of the resurrection of Christ is the Greek word “Pascha” which means “Passover” in English. It opens up the rich and necessary association of Christ as the “Pashal Lamb” with the paschal lamb of Exodus and the flight of the children of Abraham from the tyranny of Pharoah.

The word “Easter” hides this relation between the revealed and fulfilled; the final and complete paschal sacrifice of Christ outside the gates of Jerusalem that is properly comprehended and understood only in the light of the initial and incomplete sacrifice of the paschal lamb in Egypt.

It’s time to disassociate the term “Easter” as the description of what is in fact the final Passover, the Feasts of Feasts in the Orthodox Church. Apart from Western Europe and the United States, Orthodox Christians use the word “Pascha.” We should too.

The Symbolism of Palm Sunday

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Although it was an historical event that took place at a particular time and place, Our Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem has other dimensions as well. For example, it fulfills in a remarkable way the clear and precise prophecy of the Prophet Zacharias. But beyond this, it also has a mystical, symbolical meaning addressing the salvation of each of us. St Nikolai Velimirovich explicates here the rich symbolism of Christ’s mystical entry into the “spiritual Jerusalem” of the soul.

The Life of Our Venerable Mother Mary of Egypt

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This Life of Our Venerable Mother Mary of Egypt was written down in the seventh century by Saint Sophronios, Patriarch of Jerusalem, some hundred years after the repose of the holy Mary, who fell asleep in the Lord April 1, 522.

It is one of the most beautiful and edifying lives of a saint. Its obvious and stated purpose is to glorify God and to feed the souls of its readers.

St. Sophronios lifts up the life of blessed Mary as a most wondrous example of repentance for all the faithful. For this reason, the Church has lifted up this life before all the faithful on the Fifth Sunday of the Great Fast, the Sunday before Palm Sunday.

It is both a challenge and an inspiration to us. It shows us what a human being is capable of when she works with the all-powerful saving and forgiving grace of our all-loving God.

Orthodoxy and the Beauty of Chastity

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In the midst of an era that seeks to legitimize all modes of sexual license, this Lenten time of repentance offers us the distance from worldly passions that can allow us to fully appreciate the Christian virtue of chastity. As traditional forms of Western Christianity also remember, chastity is closely linked to sexual self-control or moderation (sophrosune).

But Orthodoxy has also retained the experience of chastity in its fulness, preserving not only the value of chastity as a moral virtue, but also its radiant beauty that follows from true chastity as entailing a very special kind of purity (hagneia).

Prof. David Bradshaw’s article helps us understand this rich Orthodox teaching concerning the beauty of chastity by elucidating the Akathist Hymn to the Mother of God, which the Church prescribes for the first five weeks of Lent, and which teaches us how, through the repentance that leads to humility, we can once again approach the beauty of sexual purity that our modern age has not only rejected, but nearly forgotten altogether.

An Independent Operator

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The Leo Ray Miller he had sown that night at the reception sprouted and spread like an ugly weed. It grew up through the cracks of whatever lies he told himself. It choked every intention, it poisoned every relationship and turned every so-called good deed into a self-serving con. He wanted to believe. There had to be some relief beyond his short-term capacity to fool himself. He wanted hope.

Is Music Sacred?

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If there is no pre-existing, intelligible order to go out to and apprehend, and to search through for what lies beyond it – which is the Creator – what then is music supposed to express? If external order does not exist, then music collapses in on itself and degenerates into an obsession with techniques. Any ordering of things, musical or otherwise, becomes purely arbitrary.

St. John Chrysostom: Turn Your Home Into Heaven

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St. John Chrysostom wrote, “Turn your home into heaven; you will do this not when you change the walls or rebuild the foundation, but when you invite the Almighty Lord to your repast. God never disregards any kind of supper. Where there is spiritual science, there is humility, sincerity and modesty. Where the husband, and the wife, and the children are in accord and united by the bonds of virtue, there is Christ among them.”

Journey to Pascha 2019

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Hats off to Byantine TX for publishing this handy guide for Lent and Holy Week and a special thank you to Fr. Jonathan Bannon of Christ The Savior Orthodox in Rockford Illinois who created it. The guide outlines this penitential period in ways easy to comprehend and digest! The “How to Participate” section is especially valuable for inculcating simple practices into our daily life that bring Christ to mind.

How Western Urban Planning Fueled War in the Middle East

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The Ottoman Empire, Roger Scruton writes, was not composed of nation-states but of creed communities. Peace between the sects could not be ensured by borders, as in Europe, but only by custom. Peace is precarious and requires constant work and architecture is part of that work. When France was given the madate to govern Syria in 1923, the character of the ancient cities of the Mideast began to change. Modernist buildings and the mania for vehicles, roads and motion eroded the native traditions of custom and creed that guided the growth of the Eastern cities for centuries.

God’s Commandments as Divine Energies

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Drawing upon the Patristic distinction between God’s transcendent and hidden essence (ousia), and His energies (energeia,) which are operative and manifest throughout creation, we can understand God’s commandments not as formal dictates but as His own energies addressing us personally and inviting us to be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) The commandments, then, are not merely or even primarily moral but transformative and ontological, concerning our very being.

Our Society Needs Stoic Values More Than Ever: A Response to the New APA Guidelines

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The Early Fathers of the Church drew upon the philosophy of Stoicism, not only by appropriating certain elements of its philosophical lexicon, but also in shaping the Church’s articulation of moral virtues. Questioning from a secular perspective recent criticisms of “traditional masculinity” for its “stoic” restraint of the passions, this essay effectually defends the moral vision of ancient Christianity against detractors in professional psychology and other behavioral sciences.

In Depth Articles

Original Sin According to St. Paul

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In regard to the doctrine of original sin as contained in the Old Testament and illuminated by the unique revelation of Christ in the New Testament, there continues to reign in the denominations of the West a great confusion, which in the last few centuries seems to have gained much ground in the theological problematics of the Orthodox East.

The Divine Liturgy as Mystical Experience

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There are cases in scripture where God appears directly and sensibly to man—indeed, does not only appear to him, but walks, speaks, dines, and even wrestles. There is no suggestion that, because God is “purely spiritual,” such appearances are not of God “as He is in Himself.”

Nature and City in the Greek East

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The poet seems to suggest that we can now find the natural city only in the imagination. The bridge for the modernist poet is now an interior, and even a psychological function. It was not always so.

Lost in Manhattan

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