The goal of Great Lent is not only to deny ourselves and live for Christ, but also to let Christ live in us.

It is good for our children to understand that the Orthodox treat bodies differently.

Elissa reminds us that good stewardship heals our relationship to money and other possessions.

Elissa discusses how the parish and Sunday school can help support the family throughout Lent.

Elissa offers some suggestions for guiding children through death and dying.

The four Gospels offer different perspectives and even different stories on our Lord. Elissa uses this situation as the basis for a family retreat during Great and Holy Friday.

The Holy Spirit can be a difficult and abstract concept to explain to young people, so in honor of the feast of Pentecost, Elissa explores the story of the tongues of fire, as well as the prayer "O Heavenly King," to find ways to describe this most mysterious person of the Holy Trinity.

We tell them that God is Love, but do we go a step further and teach them what it means to actually love other people? Literally, how do we show love? I think we assume that people know that already, but maybe they don't—or maybe we could do better.

Fr. Michael discusses fear of, and love for, God.

Fr. Michael encourages us to trust that God, as our coach, will teach us to float and to swim, knowing that He is our teacher, and His hands are beneath us.

Fr. Michael uses the illustration of rock climbing to talk about fear and freedom.

Fr. Michael shares an article about happiness he wrote for the Death to the World zine.

Fr. Michael reflects on a recent public-transit pilgrimage.

Fr. Michael shares from St. Isaac the Syrian, "How one speaks of spiritual things is perhaps more important than the very spiritual matters themselves."

One of the perennial struggles I have in the spiritual life comes from a form of pride that is lodged fast in me and manifests itself in an "all or nothing" attitude toward spiritual life and other life disciplines. It can take various forms in different arenas of my life, but it always follows a similar pattern. The pattern goes like this: I set a goal or rule or ideal for myself, one that I could easily achieve if I only apply myself a little. This goal could be a goal for work or for prayer; it could be a rule for conduct (such as how much computer time I will allow myself or how much and what I will or will not eat or drink); or it could be an ideal such as what a priest should look or act like. Any such goal or rule or ideal I set for myself I tell myself is reasonable and attainable if I only push a little, if I only apply myself.

Fr. Michael shares on Thomas Sunday, "Those who doubt, those who fear, those who hide and shut the doors are not cut off from the One who appears in rooms with closed doors."

It is difficult for some of us who were raised on a theology of substitutionary atonement, those of us Protestant converts to holy Orthodoxy, it is difficult for us to accept that our final judgement will involve anything more than the forgiveness of sins. But the Church teaches us otherwise. Parables such as the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the Separation of the Sheep and the Goats play a huge role in the hymnology of the Orthodox Church and in its understanding of what our judgement before God will look like. That is, judgement before God is not merely about forgiveness of sin. But rather, the judgement of the Age to Come is also about comfort and torment; or as Christ puts it in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Father Abraham speaking to the Rich Man who is in torment), “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and you are tormented.”

If we want to see God, where do we begin? Archimandrite Aimilianos says that we must begin with what we can do. We can seek; we can come to God with longing. In other words, if you want to see God, you have to want to see God. I’m not being redundant. There is wanting, and then there is wanting. I can want to become a doctor, for example; but if I don’t want to become a doctor more than I want to play video games, more than I want to hang out with my friends and more than just about anything else, I will never become a doctor. There is wanting, and then there is really wanting: wanting so much that it is pretty much all I want. And so we might say that if you want to see God, you have to want to see God more than just about anything else.

This morning my wife and I took one of our occasional half-day vacations. It’s a warmish 19 degree day (68 Fahrenheit) with the sun poking through the clouds. We walked a mile or so up a trail in the hills and then afterward stopped by a country tea and scone place for a bite and a chat and just some quite time together, Bonnie working on her knitting project and I reading a book (what else would I be doing?). Bonnie asked me what I was reading, so I read her a little quote from from Archimandrite Aimilianos. What does it mean to be dispassionate? It means turning exclusively to God, with all your strength, energy, power, and love. There is no turning aside to anything else whatsoever….

In 1851, an anonymous monk on Mount Athos wrote a book on prayer. The title of the book has been translated as The Watchful Mind: Teachings on the Prayer of the Heart. It is a book that I cannot recommend for most people because, like much classic Orthodox spiritual writing (the Philokalia, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian, to name a few), it was written for people pursuing the spiritual life, a life in communion with God, in a very specific monastic setting, a setting that exists in very few places in the world today, or some might say—indeed have said—in a setting that does not exist at all in the world any more. And yet, these texts are nonetheless compelling for us because they bear witness to a relationship with God, an intensity of relationship with God, that many people in the world today long for.

One of the greatest frustrations in my spiritual life has been caused by a passion for certainty. You might call it a need to know, a need to know what God is doing in my life, a need to have some explanation for or feeling for why my life is the way it is right now. When I don’t know—or when I don’t have some explanation that I can tell myself is the reason why things are happening to me and around me the way they are happening—if I don’t have something I can say to myself that gives reason and explanation to the pain and apparent arbitrariness of my experience, then because I don’t know, I have a great deal of inner turmoil. And it often happens that the inner turmoil of not knowing—or not thinking that I know—why things are the way they are or what God is doing in my life and in the lives of those around me through the painful, unfair and unbearable circumstances I or we are experiencing, the pain of this not knowing is more tormenting than the actual suffering I experience from the circumstance.

We don’t clean ourselves up before we pray—then we would never pray (or we would only pray the prayers of the Pharisees). We come to God in prayer bringing all of our weaknesses with us, even, perhaps glorying in our weaknesses. We glory in our weaknesses because we know that any deliverance we experience, any good that comes from our lives will only be evidence of God’s great love and power to save even the most screwed up, even the chief of sinners. We glory in our weakness because we know that our weakness is only another opportunity for God to reveal His greatness.

The Orthodox Divine Liturgy presents an introductory phrase in the form of prayer—as is typical in Orthodox Christianity, there is the prayer before the prayer. It goes like this: "And grant, O Lord, that with boldness and without condemnation we may dare to call upon you the Heavenly God as Father and to say." Why is it a daring thing to say the Lord’s Prayer? Why is it daring to call God "Our Father in heaven"?

A catechumen once asked what he could do to get victory over bad dreams: especially lustful dreams that roused his passions and often led him into temptation. I told him that this is one of those aspects of life in a fallen body that must be resisted and endured. One of the ways Satan seeks to weary and wear out the saints (or those who strive to be holy) is through the constant going astray of our flesh. Our job is to resist and to return our attention to God and to whatever is good, true and beautiful. When we turn our attention to Jesus, then Jesus fights our battles. One of the desert fathers said that trying to confront our own wicked thoughts is like trying to drive off wild dogs by throwing biscuits at them. We end up feeding the very thing we are trying to drive away. But if we turn our attention to Jesus, to the One who saves, to the One who made us and loves us and calls us to Himself, then the barking of the dogs fades away into the background. Then Christ Himself fights our battles, and we return to our natural place as worshipers of God, as those whose minds and hearts are attending to the one thing needful.

Maybe it’s just the weather: Cold rain, wind and fog. Repeat. If there is any lesson I have learned while praying in the rain, while I have tried to pray in the damp, dreary mess that is my life, if there is any one thing I have learned it is this: God is where I am, not where I wish I were or think I should be; God is near the brokenhearted; God has mercy on sinners.

It seems as though the nearer I draw to God, the farther away I realize I am. The more I realize, the less I understand. People sometimes ask me about certainty: “How can you be certain about your faith in God?” Honestly, I gave up certainty years ago. The only thing I am certain of is my utter dependence on the mercy of God.

Continuing in homily 42, St. Isaac gives us another warning. When you find unchanging peace, that is, when everything is going smoothly for you most of the time, then “beware: you are very far from the divine paths trodden by the weary feet of the saints. For as long as you are journeying in the way to the city of the Kingdom and are drawing nigh to the city of God, this will be a sign for you: the strength of the temptations that you encounter. And the nearer you draw nigh and progress, the more temptations will multiply against you.”

In Homily 43, St. Isaac speaks of three areas of ‘discipline,’ or areas in which we must guide or rule our life. Proper discipline in these areas leads to purity. These three areas are bodily discipline, leading to purification of the body; discipline of the mind, leading to purification of the soul; and spiritual discipline, leading to purification of the mind.

I feel a little crazy sometimes, like an idiot—not a godly, holy idiot, just a plain, old-fashioned idiot: the kind that boasts of humility and speaks about the virtue of silence.

If we are really interested in helping others who are sick, who are in sin, and who have fallen, then St. Isaac tells us, “know that the sick are in greater need of loving care than of rebuke.”

St. Isaac the Syrian refers to zeal as a guard dog. He refers to sinful and unwanted thoughts and impulses as birds that fly around our soul. Zeal is the guard dog that barks and warns us that these unwanted thoughts are there and motivates us to chase these birds away.

It seems the future of the Church, the future of the next Great and Holy Council (or the continuation of the one that has already begun) depends mostly on us, the people: the moms and dads, the brothers and sisters, the laity in general and the married priests and simple monastics. We’re the one’s whose holiness or lack thereof determines the holiness of tomorrow’s generation of leaders in the Church.

"Most of us most of the time will be attending to the first stage of the spiritual struggle: the purification of our senses through ascetic discipline, the control of the passions and developing the habit of attention. But even as we are focused mostly on this first stage, it does not mean that, by God’s Grace, we might not also have small clumps, small glimpses of illumination here and there growing in the field of our soul also. And who knows, maybe with time and continued struggle, deep in the heart of one of those little groves, in the darkest, most undisturbed part, who knows maybe the seedling of a great cedar is taking root."

"In our awkward attempts to love the needy, we discover our own poverty. They may hunger for bread, but we hunger for righteousness. In clothing the naked, we see our own nakedness, our complete lack of virtue. In visiting the prisoner or the sick we discover that we are imprisoned by habits of prideful and judgemental thought; we are sick with selfish passions and desires. When we do the outer work that Jesus speaks of, we discover the inner meaning that Jesus is referring to." Here is the article that Fr. Michael refers to: http://blogs.ancientfaith.com/prayingintherain/2015/10/your-kingdom-come-the-sorting-parables/.

Sometimes letters are sent to AFR addressed to no specific person. In such cases various authors, podcasters or bloggers are called upon to respond to the letter. The lot fell to me for this one. Of course, in selecting a person to respond to a question, you don’t necessarily get the best or even most correct answer to the question. You get that person’s answer—given his or her current understanding, knowledge, ability to communicate and level of sleep deprivation. I share the question and my response with you-all in the hope that some of you might find it interesting and even a little helpful—even if you have never wondered about the Hebrew rendering of Hosea 14:2.

Many holy fathers and mothers of the Church have pointed out that spiritual words are like powerful medicine. If taken inappropriately, what was designed to heal ends up causing harm.

"And because such suffering is a temptation to sin, it is also an opportunity to deny Christ. It is an opportunity to curse God or curse man made in the image of God. It is an opportunity to become lost in self pity and never-ending introspection. It is an opportunity to become engrossed in the immediate human or demonic or biological causes, and to ignore God almost completely, as though our suffering and difficult circumstance were happening behind God’s back. The same difficult or painful circumstance becomes for us the means by which we either grow in Christ or in some way deny Him. And of course what is happening to us never makes any sense in the midst of the suffering. That’s part of the temptation. We don’t know why God is letting this happen. We don’t know what God is doing. It just doesn’t make sense. And at that point of confusion, that dark night of the body and soul, all we have left is naked trust, naked hope that God is still God despite all of the evidence to the contrary, despite the pain and confusion and injustice of the situation. Can we say with Job, 'Even if He slay me, yet will I trust in Him'?"

Fr. Michael Gillis reminds us that our salvation lies in living humbly within our measure, pushing a little during lent, perhaps, but always judging ourselves unworthy of a higher or stricter measure. This kind of fasting will be to our spiritual benefit.

Fr. Michael Gillis uses a gardening analogy to discuss dealing with the deep-rooted sins in life.

For all that Christ accomplished for our salvation at Pascha, it remains still for us to receive it. And for us to receive the resurrected Life, we have to thirst for it. All of the blessings and gifts and graces of heaven are ours through Christ, but God will not force them on us. God will only give us the heavenly gifts if we thirst for them.

It seems whenever there is a crisis, people begin to see possible predictions and warnings about such times in the scripture. And certainly Christ does warn us to be prepared for the End, and to recognize that various tribulations and “wars and rumours of wars” would be the ongoing signs that the End is near. However, the scriptures themselves also tell us that we are already in the Last Days. That is, from the time of the Apostles we have been in the “last hour,” and already “many antichrists have come” (1John 2: 18). For just as the Kingdom of Heaven is near (at hand) at all times, so too, the End is always near.

Last night I attended a prayer service in the street in front of the Coptic Orthodox Church that was burned down early Monday morning. Although some evidence points toward arson, arson has not been proven and no motive has yet been identified. However, there has been a recent spike in violence against churches (vandalism, arson and threats), some sources report over 200 significant incidents in Canada since June. Many of us may be wondering what we should do. Well, I think we should do what our Coptic Orthodox brothers and sisters are doing. We should pray and love.

There are many kinds of waves in the chaotic world we live in. Sometimes the waves are pushing to the left. Sometimes the waves push to the right. Really, there is no rhyme or reason to it. In fact, part of what can drive you crazy is how unreasonable life in this world is. Like the waves on the ocean, it all depends which way the wind is blowing. And the wind that influences the political and social realities of this fallen world is the spirit of the age, the spirits of wickedness that dwell in the air (Ephesians 6:12).

Fr. Michael talks about the difference between inwardly-focused spiritual zeal and outwardly-focused emotional zeal.

What will we finally say when death visits us - and not for coffee?

Fr. Tom Hopko continues his informative series on the Names of Jesus by exploring the term "Rabbi" or "Teacher" when referring to Jesus.

Fr. Tom takes us to the Letter to the Hebrews which tells us why Jesus is the perfect sacrifice or offering.

Jesus didn't just say he would give us our daily bread; he said he is the Bread of Life. Fr. Tom Hopko continues his study of the great "I Am" sayings of Jesus.

Peace is not simply the absence of conflict but rather a virtue reflecting the character of God Himself.

Jesus is the Head of the Church and the Head of the Body which is the Church. Fr. Thomas reflects on this title for Christ in this new episode.