This is the prayer of one who is still in the world, but no longer of the world. When despair and anxiety bite they feel like a little death. When your tiredness, your sin or your despondency collapse over you, you need to pray with the prayer of the dead, the prayer of our nothingness silently hoping against hope, silently crying out for Christ, silently waiting for the Resurrected One to be risen from our own tomb: our body and our soul. This is not abandonment, but the exact opposite: this is the prayer which is proper to our fallen nature, the desperate cry for Life of one who is made of nothing, but does not belong to nothing. This is the prayer of one who is still in the world, but no longer of the world - instead, they now belong to Christ

Every Lent is an opportunity to START ANEW, to shine in Christ, to do the things we only think about doing the rest of the year. We can go deeper in our faith, we can create secret 'signs of love and faith' with Christ, we can re-shape the courses of our thoughts and emotions so they once again flow in the direction God intended them to flow when He created us.

When we judge our brother we become anti-Christs, because we rob the True Judge - Jesus Christ - of the authority given to Him Alone by the Father. We envy His place on His Throne of Judgement and we sit on His Throne in our mind, making ourselves to be judges, although God did not give us this authority. We are not the Judge, but the ones who will be judged, with the rest of humanity. We must always remember that the Same One Who said: 'do not kill' also said: 'do not Judge'.

Some people thrive and others collapse fought by the same temptations, in the same context, surrounded by the same people. St Paisius the Agiorite (St Paisius of the Holy Mountain) and St John of the Ladder teach us that a joyful disposition of the heart and the determination to see goodness in everyone can make the difference between spiritual life and death. We need to train our thoughts to always 'translate' the situations we face into good examples, into sources of strength, virtue and beauty. Depending on whether we decode this world through a lens of love or one of condemnation, the same temptations can feed the Divine Image in us or the nothingness in us.

We often gather our forces to fight our spiritual enemies at the wrong 'gate' of our being. Most frequently, evil enters our life through the gates of our mind and heart, not that of the body. We need to pay attention and learn the behaviour of the evil one, so we may guard well the fortress of our being. Once we learn to decode his behaviour, we can finally begin to plan a strategy to fight back.

This battle is now way above our heads. We need to humbly wait in the loving palm of Christ.

There is no fall too deep for Christ's love for us. Never lose hope, my brothers and my sisters.

The opinion of others can destroy one's self-esteem. We need to found our life on Christ's values, regardless of the response that generates in those around us. We may be unpopular, but we are truly ourselves, and that is worth carrying this Cross for.

Fr. Seraphim gives a short update.

Fr. Seraphim encourages viewers to take time away before resetting their lives.

As a freelance writer, you’re going to run into a lot of clients that are petrified by the idea of plagiarized or stolen content. That fear is not without reason. Search engines are capable of sniffing out plagiarism or duplicate content and they penalize the blogs and websites that engage in it. That fear of […]

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Finding work as a freelance writer is hard enough even in fields with little competition. However, there are several niches where that competition is off the charts. If you plan to make a living writing about one of those, you’ll need to bring your A-game. Some examples of highly-contested niches include finance and (surprisingly) psychedelics. […]

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These days, anyone can start a blog or create a simple website in a matter of hours. However, getting that website to work and look just the way you want it to takes a lot more time. Most people don’t realize that and end up giving up long before the work is done. If you don’t have […]

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The events in Houston elicited some marvelous human responses. But Fr. Steven wonders why it takes a catastrophe to bring out the best in us.

Does the Church have anything to say about free speech and its attempted suppression by some today?

Why are we so worried about the things happening in the world when the Lord told us not to be?