Life in Christ frees us to build intimacy with integrity
A prayer by St Nikolai Velimirovich used in the 6th session of the FtFtL pastoral program “Forgiving and Forgiven”:
Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them. Enemies have driven me into Your embrace more than friends have. Friends have bound me to earth, enemies have loosed me from earth and have demolished all my aspirations in the world. Enemies have made me a stranger in worldly realms and… [ read more ]
In Orthodoxy, we often hear talk about the mortification of the passions. What do we mean by this? Perhaps the Paschal season helps us to understand.
Christ destroyed death not by killing, but by voluntarily accepting his own death. Through his voluntary death, he destroyed death, and that destruction of death by death gave abundant life — life to those in the tombs!
So we don’t fight against the passions directly, we mortify them by our death… [ read more ]
What does venerating the cross teach us about how to deal with our addictions and habitual sins?
From the beginning of this series, I’ve been talking about how seeing iconographically — seeing with the eye of the heart, the nous — changes everything. Last time, I talked about the way in which repentance is the context in which the eye of the heart can be opened enabling us to see truly — to begin to perceive… [ read more ]
