Lead 
Don’t assume you are good soil(0)
I’m reading Matthew 13 tonight. In one parable Christ describes people who hear about the Kingdom and genuinely, joyfully believe — but they fail to bear fruit and persevere to the end. In the next parable He says that not everybody in the church is His, but we won’t see who’s who until the final Judgment…
Where Two or Three Are Gathered in My Name
An encounter with Life in a Soviet death camp.
During one of the winters, a young man was assigned to Father Arseny’s barracks. Aged 23, he was a student and had been sentenced to twenty years in the camp. He had no experience of camp life because he had been sent to this special camp directly from the strict Butirki Prison in Moscow. Still young, he did not fully understand what lay ahead of him.
Identity in communion
The only way we can find ourselves is to deny ourselves. That’s Christ’s teaching. If you cling to yourself, you lose yourself. The unwillingness to forgive is the ultimate act of not wanting to let yourself go. You want to defend yourself, assert yourself, protect yourself. There is a consistent line through the Gospel — if you want to be the first you must will to be the last…
Justice and forgiveness
If a person is inspired by the spirit of God, he or she can forgive. But I’m not sure you can say that in general there is the feeling that forgiveness is of value. I have met people who would say, “I don’t care. I can go on and live my life; it really doesn’t matter to me. If I’m not bothering you and you aren’t bothering me, why be reconciled?” This is plain indifference…
More in this category:
- Hallowe’en: An Orthodox approach
- The nature of things
- Can a scientist believe in the Resurrection?
- The Crucifixion of the Paschal Lamb
- Dude, where’s my God?
- At the beginning of Lent
- Ancestral Versus Original Sin
- In the Temple of Broken Hearts
- The Lost Gospel of Mary
- When Tradition Fractures
- Perichoresis: God and His mother
- Monasticism in the 21st Century
- September 24: The Feast of Saint Silouan
- The Monastic Call
- Under the Heaven Tree
- Call no man “Father”
- Orthodox Study Bible