Category Archives: Blog

From our text, Community of Grace, Chapter 4, “It Takes a Village” we read that an elderly grandmother who, in response to someone who claimed focusing on church community shelters children too much, retorted “What’s wrong with being sheltered?…It meets my needs.” The author goes on to note, “Thinking later about this lively discussion, I wondered […]

From A Community of Grace: It takes a Village (Chapter 4) The author writes, “Children love and need tradition, order, and predictability. The value of tradition lies in its repetition, its intimacy, its knowledge this is what we do, what we have been through together, what we have shared, laughed at, and been a part of.” I […]

Saint Photina The Church has given the woman in today’s Gospel passage the name “Photina”. Her name is based on the word “light” because she is both enlightened herself, and directs the whole town back to Christ who is the Light of Life. What does it mean that she is enlightened? First, remember we are […]

George had a tumultuous childhood.  His father died when he was young, and his mother moved him far from his hometown.  When he grew up, he became a soldier in the military, achieving a very high rank.  He treasured his faith much more than the treasures of the world, and when the emperor began to abuse and kill […]

April-May Book Club- Community of Grace: An Orthodox Christian Year in Alaska by Mary Alice Cook Throughout the Christian world and beyond, people are beginning to recognize the need for community—the need to belong to a close and caring group of people who provide each other with physical, material, emotional, and spiritual support on a daily basis. But […]

“I say frequent prayer because purity and perfection in prayer is not within our reach, as St. Paul the Apostle indicates. The Spirit comes to help us in our weakness when we do not know how to pray (Rom. 8:26). Consequently, our only contribution toward perfection in prayer, the mother of all spiritual good, is […]

This Week’s Reflection “I told him that the soul could be freed from sinful thoughts only by guarding the mind and cleansing the heart and that this could be done by interior prayer. I added that according to the holy Fathers, one who performs saving works simply from the fear of hell follows the way […]

The three-fold apparatus that empowers the Christian to navigate the complexities of the Great Fast, and arrive eager and prepared at the Resurrection, consists of prayer, fasting, and alms-giving (Matthew 6).   Prayer reflects the Christian’s vision of the Beauty of God, true self-awareness of a failure to live according to the invitation of this Beauty, and […]

“The trouble is that we live far from ourselves and have but little wish to get any nearer to ourselves. Indeed we are running away all the time to avoid coming face to face with our real selves, and we barter the truth for trifles.” I recall being in seminary, every day we would wake […]

The devil is very good at taking things that are good and beautiful, and twisting them into something evil and ugly.  God though, is even better at untwisting them to reveal the original goodness and beauty that He gave them.  Such is the case with a feast that we will celebrate on this coming Saturday […]