Category Archives: quotes

We express ourselves in thanksgiving.

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At this season of Thanksgiving as a holiday, it seems good to consider thanksgiving as a way of life, even a way to Life. First, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones brings up a good point about the Garden of Eden:

“. . . The terrible fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man’s troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell. . . .”

—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (1971)

Mikael Toppelius, Expulsion of Adam and Eve, Finland

Fr. Alexander Schmemann also mentions that garden:

“In the story of the Garden this took place in the cool of the day: that is, at night. And Adam, when he left the Garden where life was to have been eucharistic — an offering of the world in thanksgiving to God — Adam led the whole world, as it were, into darkness. In one of the beautiful pieces of Byzantine hymnology Adam is pictured sitting outside, facing Paradise, weeping. It is the figure of man himself.”

But that sad picture is not the end. The Son of God became incarnate, and Jesus Christ is the New Adam. He has fulfilled all that the first Adam failed to do, and now in the Divine Liturgy we can:

“…ascend to heaven in Christ to see and to understand the creation in its real being as glorification of God, as that response to divine love in which alone creation becomes what God wants it to be: thanksgiving, eucharist, adoration. It is here — in the heavenly dimension of the Church, with ‘thousands of Archangels and myriads of Angels, with the Cherubim and Seraphim … who soar aloft, borne on their pinions …’ — that we can finally ‘express ourself,’ and this expression is: Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of Sabaoth. Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord. This is the ultimate purpose of all that exists, the end, the goal and the fulfillment, because this is the beginning, the principle of Creation.”

“In thanksgiving we recognize and confess above all the divine source and the divine calling of our life. The prayer of thanksgiving affirms that God brought us from nonexistence into being, which means that he created us as partakers of Being, i.e., not just something that comes from him, but something permeated by his presence, light, wisdom, love – by what Orthodox theology, following St. Gregory Palamas, calls the divine energies and which makes the world called to and capable of transfiguration into a ‘new heaven and a new earth,’ and the ruler of creation, man, called to and capable of theosis, ‘partaking of the divine nature.’”

-Fr. Alexander Schmemann

These three quotes from Fr. Alexander are from the book, For the Life of the World, an incredibly rich and deep explanation of Orthodox Christian theology. Our women’s book group and sisterhood at church are reading it right now during our Nativity fast, and I discovered that it can be found on YouTube being read in its entirety. You can listen for free here on the channel The Orthodox Voice: For the Life of the World.

If you want to read for free instead, a pdf file is here: For the Life of the World

“In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God.”
I Thessalonians 5:18

Getting back to thanksgiving as a holiday, this year I’ll be giving thanks and praise with the angels in the morning in Liturgy, and in the afternoon feasting in the traditional American way. Whether your celebration is small and quiet, or large and festive, I hope you remember much to be thankful for ❤

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Currier & Ives, Home to Thanksgiving

 

 

 

 

Not Star Trek mythology.

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More and more I notice that people, including me, use the words brain and mind interchangeably; but they are not the same thing at all. No scientist has been able to find the mind in the brain. And when we are considering mind vs. heart, where is the heart exactly? As the Scripture says, “We are fearfully and wonderfully made.” The more researchers probe into the intricacies of the human body and its functions, the more complex we are found to be, the more questions emerge.

I am using the photo of the book cover at right only to illustrate one use of the word mind; it’s been a while since I read it, but I think the author may have been thinking of this passage of Scripture:

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

Father Stephen Freeman draws attention in a recent article to the way we moderns tend to think about minds and our thinking:

“We are material beings. We are not souls that have bodies, or bodies that have souls. The soul is the ‘life’ of the body, but is not, strictly speaking, a thing in itself. Most moderns mistake the soul for consciousness, and they imagine that at death their consciousness migrates somewhere else (to heaven, etc). And, we do not care very much about what then happens to the body, so long as our precious consciousness abides. This, I might add, is the mythology of Star Trek, where in at least several episodes, Spock’s consciousness is deposited in various other places. It is not, however, true Christianity.”

You can read the whole article here:  “The Secular Mind Versus the Whole Heart.”

Auguste Rodin, The Thinker; Rodin Museum, Paris

Monasteries are not places of refuge.

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“The world thinks that when someone becomes a monk in a monastery, he leaves society and becomes wild. They say this because they are unaware that monks are the most sociable of human beings. You should know that no one can become a monk if he is not sociable, that is, if he cannot communicate and deal openly and directly with all the difficulties encountered in a life shared with others. If a man has had difficulties in marrying or establishing a family, chances are he won’t be a good monk. He must feel secure in his life. Monasteries are not places of refuge. Consequently, a monk is someone who may have formerly attained success in such relationships, and loved them, too, and thus he doesn’t reject them, he doesn’t condemn them, he doesn’t despise them, but rather prefers something superior for himself.”

-Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra, in The Church at Prayer: The Mystical Liturgy of the Heart 

From Uncreated Light to electrics.

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For it is the God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
-II Corinthians 4:6

My priest mentioned in a homily recently that the verse above was his favorite; of course that made me pay close attention to it. Soon afterward I read an article by the iconographer Aidan Hart, “Lighting in Orthodox Churches: Liturgical Principles and Practical Ideas,” which has kept me thinking on this Light … and I’m certain I could benefit from further meditation on Hart’s ideas — because they flow from the truth that Christ Himself stated, that He is The Light of the World.

How do we reflect this reality symbolically when choosing physical lighting for our churches? And how might lighting help us to worship or distract us? If any of these questions is interesting to you, you might like to read the whole article, which I have linked above and below. Or skip the text and look only at the more than two dozen photographs of most beautiful churches and monasteries — and one mosque — illustrating the principles that Hart discusses. I especially loved the photo showing alabaster windows such as this one:

Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna

Hart reminds us that “The Church is ultimately a community of persons and not a building.” It follows that “Its light should illuminate the personal rather than the abstract.” He compares the needs of monasteries to those of parish churches, and The Blue Mosque to Hagia Sophia. The pros and cons of natural light, candles, oil lamps and electric lights are discussed; he explains how an environment with quiet light can help us to “learn the art of stillness, watchfulness, interiority.”

I’ll close with one paragraph that is rich with theological principles worth musing on, and leave you to click on the link for the whole article:

The second century neo-Platonist Plotinus wrote that “beauty is symmetry irradiated by life”. This was interpreted by the Byzantines as symmetry irradiated by light, for light was regarded an image of divine, animating and transfiguring life. But this Byzantine aesthetic of moving rather than static light was ultimately rooted in Trinitarian theology. The uncreated light of divine love is One, but it is also dynamic, moving within the Trinity and moving down to creation. Of course the term moving is a human concept and is ultimately inapplicable to God, who has no need to move from place to place. But the term is applicable inasmuch as it reminds us that God is not a single monad, that God is love because He is Three. Christian beauty is therefore rooted in relationship rather than an abstract and static ideal. And this can be reflected in church lighting.

-Aidan Hart, “Lighting in Orthodox Churches: Liturgical Principles and Practical Ideas”

St Demetrios Church, Thessaloniki (not taken by me)