Witness, NM

Ash Wednesday “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be…

The tyranny of self-will “Yet even now, says the Lord,    return to me with all your heart,with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;     rend your hearts and not your clothing.Return to the Lord your God,    for he is gracious and merciful,slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love,    and relenting from punishment.Who knows whether he will not turn and relent    and…

The Last Sunday after Epiphany “Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling bright, such as no one on earth could brighten them. And there appeared to them Elijah with…

Not as I will, but as Thou Wilt “Then he called the crowd again and said to them, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.’ When he had left the crowd and entered the…

Final thoughts “The Word of God, born once in the flesh (such is his kindness and his goodness), is always willing to be born spiritually in those who desire him. In them he is born as an infant as he fashions himself in them by means of their virtues. He reveals himself to the extent…

Forgiving others’ trespasses for fun and profit “There is no one who does not know from his own experience that egoism and self-affirmation involve the sapping of our vital forces and in the long run the very destruction of life itself. While that ‘bad infinity’ which is constituted by the aching void of desire and…

Demuirgic epistemology “Pride and egoism lead to the abyss, to non-being, and to death. By isolating himself in himself, and by taking as the centre of his life not being but his own self, man is not only separated from God and from the sphere of the divine, but is also deprived of all true…

Temporal eternity “Logismoi are much more than simple thoughts. They penetrate into the very depths of a human being. They have enormous power. Let us say that a simple thought is a weak logismos. We need to realize, however, that certain thoughts, or logismoi, once inside a human being, can undermine every trace of a…

Pabst and Carl do some garden work “… as I understand, the subconscious is a storage space into which human beings pile up, so to speak, those memories and experiences they don’t want to be aware of… From the point of view of the true spiritual life we must eradicate the subconscious…” (Markides, quoting Fr.…