Mar. 8, 2007 Plowing through
Lately, I have been struggling to enjoy the Daily Readings from the Church Fathers. Most of this week (I have opted to read on Sunday's rather than follow the Western calendar) is spent on Justin Martyr. He is an interesting fellow, but his writing is tedious thus far. I am looking forward to the Life of St. Anthony by Athanasius and Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical lectures but I have to get through Justin and Cyprian (don't know what he will be like either) first.
In order to make my reading more pleasurable I've been listening to this:
![Chant [CD]](http://www.svspress.com/images/CD-149.jpg "Chant [CD]") Choirs of St Vladimir's Seminary
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Today is the first "official" day of Pre-Lent. It is the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee.
Like the Publican, let us bring tears of repentance to the Lord,
falling before Him as sinners before the feet of our Master.
For He desires the salvation of all men,
granting forgiveness to all who repent
and taking flesh for our sake
though He is God, co-eternal with the Father!
Kontakion for the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee
Several weeks ago my godmother and I were discussing what to read during Lent. She suggested the Lenten Triodion but I was a bit unsure that it would fit the bill. And now the Triodion has begun...so I'll be a bit late if I choose to do it.
Last night she and I had some time before Vespers and we chatted again about what to read. She suggested the Bible and the Church Fathers. That sounds a bit more up my alley. I looked it up at St. Vlad's bookstore and if that is the correct one, that puppy is expensive! I'm going to make doubly sure its the right one before buying it.
I also want to utilize this website. Last year at the end of Lent, Elizabeth shared it on her blog and I tucked it away for this year.
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Jan. 22, 2007 Things that make you go "hmmmm?"
"We'll also encounter an even weirder possibility, which the physicist Andreas Karch and I discovered a year later: we could be living in a three-dimensional pocket of space, even though the rest of the universe behaves as if it is higher-dimensional. This results open a host of new possibilities for the fabric of spacetime, which could consist of distinct regions, each appearing to contain a different number of dimensions. Not only are we not in the center of the universe, as Copernicus shocked the world by suggesting five hundred years ago, but we just might be living in an isolated neighborhood with three spatial dimensions that's part of a higher-dimensional cosmos"
In the Introducation to Warped Passages
by Lisa Randall
"Have you servants out in the heavens?"
"Where else? There is nowhere else."
"But you, Oyarsa, are here on Malacandra, as I am."
"But Malacandra, like all worlds, floats in heaven. And I am not "here" altogether as you are, Ransom of Thulcandra. Creatures of your kind must drop out of heaven into a world; for us the worlds are places in heaven.... It is enough to know that I and my servants are even now in heaven; they were around you in the sky-ship no less than they are around you here."
"Then you knew of our journey before we left Thulcandra?"
"No. Thulcandra is the world we do not know. It alone is outside the heaven, and no message comes from it."...
"...and we know no more of that planet: it is silent."
Out of the Silent Planet
by C.S. Lewis
He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.
Gen. 3:24
And suddenly there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased."
When the angels had gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds began saying to one another, "Let us go straight to Bethlehem then, and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has
made known to us."
Luke 2:13
For He will give His angels charge concerning you,
To guard you in all your ways.
Ps. 91:11
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"'I wanted to be free,' says the prodigal son to himself - perhaps he cries it aloud, 'I wanted to become myself; and I thought I would get all this by cutting myself from my father and my roots, fool that I am! I have found nothing but chains.' And bitter laughter goes up from the pigsty.
That he should have wanted to separate himself from his father now seems just as ridiculous as that a person should fret over being dependent on air and then hold his breath, in order to assert his freedom. We cannot with impunity - actually, without being utterly foolish - separate ourselves from the element in which we live and have our being. We can't take God off as we would take off a shirt.....
The repentance of the lost son is therefore not something merely negative. In the last analysis it is not merely disgust; it is above all homesickness; not just turning away from something, but turning back home. Whenever the New Testament speaks of repentance, always the great joy is in the background. It does not say, 'Repent or hell will swallow you up,' but 'Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.'" (emphasis mine)
The Waiting Father by Helmut Thielicke
pg. 26
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Nov. 16, 2006 Winter Pascha
I've again begun to read Winter Pascha by
Fr. Thomas Hopko. It is often said that there would be no Good
Friday without Easter morning. Orthodox remind us that there
would be no Pascha without the Incarnation. Christmas is
not a "stand-alone" holiday. It brings us face to face with
Christ's death and resurrection... at least it should:
"The litugrical services for Christmas, officially called The Nativity According to the Flesh of Our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, (Deb says: try to put that on your Christmas cards, folks!)
are consciensly patterned after the services for the festival of Pascha
of the Lord, the holy Resurrection. There is a forty-day
fast. There are prefeast preparations. There are the special
royal hours with their prophescies, epistles, gospels, and humns of the
eve of the feast, followed by t he vesperal liturgy of St. Basil the
Great. There is the solemn all night vigil, crowned by matin's
canon and hymns"
Okay, so I must have been daydreaming during last year's Nativity season (I was a new catechumen then) because I never
saw this connection. Now, it also wasn't pointed out to me
either, and being the clueless neophyte that I am, I didn't connect the
dots. In my defense, I had not yet experienced the Lenten season
either. It will be fun to look at the Nativity season with
different eyes this year.
Fr. Thomas goes on:
"Jesus
lay as an infant in the cavern in the reign of Caesar Augustus that He
might lay in the tomb under Pontius Pilate. He was hounded by
Herod that He might be caught by Caiaphas. He was buried in
baptism that He might descend into death through the Cross.... The
Pascha of His Cross was prepared by the Pascha of His coming. The
Pascha of His Resurrection was begun by the Pascha of His Incarnation."
Today He who hung the earth upon the waters
is hung upon the tree.
Today He who holds the whole creation in His hand
is born of a virgin.
The King of angels is decked with a crown of thorns.
He whose essence none can touch is bound in
swaddling-clothes as a mortal man.
This is part of a hymn which is sung at both the Nativity Eve services and Great & Holy Friday (Good Friday).
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Nov. 6, 2006 Fall is the time...
to return to Middle Earth. It is when Frodo set off on his adventures.
I haven't read the Silmarillion in many years and have been wanting to
return to it's beauty. The beginning is a bit of a plow but once
I get to Quenta Silmarillion the speed picks up.
It
is told among the wise that the First War began before Arda was
full-shaped, and ere yet there was anything that grew or walked upon
earth; and for long Melkor had the upper hand. But in the midst
of the war a spirit of great strength and hardihood came to the aid of
the Valar, hearing in the far heaven that there was battle in the
Little Kingdom; and Arda was filled with the sound of his
laughter. So came Tulkus the Strong.
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If it seems like I am reading many different books at once, its because I am! 
I hop around from book to book and have the very bad habit of starting
one before I've finished the first.. I have several by my bedside
and several near the couch, I'll pick one up depending on my mood.
Here's a quote from one of my "on hand" books. Its an Orthodox
catechesis and not really a read-through-in-one-sitting type. I
pick it up for Feasts or questions I have about beliefs or practices in
the Orthodox Church. It has the added bonus of including the
troparions for each Feast with the music.
Under the chapter "The Church":
"If you had been in Jerusalem on that Good Friday when Pilate presented
Christ to the crowd, covered with blood and spit, you would have
thought that He looked repulsive. 'As many were astonished at Him - His
appearance was so marred, beyond human semblence... He was despised and
rejected by men...and as one from whom men hid their faces.' (Is.
52:14;52:3). This is how Isaiah described the suffering
Messiah. His face was marked by all the ugliness of this
world. The spitting of men disfigured Him and yet He remained the
same Christ, the only Holy One. It is the same with the
Church. It is disfigured by our spitting, our pettiness, our
crimes, by the sins of those who belong to it, including yours and
mine. And yet Christ remains hidden in it and the Spirit hovers
over it. The Church is 'Emmanuel' that is, 'God with us', a God
who consents to be present among sinners, publicans, and
prostitutes. It is not those who are well but those who are sick
who need healing, the Lord Jesus would say when He was criticized for
sitting at the sinners' table."
The Living God: A Catechism Vol 2
Trans. by Olga Dunlop
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We're in that "time between". We're
between the busy part of summer with swimming and vacation and the
beginning of school. Not much is happening and I'm perfectly
happy about that. Some curriculum has been ordered (later than
usual), the wait has begun, and I'm doing almost nothing.
Contentment for me, boredom for the kids. I'm sure I'll catch up
to them soon.
Meanwhile.....
"We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers
to every question but to make us progressively aware of a
mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the
cause of our wonder. Quoting Psalm 8:1 'O Lord, our Lord, how
wonderful is thy name in all the earth.', St. Gregory of Nyssa states:
'God's name is not known it is wondered at.'"
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"The Word was not hedged in by His
body, nor did His presence in the body prevent His being present
elsewhere as well. When He moved His body He did not cease also
to direct the universe by His Mind and might. No. The
marvellous truth is, that being the Word so far from being Himself
contained by anything, He actually contained all things Himself.
In creation He is present everywhere, yet is distinct in being from it,
ordering, directing, giving life to all, containing all, yet is He
Himself the Uncontained, existing solely in His Father........ His body
was for Him, not a limitation, but an instrument, so that He was
both in it and in all things, and outside all things, resting in the
Father alone. At one and the same time - this is the wonder - as
Man He was living a human life, and as Word He was sustaining the life
of the universe, and as Son He was in constant union with the Father."
On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius
I don't know if it was the Saint's
words or what, but this portion of the book really struck me.
I've heard similar things said other places. Certainly, there are
many great hymns that speak of this, but somehow these words resonated
with me.
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