Category: meditations
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Updates
MEDITATING on the material in previous posts has moved some updates into my brain. I have tended to add “update: some stuff” to the posts, but I think that doesn’t get the updated material out to readers by email. Going forward I will do update posts like this one and add an update link to…
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To Be or Not to Be
METROPOLITAN JOHN ZIZIOULAS (Memory Eternal!) has this great line in Being as Communion, “to be and to be in communion are the same thing”. It’s not an exact quote. I pulled it out and wrapped it into my final presentation to be graduated from CIIS in 2002. The argument continues – as I understood it…
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The Weight of Mists
THIS POST STARTED with Across the Universe, the brilliant cinematic reworking of The Beatles’ ouvre into a story of love, rejection, and nirvanah interwoven with a full on history of the 60s in America. I first watched it when it came out and became obsessed with the Beatles as a result. I’d never really liked…
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Time. Eucharist. Love.
WHEN NEXT YOU approach Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist, drawing near to the chalice in faith and love, kneeling at the rail, or coming to the front of line; when you receive from the Priest, Deacon, or Eucharistic Minister the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of the God-Man, Jesus, born of Mary and descended…
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Don’t Look Back
YOUR HOST IS ATTEMPTING To navigate between two parishes, one Latin and one Byzantine, with the latter using the Julian Calendar no less. (Most Byzantine Catholic places, in the US at least, use the Gregorian Calendar.) This year’s Gregorian and Julian Easters are one week apart. Next year they are five weeks apart! This year…
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Something Greater.
The Readings for the Sunday of St Mary of Egypt The Fifth Sunday of the Great Fast OUR HOLY MOTHER MARY OF Egypt, as she is called in the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete, is perhaps my most-favorite of female saints. Her regular feast day is 1 April which is always in Lent…
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Misty Morning Sunrise
THE BOOK OF Ecclesiastes, named Kohelet or Qohelet in the Hebrew text (קֹהֶלֶת), is one of the Wisdom Books in the Hebrew Scriptures which can be read as meditation texts rather than literal “rules”. In fact, if you read the Wisdom Books without context, there are some serious contradictions between Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes in…
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Of Incidents and Accidents.
The Readings for the Sunday of St Gregory Palamas The Second Sunday of the Great Fast AS THE Observance of the Great Fast evolved in the Eastern Church, each Sunday was assigned a special devotion: the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the Sundays of St Gregory, of St John, of St Mary, and the Sunday of the…
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The Difference
AS POSTED OVER ON My Hebrew language blog, I’ve been wondering about these two songs. My limited skill in that language did not prevent me from hearing the same words rolled around in two very different songs. Give a listen. Turning on the captions for the first one to see an English translation. I’m sorry…
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Of Icons & Hosts
The Readings for the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy The First Sunday of the Great Fast HEARING OF A BYZANTINE CATHOLIC podcast called What God is Not, I decided to give a listen to a ByzCath Nun, Mother Natalia, and Fr Michael O’Loughlin, a priest of the Eparchy of Phoenix. I was instantly drawn…
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A Tale of Two Kisses
SOLOMON WRITES FOR the Bride these words, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” Certainly, that is the desire of our hearts, that the Lord should kiss us so. Yet, as in a dream where everything is one’s own mind speaking, so in scripture, everything is God’s own word. And how our…
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The BVM, Challah, and Celibacy
SO, AS WAS EARLIER mentioned I’ve been wrestling with an article from First Things, published in 2002, called Celibacy in Context. I don’t mean “wrestling” as in struggling with, but rather as in Jacob saying to God, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” Celibacy is not only hard for some folks…
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The Parable of Rabbits & Pigs
The Readings for the Sunday of the Last Judgement Meatfare HERE IS A PRECES of our parable: Jesus says at the Last Judgement God will divide us as a farmer does the sheep from the goats. The sheep will find out that they have often fed, clothed, and cared for Jesus. And they will say…
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So this Guy’s got Two Boys, right?
Readings for the Sunday of the Prodigal: NOT THAT THERE’S Really this kind of ranking system, but I imagine that “The Prodigal Son” is one of the more well-known of Jesus’ stories. Perhaps equally as often what they know about this story is wrong. We use “prodigal” as a way to describe anyone who goes…
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Freedom is a State of Soul
Tuesday in the week of the Publican & the Pharisee: BETWEEN THE CFR Podcast and my own t0-read (especially Transformation in Christ and He and I) list I’m in the midst of a flood of thoughts about interior freedom. This is a specifically Christian conception, although it may have non-Christian predecessors in pagan philosophies. How…
Orthoparadoxy 