I see a small, clammy hand, Grasping after the world. My country, pounded in sand: As the oligarchs are thrilled. My ancestors died, To give us liberty, The pilgrims’s pride, Now undermined bitterly. Every mountainside, Free to be demolished. As we see the rising tide, Which should be admonished. Once I could love, The rocks and rills, With birds soaring above, Thy woods and hills. Let us all awake, Let the silence break! Dirty air we will partake, Clean water,... Read more
Compassion and mercy are both qualities which Christians must embrace in their lives if they are going to be faithful to the call Christ has given them. Christians should be kind and caring, taking into consideration the needs of others, whether or not they are Christians. With their fellow Christians, they are expected to form a bond of love, to come together and live in harmony with each other, presenting to the world the love of Christ through the love... Read more
After learning that he had been called to a special kind of life, one which was not meant for many, St. Antony the Great went to the Egyptian desert, putting all his trust in God, believing that God would make it possible for him to do what God intended him to achieve. While there were ascetics before him, some who helped train him in the way of asceticism in his youth, and there were even some who went into the... Read more
Sometimes, it feels like I am dreaming, or rather, I am living in a nightmare world, as I look out and see the insanity which seems to have taken over the world. Lewis Carroll gives us nothing equal to the madness found with Donald Trump and his followers. The Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts have nothing on Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk. When I wake up, not only do I wonder what Donald Trump said, but how his... Read more
While St. Antony the Great might not have been literate, that is, he might not have been able to read Greek, that should not lead us to assume he was uneducated. From the letters which we have by him, written in Coptic (which means he could still be seen as illiterate to those who considered knowledge of Greek necessary for proper literacy), we can discern that he was quite well educated, knowing advanced elements of philosophy and Christian theology. Through... Read more
We must not neglect our own good, which means, we must take reasonable care of ourselves. To do this properly, we must always examine the situation we find ourselves in and use our prudence to act accordingly. The better we know ourselves, the better we know who we are, and what we can and should be doing in the world, the easier this will be. This is not to say, when we know ourselves properly, there will be no challenges... Read more
While holiness, which includes moral and spiritual purity, is important, we must never assume the qualifications we make concerning moral and spiritual purity properly represents such holiness. We often get things wrong. One of the ways we do so is assume holiness is something individualistic, something which we achieve all by ourselves. While some might agree, this is wrong, because it tends towards the Pelagian heresy, they still tend to be individualistic, as they ignore the community aspect of holiness.... Read more
Since the new Jubilee Year, Jubilee 2025, began, I have found myself thinking about two different things. The first relates to the Jubilee Year itself, its meaning in the present, but also what it originally meant when it was established in the Torah. The Jubilee is all about liberation, freeing people (such as slaves) from what oppressed them, especially all the debts they might have accumulated since the last Jubilee year. Jubilees especially helped the poor, as they were the... Read more
Each of the persons of the Trinity reveal themselves at Jesus’ baptism. God the Son, the incarnate Logos, was baptized, not because he needed to be baptized by John, but because the world needed his baptism. “For the Word was not baptized stripped of a body, but received baptism having truly become flesh; the Word was baptized for the sake of us men, in order that, having purified our nature and the waters, He might make our salvation perfect.”[1] The... Read more
St. John the Baptist was. in some respects, the last of the prophets (even if prophecy would not end with him), because Christians see in him the end of the preparatory stage of human history and the way God worked in and with prophets in Israel (and around the world) to prepare for the incarnation. He became the living embodiment of that tradition, that is, his mission was to be the sign that the eschatological kingdom of God was at... Read more
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