Undusted Texts

"I am the Vine and you are the branches..." All who have been baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ, and not only clothed: indeed, they have become members of Christ, members of His Body, the Church.  "One cannot have God for his Father without having the Church for his Mother" (St. Cyprian).  "Wherever two or more of you are gathered, there am I in the midst of them."  So we proclaim when we venerate the Cross at the end of Liturgy: "Christ is among us."  "He is and will be."  So He is in the midst of the Church, and so He is in the midst of two or more of the baptized who call upon His name; then we could say that each group of two or more, each Christian community, are a form of mini-Church, a micro-ecclesia, which is united to the remainder of the Church. The union among those in the Church and in the Christian community is the bond of Christ.  It is a true, existing, real union.  "Christian community i...

  "I call upon You, God, Pantokrator, Lord Jesus Christ, Heavenly King: I call upon You, the maker of heaven and earth. I exorcise you, spirit unclean, according to the word of God, the maker of heaven and earth. Be put to flight by the one who wraps himself in light as a cloak: the one who alone has immortality and light unapprochable: to Whom be glory and power unto the ages. Amen." --St. Epiphanius of Salamis What St. Epiphanius' short prayer was written to do is something which the world has needed since the Garden: the exorcism of demons.  While sin is, of course, the choice of man, the demons play their part in trying to bend us toward sin, to constantly bombard us with temptation (think of C.S. Lewis' fictionalized account of this in The Screwtape Letters ).  But God does not leave us to their whims: we are not abandoned into the hands of the "worldrulers," as St. Paul calls them.  Indeed, He gives us the power of His Spirit to d...

A Hagiologion (calendar of all the saints by feast day) from St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai (13th century) "Resplendent with the brightness of beauty, and shining as unerring stars, you have made the Church of Christ a star-filled heaven on earth by the diversity of your lives."--Canon of the Sunday of All Saints, Ode 3 The many mansions in the Father's house welcome countless men and women from every land and tongue, every tribe and nation, every race and people.  Until we, God willing, are also there, we can never know the sheer number of those who have fallen asleep marked with the sign of faith, the multitude of those who are praising the Lord for eternity.  For though there are thousands and thousands of the Lord's servants that we know are in Heaven, there are innumerably more as well whom we shall not know in this life. These saints in Heaven, even the ones we do not glorify with that title, come from countless backgrounds.  Some are ...

The Church has a devotion to those great men and women who went before them in the faith, teaching the Gospel fervently and helping others to deepen their living of the true Christian life.  In the Eastern Church, the title "our holy and God-bearing Fathers" is used for the great saints of the past.  In this series (which I will hopefully not give up on, as I have with some of my past series), I hope to introduce members of the Western Church to some of the great saints venerated in the Eastern Church and explain how powerful their memory is for the Eastern Church.  The first saint I will discuss is St. Makarios the Great. St. Makarios (Macarius) the Great (295-392), also known as St. Makarios the Egyptian, St. Macarius the Spirit-Bearer, and the Lamp of the Desert, was a disciple of St. Anthony the Great, the first monastic.  His name means "blessed" in Greek, and it was chosen because his birth was such a blessing to his infertile parents, fittingly named Ab...

Lent is a time of the desert.  In the desert, we lack what we previously thought we needed but truly did not: in the desert, we are stripped of excess.  Yet the desert is not just a place of aridity and ascesis: it is also a place of God.  "Spiritual work is essential, it is for this that we have come to the desert." Countless holy men and women went to the desert to be united with the Triune God: St. Anthony the Great, St. Mary of Egypt, Sts. Barsanuphius and John, the great Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers, St. Pachomius, St. Hilarion, and innumerable others.  The desert is a place where we can find Tabor and encounter Christ: in the desert we can become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pt 1:4). During this holy season of Lent, let us not just strip ourselves of distractions and worldly goods, but let us enter deeper into our relationship with Jesus Christ, and let us fight harder in our spiritual battle. Below is a list of suggestions for making thi...