Do not despise our feeble petitions In times of trouble. Rescue us from the curses that convulse The wretched lips of our enemies. Born into a world of sin, We struggle to maintain faith within. Teach us to partake of the Mysteries, Giving our all to God. Joachim and Anna Brought you into the Temple They presented you to the Lord, Who entered your womb. Brought up in piety Protected from vanity, You became the Mother of God And Mother to all. Within thy love and compassion, We take refuge, O Theotokos. Encountering Christ Living in the Spirit Fearing not Forevermore! An icon of the Entry into the Temple of the Most Holy Mother of God.

Drifting can be floating free, at ease, falling asleep, And dreamy, too. Drifting can be wandering afar, listless, and confused. It can also be stubborn. I pray and I wish to be the former. I fear and I know I am the latter. When I want to be lifted up, I fix my eyes to the heart. When I want to be pulled down, I let my eyes run wild. I hate that. Let not the winds of the world Toss me about like leaves Drifting and blowing Like scattered thoughts and sinful whims. Send the Holy Spirit Whose violent gushes of wind And fiery sprites Keep me from drifting. Free image autumn leaf under the rain (Free photobank torange.biz) / ©torange.biz

I pretend and pretend and pretend To want what others want. But the truth is I don't. I don't care about status or trends I don't care about politics or position. I don't care about nations or businesses. They're all just part of the labyrinthine flight from God. All I want is a simple Liturgy And Eucharist And prayer And thinking about prayer And reading about prayer And writing about prayer And talking about prayer And looking at art that expresses prayer And listening to music that enlivens prayer. Prayer is speaking Prayer is listening Prayer is looking Prayer is feeling Prayer is communing Prayer is... Finding your way to God by choosing to leave the chaotic maze! Photo downloaded from pexels.com (https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-and-orange-galaxy-illustration-41951/) on 3 March 2023.

Inhumanity reigns Everyone, each and all Climbing and scraping Shouting and reacting! These words are tried, And they're never enough. Those actions, too Recycled through and through. Desire simplicity, A most intimate space. Speaking candidly To a higher face. Not as a slave and In absence of fear. Without shame and Devoid of guilt. Filled with innocence And complete with trust. It is always a surprise, Just how familiar it is. This is prayer, A conversation with God, A contemplation. Come close to the Holy Spirit.

When Your Mother took me By the arm and Stared into my eyes, I could not see. When Your Mother Walked with me and Talked with me, I could not hear. When Your Mother Stopped with me and Turned me toward You I could not know. Then Your light Shined on me and My heart was filled With an energy not known to man. Then Your warmth Filled me with ecstasy and Showed me the truth Of a silence not made by man. Felicitous delight Euphoric cheer Enraptured love Blessed radiance, Nothing human comes close To describing Your presence O, Lord of mine. How do I show them? File:Sun at dawn.JPG - Wikimedia Commons

Seeking heaven, the Sun the Moon the Clouds, and the Rain. Searching earth, the Mountains, the Oceans, the Desert, and the Ice. Seeing people, the Hesychastic, the Apophatic, the Concerned, and the Caring. Meeting death, and its captives, all those thousands upon millions, spiritually dead. I will pray For you For that is what I do, Not because I am worthy But that is what He bid me do.

A stone door opens Light fades to darkness The space is filled Veils abound. Silence deafens Heads are bent Knees weaken A Body is still. Depth was known Heaven tasted The shroud covers Sadness engulfs. Hands are clasped A flame flickers Incense rises Tears that adore. Love pervades! Cave Walkway Narrow Entrance Photo · Free Stock Photo (pexels.com). Photo by Matteo Nannini, downloaded on 20 March 2023.

"Being actively united with this entire world, every sinner falls into its broad nets, wraps himself in them, and is so deeply buried that he cannot be seen. A heavy burden lies upon the sinner, that lover of this world, and on each of his members. He has no power to move or stir, not even a little. He cannot do anything that is not in accordance with the spirit of this world. To do otherwise, he must throw off this impossible load. That is why nobody undertakes this backbreaking work. Nobody even thinks about it! Everybody lives on in the same way, moving along the tracks in which he finds himself." - St. Theophan the Recluse, Turning the Heart to God, p.7 (published separately, this is the second part of The Path to Salvation). #Death #Pride #Materialism #God #Repentance #Sinner #Sin #ContemplativePrayer #continualprayer

While we await Our eternal return To fully live in God, It is our job and our joy to commune with Him By entering into the divine discourse that Requires no words. While the Eucharist is the fount and summit of All created interface with the Holy Trinity, Personal prayer is the daily guarantor that We seek in order to bind in union the divinity We share by the energies of God with that Divinity, which is God’s in Essence. The prayers we offer to, for, and with God, Rather than being long, thin and petty, are Intended to plunge the depths of the hypostatic union In order to help the true believer Transverse the divide between the Kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of man. Andrew Rublev's 15th century icon of the Holy Trinity based on the Hospitality of Abraham.

There is another who wears our face. He rises before us in the morning and Speaks before we have a thought. He keeps our appointments, Answers to our names, and Carries around our favorite sins like relics. The old Germanic tales said that To see your double was to see your death. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps he is the death we have been living. Saint Paul called him the old man, The self we must put off, Forged from ten thousand small consents. He is a distorted copy of the image of God, Made darker with every noisy hour. But he carries fear, too. He fears silence and stillness. The uncreated light. The uncreated silence. That is why we choose to sit in the illuminated darkness And say the real Name, over and over again: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. That's when our inner doppelgänger begins to thrash. It argues. It paces. It tires. It grows thin. Then, we invoke another Name: Most Holy Spirit, save me from myself, and sanctify me. And discover a newfound stillness, Faint as a lamp before an icon ... but truly The real person God made us to be ... Beginning to breathe again ... and Our double has no room to live within. Man Standing on Alley If you have a question or prayer request, please reach out here. If you can donate, please click here.

Love is the key to the life of the monastic in the desert, and just as much to the layperson in the world. St. Isaac the Syrian teaches that when silence and seclusion leave no room for active charity, it is enough before God to offer mental love, which is prayerful intercession. In other words, the Christian ideal has two sides: active mercy and contemplative stillness. Spiritual fathers and mothers may live either or both. St. John Maximovitch rescued refugees from Shanghai and St. Maria Skobtsova sheltered them in occupied Paris. But neither could have borne the gifts of eldership without the silence we usually associate with hesychasts. St. Porphyrios made the same point from the other direction. He counseled us not to press upon the people we love, but to pray for them in secret and let grace do the work. After all, intercession is not created within us. "The Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered" (Rom 8:26). Thus, the uncreated silence of Pentecost is heard in the stillness of our hearts and poured out of us as love upon others. Simply put, silent, sacrificial, private, prayerful intercession is a true gift of mental love given in secret, whether it starts in a Mediterranean village or an American kitchen. Woman Lighting A Candle In Orthodox Church Photos If you have a question or prayer request, please reach out here. If you can donate, please click here.

Written on the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001 I. The morning the words ran out I made my living with words. I was trained as a journalist. I spent years in public affairs and crisis communication for energy and chemical companies, writing the sentences that get said when something has gone badly wrong. I studied how disputes are negotiated and how public arguments are framed. By the autumn of 2001 I was in Houston, teaching and advising at a graduate school of theology, still writing, still reaching for the perfect phrase. Then came a Tuesday morning when every word was left wanting. I remember the feeling of defenselessness over not being able to get a call through to one of my brothers who was in very close proximity to the explosions at the Pentagon. I remember knowing that there were no words to describe something that language could not hold. And I don't mean the inability of having nothing to say. Rather, the ridiculousness of having something to say and already knowing it would fall straight through. Just like all the statements and all the analysis that flew around every hour on the hour. All of it ended up being cacophonous noise stacked against an event that had gone silent at its center. What I did not understand then, and have spent twenty-five years learning, is that the silence at the center was not an absence. It was the only thing in the room that was still speaking. II. What I now believe happened September 11, 2001, was many things: a mass murder, a geopolitical rupture, a wound that has not closed. I will leave those accounts to others who know them more intimately, like those who have to remember their dead. And all the soldiers, sailors, airmen, police, fire, and other first responders. I want to say something more specific and, I think, more permanent. That day was a catastrophe of hearing. It was a catastrophe of hearing twice over. It was a catastrophe of hearing because 19 men were certain they had heard God. They had not. They had heard something demonic, and they had obeyed it, and they had been formed for years inside a system that told them their hearing was sound. No tradition is immune to this. The history of my own is full of men who heard voices and burned people with them. The claim 'God told me' can be the most dangerous sentence any human being can say, and it is said constantly, in every language, in every century. It was also a catastrophe of hearing because of what we did next. We answered a silence we could not bear with 25 years of noise. Cable news that never stopped. Arguments that never resolved. A war of words about a war. Then the internet arrived at scale and industrialized the whole operation, and now a generation has grown up inside a soundscape engineered so that no one is ever alone with anything for longer than eight seconds. We did not process what happened. We buried it under volume. Max Picard saw this coming decades before the towers fell. In the modern world, he wrote, the individual no longer faces silence and no longer faces the community, but faces only universal noise - standing between the two, cut off from both, forlorn. That is a diagnosis of a civilization, and it is also a diagnosis of a person at three in the morning with a phone in his hand. So: false hearing on one side, and the refusal to hear on the other. The remedy for both is the same, and it is not less listening. It is listening that has been formed. III. What I found in the tradition The Christian East has kept, for 18 centuries, a discipline of formed listening. It is called hesychasm - silence, stillness, the prayer of the mind descending into the heart. It was worked out in the deserts of Egypt and Sinai, refined on Athos, defended by Gregory Palamas, and carried forward in the Philokalia. It was never hidden. It was simply never offered plainly to people who are not monks. It has also been accused, for almost as long, of being a sin against charity. Tomáš Špidlík put the accusation with real force in 1988: do these heroic forms of silence not sin by inverse excess? Does the man who withdraws not abandon his neighbor? Does he not, in fact, silence the very Spirit who speaks to persons through other persons? That question is the reason for my doctoral work, and answering it is the reason for my priesthood. Here is the answer I arrived at. On Tabor, three disciples saw the uncreated light. That is the solitary ascent - imageless prayer, one person before God, the long climb. In the upper room, the Fire descended on a group of people, and what they received was not only light but speech - speech that arrived as sound and was heard as meaning, each in his own tongue. I have named what descended there the uncreated silence: the unspoken speech of the Holy Spirit, an energy of God addressed to the spiritual sense of hearing. It is heard in prayer. It is discerned between persons. It is lived as pastoral care. I have called the receiving of it audiation - the hearing equivalent of illumination. One trunk, two branches. The trunk is silence. One branch is more prayer. The other is the care of souls. Nobody who goes into that silence, honestly comes out of it indifferent to his neighbor. The silence is not the alternative to charity. It is where charity is told what to do. IV. What Holy Silence is for This is the mission of this ministry and I state it plainly. One. To teach the Eastern Christian tradition of stillness - hesychasm, meditation, contemplation, the Jesus Prayer, the Holy Spirit Prayer - to people living ordinary lives outside the monastery. No theological degree required. Only the willingness to be quiet. Two. To insist that this is not the barrenness of an empty mind. Orthodox meditation has a concrete foundation: a personal God who has spoken, who continues to speak, and who transfigures those who wait on Him in the illuminated darkness. It is not borrowed, not manufactured, and not dependent on trends that come and go. Three. To treat discernment as a discipline rather than a feeling. Anyone can have an impression and call it God. The tradition has always known this, which is why it produced elders, confession, exagoreusis, the testing of thoughts, and the reading of hearts - an entire apparatus for checking whether what a person heard was the Holy Spirit, the self, or the enemy. Twenty-five years ago, the world was shown what unchecked certainty does. That apparatus is not an antique. It is public safety. Four. To hold that spiritual guidance must be a school of inner freedom and never a form of captivity. The elder is not the center of the disciple's search. The elder builds the room in which the disciple learns to hear the Spirit for himself and then gets out of the way. Where this is inverted, the result is abuse, and I have written about it and will keep writing about it. Religion that captures a person can make him do anything. We have the footage. Five. To go to people who are hurting. Grief, exhaustion, betrayal, a crisis of faith, a prayer that once came easily and now feels like words spoken into an empty room - this is where the work actually happens. You are not alone in that room, even when it feels like it. Six. To keep the conversation going about deep, authentic prayer in order to bridge the chasm that lies beneath. I have spent many years seeking understanding, showing respect, working together, and engaging the other. The events of 2001 produced an enormous amount of talking about religion and very little praying. The corrective is not another panel. It is the discovery that the deepest, truest thing is the practice of standing before God with our minds in our hearts. Seven. To resist the noise deliberately, as an ascetic act. Not as a lifestyle preference. Not as self-care. As warfare. The enemy's most effective modern tactic is not temptation but volume, and the surest way to keep a soul from hearing God is to make sure it never hears anything at all. V. The Upper Room Twenty-five years is long enough that a great many people now walking around have no memory of that morning. They have only inherited the noise. To them especially I want to say this. The sound you have never been able to turn off is not the world. It is a condition, it is reversible, and there is an ancient and thoroughly tested way out of it that does not require you to leave your job, your family, or your city. Sit down. Be still. Stop explaining. The disciples in the upper room were not doing anything impressive. They were waiting, together, in a locked room, after a catastrophe, with no idea what came next. What came was Fire, and what the Fire brought was speech - and the first thing they did with it was walk outside and start taking care of people. That is the whole pattern. Silence, then hearing, then love of neighbor. It held on the day after Pentecost and it holds on the day after the towers. Twenty-five years ago, I was a man of many and great words who already knew that my real calling was to be a man of NOT words ... holy silence. There is more said there than in any human conversation anywhere ever conceived. Come and listen to the Holy Spirit. If you have a question or prayer request, please reach out here. If you can donate, please click here. September 11 attacks at the WTC - Public Domain Media Search Engine