FB find (via a group so thank you!):
The best I have seen!!!! Section on Fasts is excellent, methinks.
BCP Online
life skills?!
What’s a thing you wish schools actually taught?
I am not convinced that schools teach anything, besides measuring yourself against abstract standards!
I want to say life skills – like cooking and budgeting. But I will be a snob and say, “classical philosophy”.
which one?
ideal
If the monastic ideal is union with God through prayer, through humility, through obedience, through constant recognition of one’s sins, voluntary or involuntary, through a renunciation of the values of this world, through poverty, through chastity, through love for mankind and love for God, then is such an ideal Christian? For some the very raising of such a question may appear strange and foreign. But the history of Christianity, especially the new theological attitude that obtained as a result of the Reformation, forces such a question and demands a serious answer. If the monastic ideal is to attain a creative spiritual freedom, if the monastic ideal realizes that freedom is attainable only in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and if the monastic ideal asserts that to become a slave to God is ontologically and existentially the path to becoming free, the path in which humanity fully becomes human precisely because the created existence of humanity is contingent upon God, is by itself bordered on both sides by non-existence, then is such an ideal Christian? Is such an ideal Biblical—New Testamental? Or is this monastic ideal, as its opponents have claimed, a distortion of authentic Christianity, a slavery to mechanical “monkish” “works righteousness”?
The Ascetic Ideal and the New Testment: A Critique of the Theology of the Reformation
by Father George Florovsky
fasting
alone
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Don’t chase anyone! If they do not answer, do not chase. If they make no effort, do not chase. Being alone is often much better than being an addition.
transfiguration of the Lord
Today is the great feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ. I wish all of you to be spiritually transfigured and to begin a new life in Christ. Those who fulfill the commandments of the Lord according to their strength even here on earth pass from strength to strength. But those who are counted worthy to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven will pass already from glory to glory.
Talks with Spiritual Children: Spiritual Counsel from St. Barsanuphius of Optina
And, today, is my birthday! So happy birthday to me.
nationalism?
Nationalism has been the bane of Orthodoxy for the last ten centuries.
The Orthodox Church, 84
looks
What’s something you used to worry about but don’t anymore?
I want to say other people and their opinions. But maybe the way I look is more realist. I used to care, especially when I was much younger, but now it is just no longer part of my thought-process. I am simply past it
Anyway …
person over institution
What’s a quote that perfectly describes your outlook on life?
… wherever Jesus Christ is [present], there is the Church
As a person who is de-churched (that is, I was once involved but no longer), this quote by Ignatius of Antioch sets the baseline. I want to entertain that I still have faith but will remain outside the institution for the foreseeable future. Jesus over institution.
