Journey Into Divine Intimacy

Introduction One of the challenges facing a movement is how to transmit authority from a founder to succeeding generations of participants. The problem of authority transmission entails at least two parts: 1) determining new leaders and 2) unambiguously communicating that the new leaders are endowed with legitimate authority. The problem of authority transmission often is the cause of splits in religions. For example, the underlying difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims can be characterized as two different answers to the question, “Who is Muhammad's legitimate successor?” Christianity from very early on has had to face this same challenge, and, not surprisingly, different approaches have resulted in multiple communities that self-identify as Christian but consider the other communities to be defective in some way. The purpose of this paper is to explain one model of authority transmission, namely that used by churches self-identifying as Orthodox Catholic. This model is int...

The  Fellowship of Intentional Communities  defined intentional community this way: "A group of people who live together or share common facilities and who regularly associate with each other on the basis of explicit common values." I believe we need to form an Orthodox intentional community in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The reason is the synthesis and application of the answers to a series of increasingly specific questions as documented below: Why am I attracted to intentional community? I long to grow in the virtues of forgiveness, tolerance, love, commitment, grace, mercy, etc, but this only happens in community. Only in community can my narcissistic blindspots be challenged. For much of my life, my circumstances have required that I live alone, or effectively alone, and my interactions with people have been extremely compartmentalized. The result is that my growth in Christlikeness has been stagnant. It is a source of great sorrow for me. I might be naive, but...

I have been intrigued by monasticism throughout most of my life. Probably my first encounter with it was as a child in the movie The Sound of Music . Before I become an Orthodox Christian, I had taken several retreats at Roman Catholic monasteries. The longest one was a week-long retreat was at a Trappist monastery in Taiwan in 2009. That was a very interesting experience, and I wrote about it in my former blog: A Retreat In Taiwan and  The Essence of Trappist Monasticism . The photos are  here . Although I was happy that these monasteries existed so that I could utilize them as retreat centers, because of reservations that I had and have toward Roman Catholicism, I could never really seriously consider that as a viable path. This left me sad since from my perspective, monasticism was just one more baby that had been thrown out at the Protestant Reformation. But that all changed on January 6, 2012, the night I was received into the Orthodox Church. Right after my lif...

Introduction  I still cannot work out why ... why would anyone choose to do it ... total renunciation of all contact, of all comfort, why, why would anyone do that? And why is that a road to God? Why can't the road to God be eating tomato and basil soup and getting up and having a lovely day? Why can't that be a road to God? Why does it have to involve all of this deprivation, pain, starvation, and torture. Why? (Fr. Peter Owen-Jones) The above quote from the BBC documentary Extreme Pilgrim--Ascetic Christianity came to my mind frequently during my own recent pilgrimage. Unlike Fr. Peter who lived as a hermit for twenty-one days, I merely visited at six different monasteries over the course of twenty days: http://www.saintantonymonasteryus.org/ http://www.roea.org/holyresurrection.html http://www.holycrossmonastery.org/ http://www.wadiocese.com/saint_silouan_monastery_sonora_ca.html http://www.monasteryofstjohn.org/ http://sainthermanmonastery.org/ Like him I str...