Journey Into Divine Intimacy

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...

In part 1 of this series, I introduced the process of traditioning and documented how it was used in the Bible. In this post I will trace how this traditioning process was used in the early church. First we will construct a narrative for the traditioning process up to and including the apostles. Second, we will explore the importance of the oral component of the tradition. The Christian Tradition in the Apostolic Era From Scripture we can reconstruct this narrative about the uniquely Christian tradition and the initial stages of its transmission: God the Father is the ultimate source of the Christian tradition, and the Son is the agent through whom it is initially transmitted: "All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Matthew 11:27). As the incarnate Word of God, the Son orally transmits a portion of the tradition to his ...

A friend recently asked me this question: "I ... wondered how you now conceive of your sources of authority. How do you conceive now of the authority of the Scriptures? Are they ultimate in authority, or part of a wider 'stream' of inspiration and authority?" This question deserves a substantial reply, so I am going to use multiple blog posts to answer it. Although the question does not used the word tradition , I understand it to be asking about my relationship to tradition . In the Evangelical tradition of my upbringing, the word  tradition  was a bad word. It was mainly used pejoratively to ridicule people of other faith traditions, most notably Roman Catholics. Ironically, the pejorative users of this word rarely ever realized that they had their own traditions and unconsciously operated within them. In retrospect, one of the differences between the Evangelicalism I experienced and Orthodoxy is that of self-awareness. As an Evangelical--unaware or even in denia...

Someone dear to me recently wrote and said that while reading a book by an Orthodox author, she ran into a stumbling block. This is the quote from the book with the challenging parts in bold: Orthodox Christian Scriptures and saints all stress the necessity, and indeed the inevitability, of blessed mourning ( penthos ) over life in this sinful world . They say, as is often emphasized in Orthodox Church services, that without tears of sorrow over the "sin of the world" and one's own sins, and those of one's family and friends, no person can be saved . A human being who sees and experiences the grim realities of life in this world will necessarily weep as Jesus wept, and weep together with Him. "Blessed are they who mourn," Christ teaches, "for they shall be comforted" (Matt. 5:4). (from Christian Faith and Same Sex Attraction: Eastern Orthodox Reflections by Fr. Thomas Hopko of blessed memory). I want to share my response to her below. You sai...