mc776 | Left in my notes file too long (Reply)

A rock-club which is supported by the church keeps its own coffin, and if a believer wishes to lie down in this coffin for a while and think about death, he is not forbidden to do so, because many Russian saints used this practice. "The main thing, you should not forget that life is wonderful," Hegumen Sergy says.

The entire linkdump will take some time to go through.

All that "Christianity is a way of life", "you need the Spirit in you", "accept Jesus into your heart" talk is, I think, incomprehensible without this framework:

Barlaamists and Barlaamizers not only are empirically ignorant of this spiritual and angelic liturgy, but they deny it, dishonor it and mock it. They completely identify worship with hymns and prayers, which they want to understand with their reason, because otherwise they don’t feel like they are praying. In other words, they are based entirely on their reason and make it absolute. The question is: if they think in and desire to pray this way, then how will they learn about the other-worldy liturgy and how will they enter into this after their death, since they are ignorant of it and fight against it now?

And more:

The Law applies in the Old Testament, but also in the New Testament. The Law is not only in the Old Testament. The Law is in the New Testament as well. Why? Because it is Our tutor to bring us to Christ’. The Apostle Paul says it clearly: ‘The law was our tutor to bring us to Christ’ (Gal. 3:24). But when St Paul says Our tutor to bring us to Christ’ he does not mean, as the Lutherans and others suppose, that the Old Testament Law is a tutor to lead us to the New Testament. No. The Law leads us to the state of purification.

[the writer explicitily ties this to the Miserere further down.]

Also of note:

“Because the beginner cannot manage this, as he has not yet distinguished between the nous and the rational faculty, he sits and prays as much as he can with the rational faculty, under the guidance of his spiritual father. He prays continually until the day when, instead of praying this prayer with his rational faculty, he begins to pray it with his nous in his heart.”

The amazing thing is that, when the nous enters the heart and prays, the rational faculty is outside observing the movement of the nous.

The distinction seems very close to the rider/beast analogy I had before. And the description of the underlying problem seems to be describing the same thing with respect to each, but with a different (obviously mine inferior and more misguided) approach.

Wherein I am tempted to move out to Chilliwack so I have an excuse to go to Fr. Richard's parish on Sundays, as he points out the emperor in such majestic, priapic nakedness in this whole hideous kerfuffle:

...What I am suggesting, though, is that in our preoccupation with canonical questions about sex, we forget to ask something more essential: to what extent do our sexual behaviours manifest self-desire rather than desire for our Creator? Even if our sexual behaviour is ‘canonically approved,’ so to speak, how can St. Paul’s words to the Romans challenge us to repent of the lusts of our hearts and turn back to a love of the One who made us?

Again, this is a question we too often neglect to ask of ourselves, and our neglect continues to hinder our struggle to understand the place of sexuality in a God-centered human life. While we may win the canonical battle, we end up losing the moral war because we have lost sight of where the ‘front line’ really lies.

For instance, when dealing with unmarried people struggling with lust in its various forms, our concern tends to lie with ensuring that a person’s sexuality is ‘contained’ in a heterosexual, monogamous marriage. Once the single person finds themselves a suitable mate (we believe), their lustful urges can be safely channelled. If they were tempted to lust after sexually explicit images on the internet, they can now ‘safely’ act out with their spouse. Less often do we question whether a single person’s problem with lust might have less to do with the absence of a canonical ‘outlet’ than with a sexual identity fundamentally oriented to self-desire...

tl;dr those who accuse one side of this culture war of pharisaism have a point. But the corollary remains that Christ came to fulfill the law, not abolish it.