Praying in the Rain

Fr. Michael shares his reflections on St. Isaac the Syrian's response to the question, "If, after a man has greatly toiled, laboured, and struggled, the thought of pride shamelessly assails him—taking occasion from the beauty of his virtues—and reckons up the magnitude of his toil, by what means should he restrain his thoughts and achieve such security in his soul as not to be persuaded by it?"

After the introductory address of “Our Father in heaven,” the Lord taught His disciples to make three commands.

People sometimes flee the Church because they encounter abusive people or situations there. And yes, we need to love, minister to, care for and most of all be patient with those who flee the church because of the bad experiences they have had. But still, there are no Lone-Ranger Christians. We are not taught to pray to “My Father in heaven,” but “Our Father in heaven.” God is the God who sees. God...

The Orthodox Divine Liturgy presents an introductory phrase in the form of prayer—as is typical in Orthodox Christianity, there is the prayer before the prayer. It goes like this: "And grant, O Lord, that with boldness and without condemnation we may dare to call upon you the Heavenly God as Father and to say." Why is it a daring thing to say the Lord’s Prayer? Why is it daring to call God "...

Over the past several months, I have been reading up on the Lord’s Prayer. Basically what I have been doing is reading homilies written by ancient and contemporary fathers (and in a couple of cases, mothers) of the Church. In the next few podcasts, I’m going to share some of the ideas about the Lord’s Prayer that I found most useful along with the connections that I formed regarding them.

We don’t clean ourselves up before we pray—then we would never pray (or we would only pray the prayers of the Pharisees). We come to God in prayer bringing all of our weaknesses with us, even, perhaps glorying in our weaknesses. We glory in our weaknesses because we know that any deliverance we experience, any good that comes from our lives will only be evidence of God’s great love and power to sa...

As an Evangelical, I had been taught that everything that is really important (spiritually speaking) has to do introducing people to Jesus Christ. Presenting Christ was almost everything. I believed that once one was reconciled with God through Christ–which I understood to be a legal transaction–everything that was really important in one’s relationship with God had been taken care of. This assump...

One of the greatest frustrations in my spiritual life has been caused by a passion for certainty. You might call it a need to know, a need to know what God is doing in my life, a need to have some explanation for or feeling for why my life is the way it is right now. When I don’t know—or when I don’t have some explanation that I can tell myself is the reason why things are happening to me and arou...

Many of us have had mountain-top experiences at one time in our life or another. We have had times when God seemed right there, so close that, at that moment it seemed like nothing to offer God everything, to sacrifice all for the sake of Christ. These mountain-top experiences, at least for me, are very few and far between. It is a kind of miracle when this happens. But like most miracles, it happ...

In 1851, an anonymous monk on Mount Athos wrote a book on prayer. The title of the book has been translated as The Watchful Mind: Teachings on the Prayer of the Heart. It is a book that I cannot recommend for most people because, like much classic Orthodox spiritual writing (the Philokalia, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian, to name a few), it was written...

"Truly, O Lord, if we do not humble ourselves, You do not cease to humble us. Real humility is the fruit of knowledge; and true knowledge, the fruit of trials." St. Isaac the Syrian Homily 36

Fr. Michael reflects on this quote from St. Isaac the Syrian (Homily 36), "A small affliction borne for God’s sake is better before God than a great work performed without tribulation; for affliction willingly borne brings to light the proof of love…."

On the Last Day, it’s not what we have done for Christ that will matter. What will matter is that we have known Him. What will matter is that we have focused on the one thing needful, on the hidden man of the heart.

It is frightening to be held up by God. It is frightening to look into the abyss of our own darkness and sin. It is frightening and it is glorious. Or at least it can be glorious, once you learn to relax in God’s embrace, once you learn to trust the One who has held you from the your mother’s womb, the One whose love never fails. Once you learn to trust, then it can be glorious, then you can see n...

Young people, my daughters included, often say that there are no good candidates among the Orthodox Christians they know. I understand this problem. Often Orthodox Christian churches are small and choices are limited.

This morning my wife and I took one of our occasional half-day vacations. It’s a warmish 19 degree day (68 Fahrenheit) with the sun poking through the clouds. We walked a mile or so up a trail in the hills and then afterward stopped by a country tea and scone place for a bite and a chat and just some quite time together, Bonnie working on her knitting project and I reading a book (what else would...

“So there you are on the heights, surveying the earth below and the sky above. Your intellect [nous] now begins to feel its freedom and wants to fly.” I enjoy reading spiritual literature from holy people in the Orthodox Christian tradition. I like it because I often catch glimpses of myself, of my own struggles and my own triumphs. In many ways, books have been like a surrogate spiritual father t...

Mother Alexandra, formally Princess Ileana of Romania, back in 1960 wrote a little booklet called “Our Father: Meditations on The Lord’s Prayer.” The booklet is divided into fourteen prayers each focusing on a phrase from the Lord’s Prayer and arranged to be prayed with one’s morning and evening prayers over a week (so there’s a morning and an evening prayer for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.)....

If we want to see God, where do we begin? Archimandrite Aimilianos says that we must begin with what we can do. We can seek; we can come to God with longing. In other words, if you want to see God, you have to want to see God. I’m not being redundant. There is wanting, and then there is wanting. I can want to become a doctor, for example; but if I don’t want to become a doctor more than I want to...

In one of his talks, St. Theophan speaks of the glories of life in a monastery and then he makes a the following statement: “Of course, many inconsistencies occur here, too…” Ah, there’s the rub. There’s the bit that throws us off, “many inconsistencies occur here, too.” And the saint says, “of course,” as though we should have never expected things to be consistent. But we do. We do expect things...

Many people hit a roadblock in their relationship with God when the weight of their sins catches up to them, when they realize they are trapped in a cycle of sin or habit of ungodly behaviour that they cannot control.

It is difficult for some of us who were raised on a theology of substitutionary atonement, those of us Protestant converts to holy Orthodoxy, it is difficult for us to accept that our final judgement will involve anything more than the forgiveness of sins. But the Church teaches us otherwise. Parables such as the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the Separation of the Sheep and the Goats play a huge role...

“This is the fiercest struggle, the struggle that resists a man unto blood, wherein free will is tested as to the singleness of his love for the virtues….It is here that we manifest our patience, my beloved brethren, our struggle and our zeal. For this is the time of unseen martyrdom…” What is this struggle that St. Isaac speaks of and how can it be overcome?

Archimandrite Aimilianos of Simonopetra Monastery, in the first half of a transcribed (and then translated) speech called “The Progression of the Soul” speaks of stages to the beginning of the spiritual journey. Archimandrite Aimilianos tells us that strength really is about standing naked before God and before ourselves. Faithful application of strength and the power of the will is to deny our se...

Fr. Michael shares on Thomas Sunday, "Those who doubt, those who fear, those who hide and shut the doors are not cut off from the One who appears in rooms with closed doors."