Dead to Sin & Alive to God- By: Fr. John Behr

Fr. John Behr

While Christ has already died, we are to consider ourselves as dead to sin and alive to God: “Do not yield your members to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but yeild yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness” (Rom 6.13). Yet we are still under death, and so, while our death to sin in baptism is spoken of as an event in the past, our life with Christ is still in the future: if we have died with Christ, through baptism, we shall also live with him.

Excerpt taken from the book- The Mystery of Christ: By Fr. John Behr

The influence of St. Isaac the Syrian and his significance for today

St. Isaac the Syrian

By: Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev

Already in his lifetime Isaac was respected and venerated as a spiritual teacher. After his death his glory increased as his writings spread. Joseph Hazzaya, who lived in the eighth century, called him ‘famous among the saints’. Another Syrian writer calls him ‘the master and teacher of all monks and the haven of salvation for the whole world’.

By the eleventh century, due to the Greek translation of his writings, Isaac became widely known in the Greek-speaking East: in the famous anthology of ascetical texts, the Evergetinon, the passages from ‘abba Isaac the Syrian’ stand on the same footing as those from the classics of early Byzantine spirituality. This is how a modest ‘Nestorian’ Bishop from a remote province of Persia became a Holy Father of the Orthodox Church of Chalcedonian orientation – a rather exceptional phenomenon in the history of Eastern Christianity.

St Isaac has exerted a considerable influence on Russian spirituality. His ascetical homilies, translated into Slavonic in the XIVth century, made a deep impression on St Nil of Sora, one of the most important monastic writers of the XVIth century. In the XIXth century major theologians, such as Philaret of Moscow and Theophane the Recluse, as well as famous secular writers, such as I.Kireyevsky and F.Dostoyevsky, were among his admirers. Dostoyevsky was deeply influenced by Isaac’s homilies and used some of them as a source material for ‘the writings of Elder Zosima’ in ‘The Brothers Karamazoff’.

God Grants Us His Grace- By: Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh

We are called to be children of God…yet no man can attain any of this through his own efforts. Neither by our own efforts or by our own desire can we become a part of the body of Christ…nor can we become partakers of the divine nature simply by our own efforts…The way in which any of this can be realized are through the sacraments of the Church [in Her Liturgical Life].

The sacraments are the actions of God within the Church in which God grants us His grace by means of this material world. It is in the sacraments [such as baptism, confession and communion] that brings us the grace which we  cannot acquire by any other means,…She brings grace to us as a gift through the material substance of this world, the water of baptism, the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist, and the  myrrh of Chrismation…the world even though it is enslaved  to corruption is itself pure and without sin. And God takes this world, the matter of this material creation, and unites it in an incomprehensible way with Himself, and this material world brings to us the grace which we are unable to raise    ourselves up to.

(Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, The Mystery of  Faith, 166.)

Sharing in His Glory- By: Fr. John Meyendorff

In the Incarnation, God assumed human life in its fullness, and the discovery of the divine presence involved the body, as well as the soul. Since God Himself had suffered in His assumed human body, the human forms and bodies of His witnesses had to be seen as sharing in the glory of His resurrection.

Excerpt taken from the book: Imperial Unity & Christian Divisions