Eastern Orthodox Quotes

Tradition is not only a protective, conservative principle; it is, primarily, the principle of growth and regeneration… Tradition is the constant abiding of the Spirit and not only the memory of words.

God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.

To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defense, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego. Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions. It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying. A change of mind about the mode of thinking and being.

Orthodoxy is marked by sobriety, not by emotional enthusiasm. It is also marked by a quite “ordinary” persistence in living the humble, consistent life of Christ, not by seeking out extraordinary experiences, especially supernatural ones.

And so I, my love, am going to the very center of the earth. I am going to the point that is closest of all to Heaven. If my words are destined to fly all the way to Heaven, then it will happen there. And all my words will be about you.

Beauty must mean something. God must know something about how beauty works on the human heart. He must have made us that way.

The East is unfamiliar with those confessions, memoirs, and autobiographies so beloved in the West. There is a clear difference in tonality. One's gaze never lingers on the suffering humanity of Christ, but penetrates behind the kenotic veil. To the West's mysticism of the Cross and its veneration of the Sacred Heart corresponds the eastern mysticism of the sealed tomb, from which eternal life eternal wells up.

Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. (3)

There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all. Whereas by shifting your own laziness and powerlessness onto others, you will end by sharing in Satan's pride and murmuring against God. The Brothers Karamazov Book VI - The Russian Monk, Chapter 3 - Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zosima.

A sad man, is man with the lights turned off.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Amen. —ANCIENT EASTERN ORTHODOX PRAYER

The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.

For if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to became a truth, from whose historical contingency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wrestling of abstract principles from intractable facts. (5)

Creation is not abandoned by God, it is not godless, for apart from God it would not be at all; it is not deprived of grace for it owes its existence to grace. Rather, creation is graced, it is holy; in creation God may be encountered.

The Holy Spirit, present everywhere and filling all things, brings the faithful together as the Body of Christ and establishes the context of prayer and worship.

Though we deserve your wrath, you instead always give us compassion.

Thinking and talking about God is not communion with God. Only prayer is prayer.

It is not easy for students to realize that to ask, as they often do, whether God exists and is merciful, just, good, or wrathful, is simply to project anthropomorphic concepts into a sphere to which they do not pertain. As the Upaniṣads declare: 'There, words do not reach.' Such queries fall short of the question. And yet—as the student must also understand—although that mystery is regarded in the Orient as transcendent of all thought and naming, it is also to be recognized as the reality of one’s own being and mystery. That which is transcendent is also immanent. And the ultimate function of Oriental myths, philosophies, and social forms, therefore, is to guide the individual to an actual experience of his identity with that; tat tvam asi ('Thou art that') is the ultimate word in this connection. By contrast, in the Western sphere—in terms of the orthodox traditions, at any rate, in which our students have been raised—God is a person, the person who has created this world. God and his creation are not of the same substance. Ontologically, they are separate and apart. We, therefore, do not find in the religions of the West, as we do in those of the East, mythologies and cult disciplines devoted to the yielding of an experience of one’s identity with divinity. That, in fact, is heresy. Our myths and religions are concerned, rather, with establishing and maintaining an experience of relationship—and this is quite a different affair. Hence it is, that though the same mythological images can appear in a Western context and an Eastern, it will always be with a totally different sense. This point I regard as fundamental.

Who Started Your Church? • Calvary Chapel, 1965: Chuck Smith • Mormon church, 1830: Joseph Smith • Disciples of Christ, 1809: Thomas Campbell • Baptist church, 1609: John Smyth • Presbyterian church, 1560: John Knox • Calvinist church, 1536: John Calvin • Lutheran church, 1517: Martin Luther • Eastern Orthodox church, 1054: Eastern Patriarchs • Catholic Church, 33: Jesus Christ

The move away from writing poetry was gradual. It was a gentle slope into a muddy pond; it was a collection of choices. There was no one thing that took the pen from my hand. Life got in the way. Poetry was an elective. I elected to let it slip into the water. I elected to let my inner poet slide into that deep water and float there a long time, until at last I could no longer see her there drowning." -Nearly Orthodox

After Constantine engineered the merger of Christ worshipers with sun worshipers in the fourth century, the creeds solidified and finalized the view of faith we hold today. Not only was this politically expedient, but it gave the church many elements of Mithraism that survive to this day. Christ is depicted in early paintings as the Sun (with rays bursting from his head), Sun-Day is the day of rest, and Christmas was moved from January 6 (still the date for Eastern Orthodox churches) to December 25, the birthday of Mithra. The ornaments of Christian orthodoxy today are nearly identical to those of the Mithraic version: miters, wafers, water baptism, altar, and doxology. Mithra was a traveling teacher with twelve companions who was called the “good shepherd,” “the way, the truth, and the life,” and “redeemer,” “savior,” and “messiah.” He was buried in a tomb, and after three days he rose again. His resurrection was celebrated every year.

Our researches have thus yielded us twenty societies, most of them related as parent or offspring to one or more of the others: namely the Western, the Orthodox, the Iranic, the Arabic (these last two being now united in the Islamic), the Hindu, the Far Eastern, the Hellenic, the Syriac, the Indic, the Sinic, the Minoan, the Indus Culture, the Sumeric, the Hittite, the Babylonic, the Egyptiac, the Andean, the Mexic, the Yucatec and the Mayan.......Indeed it is probably desirable to divide the Orthodox Christian Society into an Orthodox-Byzantine and an Orthodox-Russian society, and the Far Eastern into a Chinese and a Korean-Japanese Society. This would raise our numbers to twenty-two; and since this book was written, a twenty third has come to light: the Shang culture that preceded the Sinic civilization, in the Yellow River Valley.

One who uses the morning prayer from A Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayers will not only begin each day with the sign of the cross and an invocation of the Trinity, but will next say this: God, be merciful to me, a sinner. And then there follows a prayer to the Holy Spirit: O Heavenly King, O Comforter, the Spirit of truth, who are everywhere and fillest all things, the treasure of blessings, and giver of life, come and abide in us. In truth Orthodox fashion, the next sentence brings back the matter of sin: Cleanse us from all impurity, and of thy goodness save our souls.

Ironically, some anxious evangelicals get even more anxious at the mention of contemplative prayer. Isn't that too Catholic or Eastern Orthodox? Isn't that Buddhist? Isn't that a slippery slope into NEW AGE RELIGION? Evangelicals are terrified of slippery slopes that start out innocent enough. One minute you're doing a downward dog stretch in a yoga studio and then the "eastern religion" slippery slope takes hold. Next thing you know, you're offering a fruit bowl to a pleasant little false idol statue somewhere in Asia. We've all heard that this happened once to a friend of a friend of someone we knew once at a church somewhere.

Sometimes, late at night, the words are only whispers– Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God. The quiet is kindness and gratitude and calm–Have mercy on me, a sinner. And I fall asleep like that, the words of the Jesus Prayer melting from English to Greek– Kyrie Iesou Christe. Floating around me– Yie tou Theou. Swimming apart from me– Eleison me.

beyond all the obvious ways of testing the truth of Orthodox doctrine – conformity with the sacred Scriptures, with the witness of the Holy Fathers, with the creeds, with the dogmas proclaimed at the Œcumenical Councils of the Church – there is another, more immediate test: Does what we believe find its counterpart in the way we pray in the divine liturgy?

The Harrowing of Hell is so important to the Eastern Orthodox Church that they reenact it during their Easter liturgy. The priest exits the church with a cross held high, and the congregation remains inside. The church doors are locked and the lights are turned off. The darkened church becomes hell, the Devil’s jail. The priest then pounds on the doors of the church— symbolizing Christ assaulting the gates of Hades—proclaiming “Open the doors to the Lord of the powers, the king of glory!” Inside the church the people make a great noise of rattling chains, the resistance of hell to the coming of Christ. Eventually the doors are opened, the cross enters, and the church is lit and filled with incense. For the Orthodox, Easter is all about how Jesus defeats the power of death.

In fact, the term Byzantine Empire was invented in 1557 by the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf, who as a Protestant would not have been sympathetic to Eastern (or Orthodox) Christians, to indicate that these culturally Greek people of the Eastern Roman Empire were not Romans, and somehow not even Greeks. His scholarly decision may also have been influenced by the fact that the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne and his successors had claimed the name Roman for itself.

A scholar attracts by his knowledge, a wealthy man by riches, a handsome man by beauty, an artist by his skill. Only love attracts all human beings. The attraction of love is unlimited. And educated and uneducated, rich or poor, skilled or unskilled, beautiful or ugly, healthy or sick, and young or old—all want to be loved. Christ spread his love on everyone, and lovingly drew all to himself. With his great love he encompassed even the dead, long decomposed and forgotten by men.

Prof. Marcello Truzzi, sociologist, from Eastern Michigan University, was editor of the CSICOP journal when it was called the Zetetic. He had a difference of opinion with the Executive Council about whether dissenting views should be published. He says CSICOP isn't skeptical at all in the true meaning of that word but is "an advocacy body upholding orthodox establishment views." In other words, their alleged skepticism has become, as my paradox suggests, just another dogmatic blind faith.

Church Fathers on the End Times The Church Fathers taught pre-millennialism in the first three centuries. Here are the pre-millennial teachings from the Fathers in their order:   1.        The Roman Empire would split in two. (This took place in AD 395.) 2.        The Roman Empire would fall apart. (This took place in AD 476.) 3.        Out of what was the Roman Empire, ten nations would spring up. These are the ten toes/horns of Daniel’s prophecies. 4.        A literal demon-possessed man, called the Antichrist, will ascend to power. 5.        The Antichrist’s name, if spelled out in Greek, will add up to 666. 6.        The Antichrist will sign a peace treaty between the Jews in Israel and the local non-believers there. This treaty will last seven years. 7.        This seven-year treaty is the last seven years of the “sets of sevens” prophecy in Daniel 9. 8.        At the end of the seven years, Jesus will return to earth, destroy the Antichrist, and establish reign of peace that will last for a literal 1000 years. 9.        They wrote they were taught these things by the apostles. They also wrote that anyone who rises up in the church and begins to say any of these things are symbolic, are immature Christians that can’t rightly divide the word of God, and should not be listened too. (Today these beliefs are included in the doctrines of most of, but not all of, the Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches!)   Here are some of the references from the early church fathers on the End Times:   “After the resurrection of the dead, Jesus will personally reign for 1000 years. He was taught this by the apostle John himself.” Papias Fragment 6   “The man of Sin, spoken of by Daniel, will rule two (three) times and a half, before the Second Advent… There will be a literal 1000 year reign of Christ… The man of apostasy, who speaks strange things against the Most High, shall venture to do unlawful deeds on the earth against us, the believers.” Justin Martyr Dialogue 32,81,110

It is a simple test, but an immediate one: for the doctrine of the Trinity, of the Incarnation, of human sin and our need for redemption, the victory of the cross and the grace of the resurrection, forgiveness and repentance, love and deification, the intercession of the saints and especially of the Mother of God – all these are present in the prayers we offer in the liturgy, present not just as doctrines but as truths that express the mystery in which we participate through the prayer of the Church, with the divine liturgy at its heart.

The Romans, by that means, made pagans out of indigenous people. The moral syntax of the Roman word pagan means having the quality of village life and village mindedness. It means living at a distance from the seat of power and the arbiters of orthodox belief and observance, and living at the shadowy edge of a ploughed field. It designated undomesticated, unbroken bush dwellers, those for whom the light of culture of the eastern Mediterranean kind had not yet dawned. It is a powerful distinction to make, with powerful, enforceable criteria. The Romans didn’t invent pagan, but they did make pagans out of the country people they conquered. Though the word at this time meant something like “those on land unbroken,” the change in meaning to the modern European sense of pagan as “enemy of the true religion” tracks the arc from agricultural practice to systematic ethnic cleansing. Through a programme of shame and systematic desecration, they marginalized traditionalists, drove wedges of privilege between families, rewarded collaborators, confounded and demeaned the local languages, compromised indigenous lifeways. They made another kind of war on the indigenous aptitude for living alongside ancestors. Though certainly not the history many of us were taught to emulate or admire, it is there, stones in the sediment of the Europe that founded America. As the Romans went their civil, ruinous way, they made a point of learning from the newly conquered something of the traditional histories, alliances, and enmities of the area. They learned these enmities not to conclude them but to collude with them and deepen them, to further them, prey upon them, employ them, turning the conquered against the not-yet conquered, holding themselves out as the new, powerful ally who would right ancestral wrongs, securing and obliging and forcing the newly conquered to raise the foreign conqueror to the status of a mysteriously benevolent foreign God. Sleeping with the enemy began in earnest. This is a lesson and example relied upon heavily by Hernando Cortes as he made his ruinous way across Mexico early in the sixteenth century, and it made Cortes a dark legend in the old and new worlds.

William Palmer, a distinguished member of the Anglican Church and of the University of Oxford, wished to join the Orthodox Church. He went to Russia and Turkey to study the contemporary situation in the Christian East and to find out on what conditions he would be admitted to the communion of the Eastern Orthodox. At St. Petersburg and at Moscow he was told that he had only to abjure the errors of Protestantism before a priest, who would thereupon administer to him the sacrament of Holy Chrism or Confirmation. But at Constantinople he found that he must be baptized afresh. As he knew himself to be a Christian and saw no reason to suspect the validity of his baptism (which incidentally was admitted without question by the Orthodox Russian Church), he considered that a second baptism would be a sacrilege. On the other hand, he could not bring himself to accept Orthodoxy according to the local rules of the Russian Church, since he would then become Orthodox only in Russia while remaining a heathen in the eyes of the Greeks; and he had no wish to join a national Church but to join the universal Orthodox Church. No one could solve his dilemma, and so he became a Roman Catholic.

ALL POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES ARE uprooted ones because Communism uprooted traditions, so nothing fits with anything else,” explained the philosopher Patapievici. Fifteen years earlier, when I had last met him, he had cautioned: “The task for Romania is to acquire a public style based on impersonal rules, otherwise business and politics will be full of intrigue, and I am afraid that our Eastern Orthodox tradition is not helpful in this regard. Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece—all the Orthodox nations of Europe—are characterized by weak institutions. That is because Orthodoxy is flexible and contemplative, based more on the oral traditions of peasants than on texts. So there is this pattern of rumor, lack of information, and conspiracy….”11 Thus, in 1998, did Patapievici define Romanian politics as they were still being practiced a decade and a half later. Though in 2013, he added: “No one speaks of guilt over the past. The Church has made no progress despite the enormous chance of being separated from the state for almost a quarter century. The identification of religious faith with an ethnic-national group, I find, is a moral heresy.” Dressed now in generic business casual and wearing fashionable glasses, Patapievici appeared as a figure wholly of the West—more accurately of the global elite—someone you might meet at a fancy

From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations will experience Extremistan-style variability, hence predators will necessarily go through periods of feast and famine. That's us, humans-we had to have been designed to experience extreme hunger and extreme abundance. So our food intake had to have been fractal. Not a single one of those promoting the "three meals a day," "eat in moderation" idea has tested it empirically to see whether it is healthier than intermittent fasts followed by large feasts. But Near Eastern religions (Judaism, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity) knew it, of course-just as they knew the need for debt avoidance-and so they had fast days.

If I know the classical psychological theories well enough to pass my comps and can reformulate them in ways that can impress peer reviewers from the most prestigious journals, but have not the practical wisdom of love, I am only an intrusive muzak soothing the ego while missing the heart. And if I can read tea leaves, throw the bones and manipulate spirits so as to understand the mysteries of the universe and forecast the future with scientific precision, and if I have achieved a renaissance education in both the exoteric and esoteric sciences that would rival Faust and know the equation to convert the mass of mountains into psychic energy and back again, but have not love, I do not even exist. If I gain freedom from all my attachments and maintain constant alpha waves in my consciousness, showing perfect equanimity in all situations, ignoring every personal need and compulsively martyring myself for the glory of God, but this is not done freely from love, I have accomplished nothing. Love is great-hearted and unselfish; love is not emotionally reactive, it does not seek to draw attention to itself. Love does not accuse or compare. It does not seek to serve itself at the expense of others. Love does not take pleasure in other peeople's sufferings, but rejoices when the truth is revealed and meaningful life restored. Love always bears reality as it is, extending mercy to all people in every situation. Love is faithful in all things, is constantly hopeful and meets whatever comes with immovable forbearance and steadfastness. Love never quits. By contrast, prophecies give way before the infinite possibilities of eternity, and inspiration is as fleeting as a breath. To the writing and reading of many books and learning more and more, there is no end, and yet whatever is known is never sufficient to live the Truth who is revealed to the world only in loving relationship. When I was a beginning therapist, I thought a lot and anxiously tried to fix people in order to lower my own anxiety. As I matured, my mind quieted and I stopped being so concerned with labels and techniques and began to realize that, in the mystery of attentive presence to others, the guest becomes the host in the presence of God. In the hospitality of genuine encounter with the other, we come face to face with the mystery of God who is between us as both the One offered One who offers. When all the theorizing and methodological squabbles have been addressed, there will still only be three things that are essential to pastoral counseling: faith, hope, and love. When we abide in these, we each remain as well, without comprehending how, for the source and raison d'etre of all is Love.

In this first decade of the twentieth century, a large proportion of the Jews living in Palestine were still culturally quite similar to and lived reasonably comfortably alongside city-dwelling Muslims and Christians. They were mostly ultra-Orthodox and non-Zionist, mizrahi (eastern) or Sephardic (descendants of Jews expelled from Spain), urbanites of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin who often spoke Arabic or Turkish, even if only as a second or third language. In spite of marked religious distinctions between them and their neighbors, they were not foreigners, nor were they Europeans or settlers: they were, saw themselves, and were seen as Jews who were part of the indigenous Muslim-majority society.6 Moreover, some young European Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Palestine at this time, including such ardent Zionists as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (one became prime minister and the other the president of Israel), initially sought a measure of integration into the local society. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi even took Ottoman nationality, studied in Istanbul, and learned Arabic and Turkish.

The category of validity allows for ecclesiastical lines to be crossed, even if there is no communion between ecclesial bodies. It allows Rome to recognize “valid” sacraments even outside its own self-understanding of the Church (i.e., the Church is only the Roman Catholic Church): Eastern Christians who are in fact separated in good faith from the Catholic Church, if they ask of their own accord and have the right dispositions, may be admitted to the sacraments of Penance, the Eucharist and the Anointing of the Sick. Further, Catholics may ask for these same sacraments from those non-Catholic ministers whose churches possess valid sacraments, as often as necessity or a genuine spiritual benefit recommends such a course and access to a Catholic priest is physically or morally impossible. (Vatican II, Orientalium Ecclesiarium, 1964) For the Orthodox, communion and all the sacraments exist only within one ecclesiastical communion. That is, Orthodox Christians may only receive the sacraments from Orthodox clergy. Likewise, Orthodox clergy may only give the sacraments to Orthodox Christians. (In cases of emergency, non-Orthodox are welcome to convert in order to receive the sacraments.)

PRAYER FOR A SICK PERSON Heavenly Father, physician of our souls and bodies, Who has sent your only-begotten Son and our LORD Jesus Christ to heal every sickness and infirmity, visit and heal also your servant (name) from all physical and spiritual ailments through the grace of your Christ. Grant him/her patience in this sickness, strength of body and spirit, and recovery of health. LORD, you have taught us through your word to pray for each other that we may be healed. I pray, heal your servant (name) and grant to him/her the gift of complete health. For you are the source of healing and to you I give glory, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. O LORD our God, who by a word alone did heal all diseases, who did cure the kinswoman of Peter, you who chastise with pity and heal according to your goodness; who are able to put aside every sickness and infirmity, do you yourself, the same LORD, grant aid to your servant (name) and cure him/her of every sickness of which he /she is grieved; and send down upon him/her your great mercy, and if it be your will, give to him/her health and a complete recovery; for you are the physician of our souls and bodies, and to you do we send up Glory, to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, both now and forever, and to the ages of ages. Amen.

The heart is the center of the human microcosm, at once the center of the physical body, the vital energies, the emotions, and the soul, as well as the meeting place between the human and the celestial realms where the spirit resides. How remarkable is this reality of the heart, that mysterious center which from the point of view of our earthly existence seems so small, and yet as the Prophet has said it is the Throne (al-‘arsh) of God the All-Merciful (ar-Rahmân), the Throne that encompasses the whole universe. Or as he uttered in another saying, “My Heaven containeth Me not, nor My Earth, but the heart of My faithful servant doth contain Me.” It is the heart, the realm of interiority, to which Christ referred when he said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17:21), and it is the heart which the founders of all religions and the sacred scriptures advise man to keep pure as a condition for his salvation and deliverance. We need only recall the words of the Gospel, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8) […] In Christianity the Desert Fathers articulated the spiritual, mystical, and symbolic meanings of the reality of the heart, and these teachings led to a long tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church known as Hesychasm, culminating with St Gregory Palamas, which is focused on the “prayer of the heart” and which includes the exposition of the significance of the heart and the elaboration of the mysticism and theology of the heart. In Catholicism another development took place, in which the heart of the faithful became in a sense replaced by the heart of Christ, and a new spirituality developed on the basis of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Reference to His bleeding heart became common in the writings of such figures as St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Catherine of Sienna. The Christian doctrines of the heart, based as they are on the Bible, present certain universal theses to be seen also in Judaism, the most important of which is the association of the heart with the inner soul of man and the center of the human state. In Jewish mysticism the spirituality of the heart was further developed, and some Jewish mystics emphasized the idea of the “broken or contrite heart” (levnichbar) and wrote that to reach the Divine Majesty one had to “tear one’s heart” and that the “broken heart” mentioned in the Psalms sufficed. To make clear the universality of the spiritual significance of the heart across religious boundaries, while also emphasizing the development of the “theology of the heart” and methods of “prayer of the heart” particular to each tradition, one may recall that the name of Horus, the Egyptian god, meant the “heart of the world”. In Sanskrit the term for heart, hridaya, means also the center of the world, since, by virtue of the analogy between the macrocosm and the microcosm, the center of man is also the center of the universe. Furthermore, in Sanskrit the term shraddha, meaning faith, also signifies knowledge of the heart, and the same is true in Arabic, where the word îmân means faith when used for man and knowledge when used for God, as in the Divine Name al-Mu’min. As for the Far Eastern tradition, in Chinese the term xin means both heart and mind or consciousness. – Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Chapter 3: The Heart of the Faithful is the Throne of the All-Merciful)

The heart is the center of the human microcosm, at once the center of the physical body, the vital energies, the emotions, and the soul, as well as the meeting place between the human and the celestial realms where the spirit resides. How remarkable is this reality of the heart, that mysterious center which from the point of view of our earthly existence seems so small, and yet as the Prophet has said it is the Throne (al-‘arsh) of God the All-Merciful (ar-Rahmân), the Throne that encompasses the whole universe. Or as he uttered in another saying, “My Heaven containeth Me not, nor My Earth, but the heart of My faithful servant doth contain Me.” It is the heart, the realm of interiority, to which Christ referred when he said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17:21), and it is the heart which the founders of all religions and the sacred scriptures advise man to keep pure as a condition for his salvation and deliverance. We need only recall the words of the Gospel, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8) […] In Christianity the Desert Fathers articulated the spiritual, mystical, and symbolic meanings of the reality of the heart, and these teachings led to a long tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church known as Hesychasm, culminating with St Gregory Palamas, which is focused on the “prayer of the heart” and which includes the exposition of the significance of the heart and the elaboration of the mysticism and theology of the heart. In Catholicism another development took place, in which the heart of the faithful became in a sense replaced by the heart of Christ, and a new spirituality developed on the basis of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Reference to His bleeding heart became common in the writings of such figures as St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Catherine of Sienna. The Christian doctrines of the heart, based as they are on the Bible, present certain universal theses to be seen also in Judaism, the most important of which is the association of the heart with the inner soul of man and the center of the human state. In Jewish mysticism the spirituality of the heart was further developed, and some Jewish mystics emphasized the idea of the “broken or contrite heart” (levnichbar) and wrote that to reach the Divine Majesty one had to “tear one’s heart” and that the “broken heart” mentioned in the Psalms sufficed. To make clear the universality of the spiritual significance of the heart across religious boundaries, while also emphasizing the development of the “theology of the heart” and methods of “prayer of the heart” particular to each tradition, one may recall that the name of Horus, the Egyptian god, meant the “heart of the world”. In Sanskrit the term for heart, hridaya, means also the center of the world, since, by virtue of the analogy between the macrocosm and the microcosm, the center of man is also the center of the universe. Furthermore, in Sanskrit the term shraddha, meaning faith, also signifies knowledge of the heart, and the same is true in Arabic, where the word îmân means faith when used for man and knowledge when used for God, as in the Divine Name al-Mu’min. As for the Far Eastern tradition, in Chinese the term xin means both heart and mind or consciousness. – Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Chapter 3: The Heart of the Faithful is the Throne of the All-Merciful)

That is exactly what I did once, for instance, when a rabbi from Eastern Europe turned to me and told me his story. He had lost his first wife and their six children in the concentration camp of Auschwitz where they were gassed, and now it turned out that his second wife was sterile. I observed that procreation is not the only meaning of life, for then life in itself would become meaningless, and something which in itself is meaningless cannot be rendered meaningful merely by its perpetuation. However, the rabbi evaluated his plight as an orthodox Jew in terms of despair that there was no son of his own who would ever say Kaddish6 for him after his death. But I would not give up. I made a last attempt to help him by inquiring whether he did not hope to see his children again in Heaven. However, my question was followed by an outburst of tears, and now the true reason for his despair came to the fore: he explained that his children, since they died as innocent martyrs,7 were thus found worthy of the highest place in Heaven, but as for himself he could not expect, as an old, sinful man, to be assigned the same place. I did not give up but retorted, “Is it not conceivable, Rabbi, that precisely this was the meaning of your surviving your children: that you may be purified through these years of suffering, so that finally you, too, though not innocent like your children, may become worthy of joining them in Heaven? Is it not written in the Psalms that God preserves all your tears?8 So perhaps none of your sufferings were in vain.” For the first time in many years he found relief from his suffering through the new point of view which I was able to open up to him.

Pope Francis actually holds the Eastern Orthodox position on the papacy, collegiality, divorce, and the “pastoral” notion of economia revamped as being true to conscience.

Are we able to see that deeper “reality"? Much of the work in spiritual growth is along that line; we are always trying to adjust our perception so we can see the “real" reality, trying to crash through our habitual assumption that we are alone in this world, that God is too busy to notice what we're doing, and that if he's watching at all, it's "From a Distance."* The kind of “realism" icons bring helps correct our perception, bringing it into accord with the presence of God throughout all creation,

You cannot serve both God and mammon; and if “mammon” represents, in earthly terms, our attachments to wealth and money, then in the spiritual life it represents our attachment to the compulsions of the passionate soul and body. If we wish to serve the man-befriending Lord and find our rest in Him, we must learn to serve Him alone and cast off the familiar masters that are our passions.

Do not fill your mind with worldly noise without reason. Radios or televisions operating “in the background” prevent quietude by filling even empty moments with the distracting flow of sounds and voices. How shall we find quiet in our times of prayer, if we have so condition ourselves against it in every other moment?

Accept what comes from God as His gift, and remain vigilant. Do not cling to even the good, past what is fitting. The weak mind can make idols even out of the good.

Consider each temptation as an opportunity for purification, for strengthening your quiet resolve and spiritual fortitude. He who never falls in prayer is making no real attempt at growth.

Let no temptation call you away from the life of prayer! Let no obstacle be for you a true menace! The Lord is victorious, mighty in battle, and our very Defender: who can do us harm?

Our death is to be to this world in its sinful separation from God. We must die to our waywardness, to our self-will, to our false idols. We must die to a world that has taken death as its defining characteristic. Dying in this way, we open ourselves to life.

The empty tomb transformed the cosmos. So will the prayer of the heart transform the person, the cosmos, even all creation.

… any small step toward God reveals in a new way that we are not of this world.

The Liturgy is before all else the joyful gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and enter into His Kingdom. And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, in vestments and in censing, in that whole beauty of the liturgy which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful. Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the “necessary.” Beauty is never “necessary,” “functional” or “useful.” And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love. And the Church is love, expectation and joy. It is heaven on earth.… It is the joy of recovered childhood, that free, unconditioned and disinterested joy which alone is capable of transforming the world.

The feast of St. Demetrios could look a lot like All Saint’s Day in Russian Orthodox tradition. It often coincided with rites to honor the dead, and it was on October 26th. For those of us who use the Gregorian calendar, that would be equivalent to our November 8th. Therefore, the connection of these November rituals with harvest and the cult of ancestors is probably quite old.

The experience of martyrdom and persecution has been the crucible in which Orthodox Christians have found their faith refined.

Authoritarian reactionary Christianity turns out to be a global phenomenon, affecting historically Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant lands. Its antiliberalism has very deep roots, and that antiliberalism has intensified in successive waves over the last fifty years. It is in the marrow of hundreds of millions of Christians, and it has been wired into right-wing politics in many countries, such that leveraging its passion can help ambitious politicians gain power.

In much the same way that the Orthodox Christian world seems to have “converted” thunder deities into “St. Elijah”, it seems that horseman deities tended to be deliberately merged with St. George.

Upon encountering Islam by whatever means, Drew was soundly impressed with the appeal of the religion, initially. This ancient Middle Eastern religion attracted the North Carolinian with not only its strict moral discipline but also the modest way its worshippers dressed and the proud and sober manner in which they carried themselves. After reportedly coming under the influence of Muslim teachers, Drew came to view Islam as “the only instrument for Negro unity and advancement.” 7 Lacking knowledge of the Arabic language as well as grounding in Muslim orthodoxy, he examined its dogma as best he could by probing the international faith with a keen eye out for remedies that would help Negroes relieve the sociopolitical pain and suffering they endured early in the twentieth century as an oppressed people in the United States. The young black supplicant found no such balm in orthodox Islam. Also, he reasoned that Arabic dogma would be a tough sell to a generation of Negroes just out of slavery and barely literate in English. Most troubling of all, the Arab Muslims in the Middle East had a long and barbaric history of enslaving sub-Saharan Africans—indeed, they dominated this ruthless human trade in Morocco and Egypt. Additionally, the Moors were known to widely practice color-caste discrimination among themselves.

Theology in the East is based not on discursive thought but on “knowledge that stems from the vision of God.”16 The Western approach is fundamentally intellectual; the Eastern is fundamentally spiritual.

The view which would base the unity of a local church on a political, racial or cultural principle is considered by the Orthodox Church as a heresy, specially known by the name of philetism.

We have thus contracted something like a disease—the disease of death and decay—and we are desperately subject to a world in which the Evil One presently has a stronghold.

I am an image of Your ineffable glory, though I bear the scars of my transgressions. Take pity on me, the work of Your hands, Master, and cleanse me by Your compassion. Grant me the desired homeland for which I long, making me again a citizen of Paradise.

In other words, the superlative role model for Christians is a woman.

A heretical teaching arises out of a decision to deviate from revelation in favor of one’s own insights. In the Christian context, heresy means an intentional or formal preference to deny or compromise a core dogma of the Christian Faith even when one is faced with a preponderance of evidence that the resulting belief is not correct.

In fact, inside the new Reform temples, with their pulpits and pews and chandeliers, where hatted women worshiped alongside unhatted men and not in separate curtained galleries, the atmosphere was often indistinguishable from that of an American Christian church. The strictly Orthodox, kosher-keeping Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Hungarians viewed all these developments as examples—sinister and shocking ones—of how quickly the faith could erode in

These books are accepted as canonical by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians but not by Protestants or Jews. But whether taken as canonical or not, the books were undeniably influential in the early church, and certainly helped shape Christian thinking about the practice of pharmakeia. Consider the book of Wisdom. Wisdom 12:4 says God hated the Canaanites because of two things: their “wicked sacrifices” (likely human), and their “pharmakeia.” Note yet again the close association that the ancient Hebrews had between human sacrifice and pharmakeia.

The Lord’s flesh does not suffer corruption, it remains incorruptible even in death itself, i.e., alive, as though it had never died, for it abides in the very bosom of the Life in the Hypostasis of the Word.

The Revised Standard Version Bible Committee is a continuing body, comprising about thirty members, both men and women. Ecumenical in representation, it includes scholars affiliated with various Protestant denominations, as well as several Roman Catholic members, an Eastern Orthodox member, and a Jewish member who serves in the Old Testament section. For a period of time the Committee included several members from Canada and from England.

Because God is infinite and we are not, Gregory said that the soul will never tire of moving closer to divine love.

Jesus did send the Spirit into history to the disciples on earth, but Jesus also took care to clarify that this same Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father, and from the Father alone:

But when the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me. (John 15:26)

no bishop in the Church “can claim to wield an absolute power over all the rest.

the diverse humans in the Church are also intended to share in a oneness of nature.

The communion (koinōnia) of the Holy Trinity is being revealed to the Church continually through the Holy Spirit as “an event of communion, which transforms everything the Spirit touches into a relational being.

Not only does the Holy Spirit make us all one, but he makes us each different. At Pentecost the multiplicity of tongues was not abolished, but it ceased to be a cause of separation; each spoke as before in his own tongue, but by the power of the Spirit each could understand the others.

we are in the same condition as men who lose their appetite for all food regardless of what it is, after being disgusted with some particular dish; we take an equal dislike to all doctrinal discussion.

the Divine Liturgy celebrated in parts of Africa might include drums and tribal dancing, which makes it look strikingly different from the same Divine Liturgy celebrated in North America—yet it is the same Divine Liturgy.

during a theological conference in the mid-1990s, which Peter Kreeft recalled in 1998 as “the most memorable moment of the most memorable conference I ever attended.” Attending the meeting, says Kreeft, were “dozens of high-octane Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Evangelicals,” who, despite their noted theological differences, converged near the end of the conference in a crescendo of agreement. Kreeft continues: In the concluding session Father Fessio got up and proposed [tongue in cheek] that we issue a joint statement of theological agreement among all the historic, orthodox branches of Christendom saying that what united us was Scripture, the Apostles’ Creed, the first six ecumenical councils and the collected works of C. S. Lewis. The proposal was universally cheered.

Some East Side Jews were budding Marxists, some were socialists, some were Zionists. Some were Orthodox, some were atheists. The Jews of Warsaw could not see eye to eye with those from Krakow.

On the most basic question of all, “who is a Jew?” Elisabeth could find no solid answers. Many of her interviewees simply shrugged: “Ask three Jews, get five opinions.” In a later Christianity Today article, Elisabeth summarized her search for answers. “It is not, Israel officially proclaims, a racial question. There are Jews in every anthropologically-defined “race”—from the black Ethiopian to the Chinese orthodox Jew. “It is not a religious question. Probably fewer than ten percent of Israelis are orthodox Jews, and many are not only not religious, but are militantly anti-God. “To be Jewish is not a linguistic question. Over seventy languages are spoken in Israel, even though Hebrew is the official language and strong efforts are made to encourage everybody to learn it. “It is not a cultural question. Some Jews, desperately casting about for a definition that would satisfy me, said that Jewishness is a “cultural consciousness.” But what culture? Elisabeth had seen keening eastern Jewish women in Arab dress, Jews from New York’s East Side, Russian Jews, and Israeli natives born on kibbitzes. There were clearly no common denominators in terms of rituals, speech, dress, or outlook. “Is Jewishness then a political category?” Elisabeth continued. “Israel is a political state, but there are millions of Jews who are not Israelis. There are thousands of “Israelis” who are not Jews—every Arab now “assimilated” into the nation of Israel by conquest is officially an Israeli . . .” At the time the Israeli government defined Jews genetically, which to Elisabeth seemed a strange contradiction when they so vehemently deny that Jewishness has anything to do with race. But the determining question is, “‘Who is your mother?’ Anyone born of a Jewish mother is Jewish. The question as to what makes her Jewish has no answer. If your father is Jewish, if he is even a rabbi, it will not help you at all.”⁠3 “I have come to the conclusion that it remains for Israel; alone to execute justice for those who are its responsibility. If its highways must cut through the Arabs’ desert, if it claims ‘eminent domain,’ it must justly compensate those who have been displaced, those whose empty houses and lands Israel is now determined to fill with its own immigrants.

In reality, “Mother Friday” is probably a product of Slavic paganism and Orthodox Christianity. This female personification of “Friday” has a significant place in Eastern European folk tradition, and she deserves some brief explanation. The Russian scholar Rybakov strongly connected the Russian Orthodox Saint Paraskeva-Friday with the Slavic Goddess Mokosh, who is listed among the idols of Pre-Christian Kiev in the Russian Primary Chronicle. The key piece of evidence for this was a folk tradition from the Russian North, where the name “Mokusha” survived into the 20th century. Evidently, the Mokusha was a spirit who punished women for violating prohibitions on spinning.

How to account for [Eastern Europe's] wondrous and mystifying melange [of peoples]? Stempowski's answer had to do with nations and states. In the West, he wrote, the equation between ethnic and linguistic belonging and political allegiance began very early. Beginning in the Middle Ages, priests and prelates imposed their particular strands of Christianity on the populations, executing heretics and unbelievers. Meanwhile kings expelled their Jews and confiscated their property. If a realm contained Muslims, they were likewise forced to convert or were banished. By the nineteenth century, national belonging replaced religion as the dominant template to be imposed on society. Little armies of bureaucrats and educators fanned out into the countryside, making sure that all the people there spoke the same language. Across the territory conquered by the French kings, peasants were *made* into French people, and if the Scots didn't concurrently become English, they certainly adopted the English language. Virtually everywhere, the machinery of the state worked like a giant steamroller, ironing out differences wherever they could be found. In all these regards, Eastern Europe was different. There, empires tended to accentuate difference rather than suppress it. In the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire offered many Christians and Jews a wide measure of autonomy, allowing them to manage their own affairs. The Russian Empire, Stempowki's birthplace, afforded religious minorities an even greater degree of freedom. The Habsburg empire did its best to impose Catholicism on its various peoples, especially the rebellious Czechs, but even so, it remained home to numerous Orthodox Christians and Jews. More importantly, the Habsburgs made hardly any effort to turn their various constituent peoples (around 1900 the empire was home to eleven official nationalities) into Germans. These empires took a laissez-faire approach to governing, They taxed and counted their subjects, but they did not intervene too deeply in the inner structure of their communities

This relatively hands-off style of rule practiced by the Eastern European empires was born of pragmatism. Social divisions were not a flaw to be overcome, but a tool to be used. In these realms, universal citizenship did not exist. People lived not as individuals but as parts of wider social estates, each of which came with its own set of privileges and prohibitions. Everyone was discriminated against to some extent, except for the sultan or czar. Everyone also had a function. To most people, before the arrival of modernity, the idea of equality before the law was unthinkable. What mattered most in life was to be allowed to fulfill their role undisturbed. Meanwhile, what mattered most to rulers was that the sum total of these various roles added up to them staying in power. For this, outsiders could be just as useful as locals and often showed themselves to be more dependable. The process of inviting helpful strangers into Eastern Europe began very early. Eastern European monarchs began looking abroad for talent in the Middle Ages Compared to Western Europe, the East was under-populated, lacking sities and the specialized craftsmen and traders who inhabited them. Eastern rulers also sat uneasily on the intersection of multiple frontiers: between pagan and Christian, Christian and Muslim, and Catholic and Orthodox. Because of this, they needed all the help they could get cultivating, defending, and administering their realms. In the eleventh century, A Hungarian king lectured his son about the usefulness of immigrants: 'As guests come from various areas and lands, so they bring with them various languages and customs, various examples and forms of armaments, which adorn and glorify the royal court. . . . For a kingdom of one language and one custom is weak and fragile. Therefore, my son, I order that you should feed them with goodwill and honor them so that they will prefer to live with you rather than inhabit any other place.' The young prince took his father's advice to heart. By the thirteenth century, the kingdom of Hungary harbored, within its ragile borders, groups of Jews, Muslims, Armenians, Slavs, Italians, Franks, Spaniards, and Germans

No matter what bitterness has befallen you, no matter what unpleasantness has happened to you, say, "I shall endure this for Jesus Christ!" and it will be easier for you. For the name of Jesus Christ is powerful. Through it all unpleasantness is calmed, and demons disappear. Your disappointments will also be calmed and your pusillanimity will be quieted.

In addition, according to Dupuis's original multi-volume work in French (not included in the English translation), Mithra was "put to death by crucifixion, and rose again on the 25th of March." Concerning the Persian crucifixion, Robertson states, "...the Persian Sun God Mithra is imaged in the Zendavesta 'with arms stretched out towards immortality."240 Mithra's suffering was considered an act of salvation, and his resurrection was celebrated with his priests shouting, "He is risen," as they do to this day in Eastern Orthodox Christianity at Easter.

However, one visible societal element that has been lost is the proper understanding of women and their role in Protestant churches. Professor Catherine Tzacz talks about her experience studying with some Lutheran women and their surprise at the centrality that women play in Eastern Orthodox liturgy. The Protestant Reformation unwittingly erased many of the places where feminine spirituality—a spirituality profoundly different from masculine spirituality—flourished: “The Reformers, Patricia Ranft has shown, attacked institutions within Christianity that fostered women’s visibility and high status, specifically monasticism, saints, and Mariology.”13 One commentator went so far as to suggest that “the Protestant rejection of the veneration of Mary and its various consequences (such as the really ‘male-dominated’ Protestant worship, deprived of sentiment, poetry and intuitive mystery-perception) is one of the psychological reasons which explains the recent emergence of institutional feminism.”14 Without giving women an authentic outlet for their fundamental need to worship and the unique way they go about doing it, Protestantism has pushed them in another direction—that is, eyeing those roles previously reserved for men because the feminine roles have been decimated. This argument has been made among Protestants themselves. Blogger

In order to attack us, the devil must first weaken our spiritual immune systems by infecting us with the snake oil of this delusion rooted not in dialogue with God “just as I am” but the thought that I should postpone dialogue with God until after I can become good enough to be worthy of such a meeting. This is the other end of the stick of pride, which already presumes to be worthy of dialogue and so remains in a monologue of self-love out of envy and vainglory.

our worship sometimes sounds over the top (“Save us, O Virgin,” “You are our only hope”), but we know what we mean. Mostly, we mean, “Pray for us.” We don’t mean that Mary has the power to grant eternal salvation, that she was created differently than other humans, or that she supplied some additional saving factor at the Cross. It doesn’t mean that she can (or would) do anything independently from the will of her Son.¶ I think that’s where things went wrong in Western Christianity. A thread of devotion took shape that saw Mary as an independent operator, with her own allotment of power.

The reason my husband and I became Orthodox was that our mainline denomination was energetically revising its theology; church leaders were teaching that Jesus wasn’t born of a virgin, he didn’t do any miracles, and he didn’t rise from the dead.†† After some reading, visiting churches, praying, and a whole lot of talking, we decided to join the Orthodox Church.

As to Constantinople. That jewel in the crown of the Byzantine Empire. That continent-straddling stronghold of the Eastern Orthodox Church. That famously inviolable walled city ruled by generations of interbred usurping nut-jobs a pantheon of families so tortuously intertwined as to be the basis of our modern adjective byzantine.

We do not force Christianity on the reader and we do not condemn non-Christians. Nevertheless, we do acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the only Son of God, and the Logos of all creation. He is uniquely fully human and fully divine. In Greek, the term for this God-man is Theanthropos. It is Jesus Christ who we acknowledge as the most influential person in our life. He colors everything we do and certainly is an integral part of the dynamic psychology we describe here. In fact, the Greek term, dynamis, means “power,” especially the power of God, and reflects the subject matter of this discourse on psychology. It is a power dressed in the context of Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity, a tradition that traces its origins to the early Greek Church. Despite this Christian viewpoint, it is our conviction that the model of the psyche we offer is truly universal in the sense that it combines the contributions of neuroscience and cognitive-behavioral psychology with the psychodynamic insights of Jung, Freud, and other psychologists and scholars.

Darwin caused controversy, not merely because his ideas contradicted Genesis, but because they fell foul of the way in which Genesis had been read by those influenced by the Enlightenment, for it was the Enlightenment that conceived of the human as almost exclusively rational and intellectual, and set the human at a distance from the animal.

The Word bestows adoption on us when he grants us that birth and deification which, transcending nature, come by grace from above through the Spirit. The guarding and preservation of this in God depends on the resolve of those thus born: on their sincere acceptance of the grace bestowed on them and, through the practice of the commandments, on their cultivation of the beauty given to them by grace. Moreover, by emptying themselves of the passions they lay hold of the divine to the same degree as that to which, deliberately emptying himself of his own sublime glory, the Word of God truly became man.

According to the Catholic or Orthodox, who eventually triumphed within the Roman Empire, Christ had two natures, which were conjoined and commingled. Many Easterners followed the Patriarch Nestorius, who accepted the two natures but held that these were not absolutely united in the mystical sense taught by the Orthodox. This

The Council itself identified religious truth as present in what was in effect a series of overlapping circles, with all Christian faiths possessing some degree of truth but “the fullness of Christ’s truth” present only in the Catholic Church. The new ecumenism appeared revolutionary to many, a complete reversal of what had previously been taught. It was, however, merely a change of perspective, in that the Catholic Church had always recognized the core of orthodoxy in Protestantism (the Trinity, the divinity of Christ) but had previously emphasized its errors. Now she chose to recognize its truths, as the basis of imperfect brotherly unity. Eastern Orthodoxy Ecumenical priority was inevitably given to the Eastern Orthodox, who were recognized as sharing most of the Catholic faith. Separation from the Orthodox was viewed by the Council Fathers as a lamentable historical misfortune, and the mutual excommunications of 1054 were formally rescinded after the Council. Protestants The Council warned against a false ecumenism based on an indifference to, or a misinterpretation of, doctrine. However, under Bea’s direction, official dialogues were initiated, especially with Lutherans and Anglicans. In practical terms, the immediate effect of ecumenism was to alter Catholics’ and Protestants’ attitudes toward one another, as for the first time they were allowed, even encouraged, to pray together both formally and informally, although they could not share the Eucharist. The

Daniel foretells: “Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay” (Daniel 2:41). Thirty years ago that meaning was subject to many interpretations, be it western/eastern Europe; free Europe/Communist Europe; Catholic Church/Orthodox Church, etc. But, today, we can more readily perceive that as strong as the Muslim move to conquer the world will be, it will be driven by the two divisions of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shittes, just as God disclosed through Daniel. Both branches of Islam will follow the powerful Antichrist/Mahdi, arising from and ruling over the two legs/feet of the revived Roman Empire.

But how shall an Occidental mind ever understand the Orient? Eight years of study and travel have only made this, too, more evident that not even a lifetime of devoted scholarship would suffice to initiate a Western student into the subtle character and secret lore of the East. Every chap- ter, every paragraph in this book will offend or amuse some patriotic or esoteric soul: the orthodox Jew will need all his ancient patience to forgive the pages on Yahveh; the metaphysical Hindu will mourn this superficial scratching of Indian philosophy; and the Chinese or Japanese sage will smile indulgently at these brief and inadequate selections from the wealth of Far Eastern literature and thought. Some of the errors in the chapter on Judea have been corrected by Professor Harry Wolf son of Harvard;

Hasidism is considered Ultra-Orthodox, but when it began in the 1730s in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, it was seen as liberal and even revolutionary because of its emphasis of the heart over the Head. This movement was inspired by the Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760), a man beloved not so much for his book learning as for his heartfelt spirituality, his down-to-earth stories, and his unshakable conviction that God is near to all of us, and not just the intelligent and the learned.

when we're suffocated by the world's distractions, it can be easy to avoid God. But we're also quite capable of spending our time pondering the great questions instead of dealing with God. Thinking and talking about God is not communion with God. Only prayer is prayer. Both worldly distractions and theoretical cogitating can be used to avoid the challenge that ultimately faces each of us: that we are called to enter a direct, personal relationship with God,