Sailing in the Winter Sun: Journal of an Old Man at the End of Life

Excerpts from the journal of Archbishop Lazar
The beginning of true morality is to treat those around you in a decent manner, to strive never to do anything to others that you would not wish to be done to you, and to conduct your own personal life in a manner consistent with the Gospel, with the living example of Christ Jesus. However else you apply any other rules to your life, apply them within the framework of the Gospels, strive to never project your own neuroses onto others, and strive to govern your own life and not try to govern the lives of those around you. True morality consists far more in how well we care for others than in what kind of behaviour we demand from others.
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When one uses the Bible as a weapon against the “not us,” it does not make young people question the “not us,” it makes them question the Bible.
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As we approach the Christian Passover, Holy Pascha, let us remember that the blood shed by Christ was the blood of compassion, co-suffering love and healing, not the blood of vengeance, vindictiveness or payment to offended honour.
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The Gospel of Jesus Christ was not shaped as a weapon of destruction but as a word of love, compassion, understanding and healing. How dare we turn Christ’s words of love into concepts of hate, malice and destruction? Remember that the people you hate and denigrate are people that Christ loves and died for, and they may enter the Kingdom ahead of you since the person who hates has little chance of entering at all.
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To the religious nationalists, I would like to say, if you dance with Caesar, Caesar always leads.
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Ignorance is a gateway narcotic. It leads to an addiction to prejudice and hate.

Evangelicals, your moralism is killing you. No one is contributing more to modern atheism than is the Evangelical movement and its televangelists.

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A law code often closes us off to really unselfish love. Christ gave us a different perspective with His moral imperatives, which we seldom follow.
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People often talk about the “spirituality” of the “Eastern Church.” We are not seeking after “spirituality” but for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Spirituality is too often a subjective emotionalism, a fantasy, or an abstract philosophical metaphysical construct. We are not concerned with “spirituality,” but rather to strive to acquire the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and to truly have Christ present in our hearts.
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I want to express my faith in today’s young people. I have said before, and repeat again, that I believe that this generation, the Millennials, are better than my generation. Moreover, I don’t think that they are less spiritual, if anything, they are more spiritually inclined than my generation.

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Most people appear to be indifferent to the gross injustice, and practically enslavement of women in so much of the world today, and they are not the only group of people who are unjustly persecuted and demeaned. If some are not free, none are free, if some are not equal, then equality does not exist. This is unacceptable in terms of humanity, in terms of democracy, and in terms of common human decency.
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The Scripture cannot be properly understood outside the Tradition. Actually, this is logical. Many things were not clarified or written in detail because the people to whom it was written already knew the details from their life of worship and the Tradition. When someone says, “Well Paul never mentions…….” No, because he was writing to people who already knew and were doing that. In fact, Paul writes more about what might be going wrong than what was being done right, because that was what the need was. The Bible is, after all, not a technical manual.
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If Christians would seek the life in Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit rather than destructive moralisms, we could transform the world. But we have reduced the Gospel down to a mere moral code, and that cannot transform the inner person. Only the indwelling of the Holy Spirit can do that. 
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Love is greater than law, and it is the fulfilment of faith.

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Fear is a “gateway drug”. The real source of hate is fear and the culmination of fear and hate can be murder or suicide.
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We hate most in others what we fear most in ourselves, this is why moral outrage is a form of public confession.
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As a narcotic, fear leads us, on the one hand to prejudice, self-ortification, and cruelty. On the other hand, it leads us toward a kind of prejudice against our own self, a loss of self-esteem which can push us into other forms of  spiritual “narcotics.” 
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We have heard the saying “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” If the truth that you think you know is placing you in some form of bondage rather than freedom, it is likely that it is not truth at all but some form of ideology or mythology that was born of fear in the first place.
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Sin is not the problem; alienation is. In my understanding, sin is the misuse of our energies. Sin is about relationships, not about “law.”

 We should not see “sin” merely in sexual terms as far too many moralists do, rather it is a misuse of our energies in any area of life.
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The preaching of the Gospel was never meant to be a means of colonizing people’s minds with fear. 
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Fear and disdain, even hate toward “the other”  has become a primary element of far too many Christian preachers, and it has clearly contributed to the rise of atheism. It is often the result of the effort to decolonize the mind that has led to a rejection Christianity. The colonialism of fear no longer works except in a neurotic mind. If we do not wish to, in the words of Pope Francis, “inoculate young people against faith” we have to stop making it fear-based and restore it to Christ’s message of hope, love and joy.
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Speak out of the fulness of your own heart, and not from bondage to rules, regulations or ideology.
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Fasting is an important exercise in self-discipline and self-control. But if the exercise does not come from the heart, no matter how much you fast, it is of no spiritual value.. 
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The only true theocracy is a theocracy of the heart, not a theoretical political construct. God does not force His will on the unwilling.
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Until love is embraced as the only commodity of genuine value, we people will be programmed to fear and, in turn, have that fear sold back to us as freedom. 
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 Frankly, I am not so certain why the existence of evil should be an enigma. Evil is primarily “the absence of empathy,” which is why the two prime commands of Christ are to love God with all your being and to have empathy for your neighbour (which is the only way that you could love your neighbour as yourself).
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Loss of empathy is evident in the “Fall” story because it chronicles the birth of ego, egoism and self-love. Those characteristics are at the very essence of Satan and the root of the demonic. Perhaps this is why Romanides insisted that the way to defeat Satan was through growth in unselfish love.
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Ignorance is a poor basis for dogmatic and self-assured statements; but, alas, it is the most common platform from which such statements are made.
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Odd how we spend so many years weaving, only to see the fabric of our lives shredded by our own folly, or choices made in haste, or governed by passions. Instants and seconds rather than days and years unravel the fabric of our lives. Sometimes, we are left only with the residue of aspirations, of hopes and dreams diffused like ashes in the reality of our own inability to perceive reality.
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Perhaps when one falls to the temptation of thinking that one’s life no longer has meaning, we fall prey to the fear and arrogance of believing that our lives ought to have some extraordinary meaning. In reality, the actual meaning and purpose of life is to love and be loved. To be needed and adulated destroys, rather than enhances, any meaning to our lives.
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In matters of fear and passions, reason appears to be the enemy. A person in the bondage of such delusions can end up hating the one who loves him the most as a response to hating oneself and knowing that he has lost control. Obsession is among the most powerful delusions and passions that can imprison us.
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In my view, Orthodox Christianity has the most profound beauty and truth to offer to the world. Yet we, too, often find ourselves in bondage to fundamentalism, and sometimes to sheer superstitions and unsound “spiritualities.” We need to be sober and wary of how we judge others. 
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Science, education, freedom of speech and expression, and democratic values are our allies, not our enemies. It may be that much of the Islamic world has not yet discovered this, but as they do, those among them who are possessed by brittle insecurities and fear will react as violently as we have seen Fundamentalist Christians do. Our task is not to help them succeed by over-reacting to either of them, and ourselves undermining these values and freedoms. 
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There is no freedom without responsibility. If, as apostle Paul says, we enjoy the “glorious freedom of God’s children,” then surely our responsibility is to try to live as God’s children. This means we have the responsibility to live in the image of Christ Jesus, Who, in His life forgave, healed and raised up, who condemned only self-righteous hypocrisy and the degradation of God’s house.
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The struggle for equal rights for sexual minorities is not about “sex,” but about social justice and human dignity, and maybe even about a purification of our faith so that we find time to focus on the profound elements of the Gospel rather than upon our irrational fears of everything that appears to be different — and perhaps even our irrational fears of our own selves.
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Religious extremism and fanaticism, religious radicalism of any brand and form is not a result of faith but of addiction. Religious addiction is ultimately the death of faith and a true descent into a dark narcissistic fantasy.
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It is well to keep a constant measure on one’s belief to ensure that it is a genuine expression of living faith and not the result of a spiritual addiction, a developing OCD that robs one of reason and ultimately of self-control.
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 Extremism in the defence of a religion has nothing to do with profound faith but rather is a mental derangement.
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Without doubt, the biggest moral issue of our epoch is the ecological collapse. The destruction of the biosphere, the earth’s “life support system” is being brought about largely by sheer avarice, unbridled greed and self-centredness. We ourselves are the “vials of wrath” that are spoken of in the Book of Revelation.
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Are we so foolish as to think that our cursing and our condemning and our hatred are going to soften someone’s heart and change them? Will it not rather drive not only them but even other human beings who do have compassion: will it not drive all of them away from the Gospel, away from Christ, away from Orthodoxy, away from Christianity? 
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It would seem that, rather than being so audacious as to think that we must “defend God,” we ought to use the energy striving to live a life that demonstrates our complete faith in His love and Providence. God is able to take care of Himself.
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Unfortunately, the “defenders of God” generally make fools of themselves using arguments that are inane, limp, and, just as often, simply plain wrong. Better we should live the faith and proclaim the Gospel with some humility, but certain faith, hoping also to reflect the Gospel in our lives, not by means of some harsh moralisms, but by an assimilation of the love and healing compassion of our Saviour.
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Anyone who fervently and fanatically believes something that is demonstrably false is capable of any extreme, even murder.
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If our faith is primarily a mantra to drive away punishment, our faith isn’t really faith, it is fear. We feign faith in order to keep from being punished. When we do that it usually manifests itself as a kind of harsh and brutal moralism because in this system it is psychologically comforting to see ourselves as better than other people. Thus trying to hype up our ego leads us to a kind of moralism where we have to denigrate others in order to make ourselves feel better.

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Moralism is the last refuge of the true pervert; right-wing fundamentalism is the dark cloud of wickedness in which the ignorant and the perverse seek to hide from the light of truth and reality.
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History is not a presentation of truth, it is an interpretation of events from the point of view, and with the biases, of the chronicler. It is often mixed with hearsay and in many cases reflects the national mythologies of one or another side in any conflict or comparison. This is true not only of early history but of what was reported yesterday. We ought never to presume that we have completely accurate information or factual presentations. We seldom know for certain what is true, what is reality, and what is neither.
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If only all Christians would place their hope in the love and mercy of God by demonstrating love and mercy themselves, the world around us would be transformed.
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Love is greater than law. The one who lives by the law will be judged by the law; the one who lives by love will be judged by love.
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Every act of hatred and malice separates us from God, and the separation is greater when we pretend that the hatred is an act of love.
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It does not matter what your background or education is, if you deform it with ideology instead of rational thought and openness to new information and ideas, you have turned off the light in your mind and closed its door to fresh air.
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Evolution of the species is not a conjecture. It is one of the well-researched and well-proved realities in science, and it is actually irrefutable. As the late Archbishop Vitaly of Montreal once remarked, “one can deny evolution, just not successfully.” We all started our existence with the eukaryote revolution some 4 billion years ago. Sexual reproduction is at least 3.5 billion years old. In fact, “death,” as we speak of it, began precisely with sexual reproduction as indicated in the Book of Genesis.
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Askesis or “asceticism” is really about attaining self-control and self-discipline. We always think of it in terms of specific passions, but it really is about self-control and self-discipline. Indeed fasting is about the same thing. No one forces us to fast; we have to make a decision and we manage to keep the fast by means of self-control and self-discipline, and this is the principal reason for fasting.
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When it comes to “lifestyle,”  we can make clear lifestyle choices about what material things we think we need and what things we actually need. This is something we have to think about.
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I often recall a line from a British short story, from the 1800s. In the story, the characters are all animals and the character Mrs. Poodle remarks “what will people think” and Dr. Spaniel replies “Oh they won’t. I don’t doubt people will talk, but thinking is very rare.” But if we are at all serious about the environment and those who are already suffering the consequences of human effects on the weather and environment, then we must give serious thought to our individual role in this, and we must give thought to how our lifestyle contributes to the problem. 
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Ecology should be seen as a sacrament because we are dealing with God’s creation and His gift to us.
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Ecology is a sacrament that involves each of us and all of us cooperating with the grace of the Holy Spirit for the preservation of God’s creation, which has been entrusted to us; this is as much a spiritual matter as it is a physical matter.
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Asceticism, askesis, is first and foremost a matter of self-control and self-discipline. At the next level, it is finally a matter of our relationship with God, and whether we have understood the words of Christ. This means “love for neighbour”, as well as seeking to love God, striving toward unselfish love and a genuine concern for the rest of humanity and for future generations. The denial of climate change and human involvement in climate change is really a very selfish and self-centred act.
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W are not trying to save the planet – the planet is just fine without us; we are trying to save ourselves by preserving the life support system that the earth provides for us. Without us, the earth would restore her ecology – just without us. It is not the planet that will not survive, it is humanity, and this is what we are trying to rescue.

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It really is greed and avarice that are destroying our life support system on this planet. This is what genuine askesis seeks to overcome.
It is at the point of “mystery” that religion and science become complementary.
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Change is inevitable and what does not change simply dies. It is said that tradition is the living faith of the dead, while traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. To be alive and have meaning, tradition must be the underpinning of change and the guide to change.
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Tradition itself cannot remain static without withering and dying. Change is at the essence of life. Tradition may be called the caution with which we accept change.
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If tradition is not the foundation of the process with which we accept change, then eventually it will simply vanish into the dust of the past. Traditionalists are those who refuse all advances in knowledge and understanding and identify tradition with ignorance. 
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Those who are sincere about tradition use it as a foundation upon which to build as we discover new things and acquire new knowledge and understanding about things we had only surmised and guessed about before.
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Liberty is synonymous with responsibility and cannot be maintained in the absence of self-discipline and self-control. When we lack self-discipline and self-control an external authority becomes responsible for discipline and control. 
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Life is only as meaningless as you make it.

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Our own personal tragedies can make us poets or demons; spiritual healers or emotional vampires. If only we could understand and learn from them. Sometimes, we need to actually appreciate our tragedies and use them as vehicles toward greater humanity. If we live with them in a positive manner, we can even learn to be “healers.” Tragedies there be for everyone, some lesser, some greater, but the one who learns to increase in spirit and humanity from them is a gift to mankind.
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Prejudice is the easy way out of the labour of gaining knowledge.
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It often takes deep and serious thought, perhaps sometimes soul-searching, but everyone needs to understand the difference between a prejudice and a conviction. People will argue more vehemently to defend a prejudice than to express a conviction. Everyone should seriously think about this particular difference.
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Before you wish for more, make sure you are using what you already have well and wisely.

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When one uses the Bible as a weapon against the “not us”, it does not make young people question the “not us,” it makes them question the Bible. As we approach the Christian Passover, Holy Pascha, let us remember that the blood shed by Christ was the blood of compassion, co-suffering love and healing, not the blood of vengeance, vindictiveness or payment to offended honour.
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The Gospel of Jesus Christ was not shaped as a weapon of destruction but as a word of love, compassion, understanding and healing. How dare we turn Christ’s words of love into concepts of hate, malice and destruction.
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Remember that the people you hate and denigrate are people that Christ loves and died for, and they may enter the Kingdom ahead of you since the person who hates has little chance of entering at all.
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One might wish that some of our more vociferous Christians would not make such outrageous and ludicrous predictions as they do, and not blame God for every natural disaster that takes place.
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Remember that society was going to collapse if women got to vote, if black people were given rights, and how the world was going to come to an end on ______ (fill in the blank, there have been so many dates and times given that you can pick your own). Remember the hysteria over the Procter and Gamble logo? Remember the hysteria over bar-codes, when emotionally unbalanced people were screaming that they were “the mark of the beast,” the sign of the Antichrist, and UFOs were “demonic apparitions”? Such ideas were not only false, but silly, and they captured many. Remember how “earthquakes are caused by women dressing immodestly,” and every hurricane or tornado or earthquake is “God’s (or Allah’s) punishment” for this or that? One might think that many of these panics are generated intentionally by televangelists or mega-church preachers in order to increase their revenue, but many of them are also created by people with mental or emotional disorders.
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It seems to me that one reason some Christians are so anxious for the “end of the age” to come and Christ to return “soon” is because they have fallen once more into bondage to the fear of death and him who holds the power of [fear of] death, that is, the devil. They have lost faith in the resurrection to life everlasting, so they desperately want the world to end before they die, to see Christ return before they die so that they will not have to face death with terror, and so that they can be assured of everlasting life, a faith which they have lost, but desperately want to be true.
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The promises of Christ are sure. If we cannot live by faith, we will not be able to die and rise again in faith.
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Why should we disregard our beloved father Paul who has assured us “we have not been given over in bondage to a spirit of fear,” and again “man was all his lifetime held in bondage through the fear of death” but we have been redeemed and delivered from this fear “into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” We ought to pay no attention to the panics and hysterias and ludicrous “prophecies” around us, but look only with joy upon the sure hope that is given to us in Christ our Lord and God and Saviour.
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Love is the glue that holds the universe together. This is reflected in our hymnology, “Christ the word, the wisdom and the power of God that creates and sustains all things.” 
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The perverse notion of linking the concept of justice to “punishment,” rather than its original concept of putting matters in balance and setting matters aright, is inexcusable. God is love, and therefore the balance and adhesive of the universe is love. There is no other meaning to life than to love and be loved, and the highest manifestation of that is co-suffering love, the co-suffering love of God with humanity in Christ Jesus. But at every level, sincere love, unselfish love, is the essence of all meaning in life.
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Where political expediency is King, truth and justice are paupers.
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.The desire for absolutes is likely evolutionary. The chaos and uncertainty of the hunter-gatherer era likely began this development. Our history of constant turmoil, warfare and “fear of the other” are all part of the development of this deep structural quest for absolutes and certitudes. The way we approach religion is either shaped by this evolutionary construct or by hope and optimism, such as Christ taught us.

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Far too many priests are preaching the fear dimension, which a control mechanism and exhibits the condition of their own hearts. It also seeks to curtail our use of critical thinking. We can either have the freedom OF morality or freedom FROM morality, but morality can never be based in fear and hate – that is only a demand for conformity and it is a method of mind control: it is not morality. 
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Hate is a product of fear, and it is also a mind control manipulation that discourages critical thinking. Morality is a condition of the heart. Religion can give hope and optimism or it can create, or help create a deep structural fear – and that is simply wicked and completely unacceptable.
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When anyone presumes to assert that they are “speaking the truth,” they are certainly obliged to explain why they think it is “the truth,” and demonstrate some reason why the hearer should accept it as “the truth”. Science, at least, has the dignified modesty to say that it is giving us “models of reality,” not to assert that it is giving us pure reality or absolute truth. When you say that something is scientifically accurate, you can actually demonstrate why you feel it is accurate.
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When people claim to be speaking “the truth with love,” they are, first  of all obliged to explain to you, and to try to demonstrate why they are so certain that it is “the truth.” This makes it easier to assess whether they are speaking with love or not. If they preclude all other assessments of what really is “true” or “reality”, then they are not speaking with love, they are speaking with an egotistic and rather high opinion of themselves. This is especially clear when you detect actual disgust or hate in the way they express themselves.
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To assert that you are speaking “THE truth” and therefore all other opinions are false is simply narcissistic and incredibly arrogant. To claim that you have divine revelation as a source of your “truth” means that you are asserting that all of their religions – including other Christian religions – who might have a different doctrine or understanding of the truth are automatically in error, even though they claim divine revelation also.
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When anyone says “I am speaking the truth with love,” that generally means “my ideology considers this to be truth, and I am really trying to hurt other people with what I think is the truth.”
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Without curiosity and critical thinking, we are mentally blind no matter how well we can see physically or how much faith we have.
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We humans are truly a mystery, and we are most of all a mystery to ourselves. Anyone who claims to have a clear understanding of this mystery is simply deceiving them selves.
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Every human tragedy is a tragedy of all humanity. All mankind shares a common human nature. The fact that we do not often recognise ourselves in people of other tribes, nations and cultures is among the greatest of our human tragedies. How is it that we so seldom understand from the heart that all humans feel pain, hopelessness, despair, love, joy, hope and aspirations in the same way? Is it not because we also act with fear, malice, hatred and prejudice in the same manner?
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Every nation, every tribe, every race and every era produces great humanitarians and savage tyrants, and every form of character in between. The constant struggle of mankind is to become fully human, to recover the image and likeness of God in ourselves, in which likeness we are all created, and to learn to see that image in every other human being. We can validate our own humanity in no other way than by fully acknowledging from the heart the equal humanity of those whom we consider to be enemies. This can hardly be accomplished until we, altogether liberate ourselves from the tyranny of the past.
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We see only a façade of reality. We have a “reality tunnel” that prevents us from seeing beyond the façade. We had developed instruments, ones that reduce our reality tunnel and that give us a deeper perception of reality. We have micron microscopes, and super telescopes, many of which are even in outer space. We have developed CAT scans, functional MRI and much else. The more we discover the more we realise how much we do not know and how much was not known in the past when many of our perspectives, ideologies and dogmas were formulated. This should humble people in every quarter of life. Unfortunately, it does not. The more we penetrate the mystery of reality, the greater the mystery becomes.
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Many people struggle diligently to remain ignorant in the face of knowledge and understanding. People are willing to destroy others, even to bring about the deaths of others in order to maintain their ignorance.
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Christ died to remove the sin of the world, not to remove our reason and capacity to think or take responsibility. Religious fanaticism and extremism are mental illnesses, not merely excess piety.
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It is a cruel and wicked thing to refer to some people’s ontology as a “lifestyle choice.” It is also an ignorant ideological pejorative spoken by someone who feels quite superior to others and cannot resist the hubris which goes with ill-founded self-righteousness.
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Fear and disdain, even hate toward “the other” have become a primary element of far too many Christian preachers, and it has clearly contributed to the rise of atheism. It is often the result of the effort to decolonize the mind that has led to a rejection Christianity. The colonialism of fear no longer works except in a neurotic mind. If we do not wish to, in the words of Pope Francis, “inoculate young people against faith” we have to stop making it fear-based and restore it to Christ’s message of hope, love and joy.
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When fear becomes greater than hope, hate begins to pass as love and rage replaces reason.
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Just an Opinion and Nothing More:
We need to realise that fundamentalists and right- wing Christians, in general, are inimical to democracy. As with fundamentalist Islam, being coerced into a religion, or the external confessions of religion is perfectly acceptable even though Christ requires of us a free and open acceptance of his gospel from our hearts and in our hearts, followed by an inner transformation of our hearts and consciences. For fundamentalists and right-wing Christians the matter is not a free moral acceptance but coerced and imposed behaviour based on a moral philosophy that even the advocates do not actually fulfil. The real enemy now is authoritarianism in general – not whether it is right-wing authoritarianism or left-wing authoritarianism but simply that it is authoritarianism. Coerced and imposed religiosity equals only conformity and submission to control and manipulation but has nothing to do with salvation, with a living faith or seeking to live a life in Christ. We must allow that in a democracy we must allow for the quest for the freedom of morality and freedom from morality and realise that coercion is never a solution; rather moral persuasion is. Civil behaviour laws should never be referred to as moral laws as we often do, confusing morality with regulated behaviour which should be kept to a minimum which is necessary for the functioning of society. The imposition of the authoritarianism which Evangelical Christians seek is spiritually and morally deadening and has the opposite effect of leading people to salvation and a spiritual transformation into a sincere morality. We have to allow for dissent even to our most cherished beliefs. Coercion in some matters of civil behaviour is necessary for a civilised society to function, but coercion in any spiritual, moral or religious values is simply spiritually deadening and a free and heartfelt acceptance of Jesus Christ and his teachings actually is necessary for salvation. This really is part of the struggle to maintain an active democracy so that these free choices can be made.
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Power and ignorance are a dangerous and destructive combination.
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In 1963, I became a member of the Progressive-Conservative party of Canada which was, at that time, the governing party in Canada. We always understood that we were fiscally conservative and socially progressive “with caution.” With regard to Christianity, it is perfectly possible to be doctrinally conservative and to express one’s social progressivism simply by not persecuting, humiliating, haranguing, shaming or trying to destroy those who do not fit in with your doctrine or perspective.
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Christ is always the very best that you have to offer to anyone else so long as you do so in a peaceful and reasonable manner, trying to win people not simply by your flowery words- or in some cases, tragically, harsh, savage and brutal words –but by the very quality of your own life and the way in which you project love, mercy and tolerance to the world. Intolerance, expressions of condescension and hate, shaming humiliating and degrading others simply means that you actually have nothing of any value to offer to the world but that you are a bitter and angry person, unchanged by the teachings of Jesus Christ.
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It is often difficult to pursue knowledge without the interference of our mental and emotional addictions.
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Let us put aside considerations about narcotic addiction here and even alcoholism. There is a peptide for each emotional state. The hippocampus assembles the proper peptides for each emotional state. They enter the bloodstream and all the cells in the body have receptors on them the peptides elicit a series of chemical changes in those cells that have received them. Repeated excitation of cells by peptides bombardment causes a shrinkage in the subject cells. When the cell divides it has more receptors for the given peptide and fewer receptors for necessary nutrients. This leads to an addiction to the stimulus. And this recall that we are talking about emotional states here.
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The most concrete heresies are hate and a lack of empathy. Everything else is just a mistake, an error which can be resolved and corrected.
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Words are only a part of the Gospel. The life and actions, and the way Christ treated the outcast and “sinner” is the greater part of the Gospel. It seems that far too many people see a set of laws and rules in the Gospel, and do not see the light and life in which often, social conventions and rules are simply overturned.
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 Not only is the Parable of the Prodigal at the heart of the Gospel, but something too often overlooked: Under the law, a leper not only is an outcast and cannot enter the temple precinct, but it is forbidden even to touch a leper. Christ, however, heals the leper precisely by touching him. Touching the leper is as much a part of the Gospel as any word recorded in it.
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The Gospel of our salvation consists far more in what Christ did than of what He said. The healing of the fallen human nature by taking it upon Himself; calling us out of our alienation by His Incarnation and fellowship with us, delivering us from the bondage to the fear of death; embracing sinners, touching lepers, conversing with a Samaritan woman and making here an Apostle; healing the child of a Canaanite “outsider.”  All of this has set the pattern for an Orthodox Christian life, a lifestyle, to which we should all aspire if we are truly to be faithful to Jesus Christ.
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And why did Christ make a habit of eating and drinking with sinners and publicans except to demonstrate to them that He does not leave them in their alienation, but rather God has come down to them, to find these lost sheep and heal their alienation? Since they could not make it back to God on their own, He comes and takes them by their spiritual hands and leads them out of their alienation: all this is the Gospel. And our salvation appears to rest on our understanding that Matthew 25 is a keystone in that Gospel by demonstrating to us by what means we may know that we have assimilated His Gospel and are ourselves no longer in alienation from God.
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If a person finds himself away from home and alone, a telephone call to the parents is a great consolation. Is prayer not the same? Prayer is, indeed, like a call home and a comforting conversation with our loving Father. To call home, however, reminds us that we are not home. It calls to mind that we are away, in exile as it were, from our beloved home. Neither Satan, the master of our exile, nor our own passions, want us to be aware of and contemplate this condition of exile. Since the Divine Liturgy brings us to the very border of paradise — our true home — it reminds us more profoundly of our condition of exile. We are in exile through our alienation from God and often from our own selves. The Divine Liturgy is a summons home, a reminder that our Father is standing at the head of the road waiting for our return, not with consternation or retribution, but with a ring and the robe and a banquet table all set before us, not remonstrating with us for our departure but rejoicing for our return.
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Fear of the “the other” appears to me to arise in part from self recognition. We fear the “ourselves” that we see in “the other.” We hate most in others what we fear most in ourselves. Reconciliation with our own “self” is part of overcoming our fear and hatred of “the other.”
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Democracy is an all or none proposition. If we seek to deprive one person of it in our society, then we cannot claim to have democracy. Human rights are the same. We cannot curtail the rights of anyone because we do not agree with them, or they with us. Religious differences have been far too often the cause of such infringement on the rights of others, and such an action abolishes Faith and replaces it with an idolatrous ideology. It is quite dangerous to society when religious ideology becomes a factor in the governing of a nation. Faith is something we have to live within our hearts; ideology is something we try to impose on others. My first teacher, Fr. John Romanides, told us that “religion is a neurobiological illness, and Faith is its cure.” We understood that he was making a distinction between what we should try to live by within ourselves, and what one would try to force other people to live by. Human rights and social justice must flow unhindered across every boundary and all barriers.
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It is interesting to me to observe how easy it is for sexual love to turn into hate. I have seen that this hate sometimes even leads to murder. It is so important to base relationships on a higher form of love that is not so easily corrupted, not so filled with possibilities of envy, jealousy and competition.
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To the memory of Hypatia, whom I commemorate every year. She was murdered in  March 415 AD, by a mob of Fundamentalist Christians.
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One of the problems is – and it is one of my crusades to try to change that – is that so much of religion has convinced people that “faith” consists in unthinking acquiescence, and unquestioning conformity. I did mention this in my book “Freedom to Believe” because, it seems to me anyway, that real faith can only come from the freedom to believe, and not by programming mere acquiescence. I’m likely not quoting Lovelace exactly but, in his poem “To Althea from prison” he says “Stone Walls do not a Prison make, Nor Iron bars a Cage; a mind that is innocent and peaceful take that as a hermitage. If I have freedom in my Love, and in my soul am free, only Angels have such liberty.…” If religion is not more than mere conformity, then it is teaching society and mankind endless, unquestioning and un-thinking acquiescence. Politicians are bound to pick up on this and run with it. Some practitioners have the skill of turning one’s mind into the prison of his own soul and fear-bullying his heart into the iron bars of an unthinking cage.
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Religious fanaticism is not a sign of deep faith but of mental disease. No matter how much one exhibits the outward signs of religiosity or how loudly one voices one’s own righteousness by condemning others, it is all of no avail. Without sincere compassion, without remembering that God, by His own word, declares, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice” 1000 prostrations a day, swinging 1000 knots of a prayer rope and living on a single slice of bread a day, will be of no use, of no value when driven by fanaticism and a harsh, brutish moralism. A single word of hate erases a year of prayer.
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That is a long-standing problem. We have kids graduating from a seminary thinking they are immediately “spiritual fathers.” They also tend to think that they are automatically psychiatrists or psychologists – I should say, magic psychologists. The reason I wrote my book on “The Neurobiology of Sin” was to address this very problem, particularly in relation to depression. After all, there is a depression/despair loop in the brain, and untreated depression can affect the hippocampi. Getting priests, including myself, to recognise the limits of their competence in many matters is quite difficult. We have a Narcotics Anonymous chapter here at the monastery, and I listen far more than I talk – and never fail to learn something new by listening and not talking. I must say that attending these meetings and listening makes one less moralistic.
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Why is science, especially quantum mechanics and cosmology, becoming the source of modern spirituality while religion slowly fades into the background? I would like to suggest that a significant part of the reason is that the most vociferous and most heard practitioners of the religion industry are advocating a late iron age mindset – a medieval one at best, are advocating lunatic theories that have been soundly disproved by solid science, and chasing after political conspiracy theories which have nothing to do with the Gospel, nothing to do with the teachings of Christ Jesus. We have plenty of such troglodytes preaching in the Orthodox Church today and teaching in some of our seminaries. Just a thought for those who wish to think, discuss and even debate. I recall the words of my theological hero Metropolitan Antony of Kiev:. “The trouble is that people do not think their thoughts all the way through to the end,” and “we must teach our students critical thinking, otherwise they will all become socialists because it sounds good on the surface and they will not be able to think critically about it – or anything else for that matter.”
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It is one thing to have questions and confusion about transgender, it is another thing to have a phobia, disdain and hatred – things that are always based on a person’s own self-willed ignorance. It is easier to fear and hate than it is to learn to understand. This is even sadder when it is manifested by people who pretend to follow Jesus Christ.
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The more we understand the actual functioning of our brains and come to understand what is actually going on in our brains, and come to grips with neurobiology rather than abstract metaphysics, the more we have to rethink some of our primitive taboos and philosophically established concepts of morality – that is, what is and is not considered immoral, and which of the things that we have so categorized is now acceptable to the functioning of our society, which ones have been unjustifiably castigated and which ones may be acceptable in a more educated society such as ours. In other words, we should take a much more balanced and nuanced view of the questions of morality and immorality. Just an observation which practically no one will take seriously or even think seriously about.
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Liberty is not liberty if someone can take it away from you; freedom is not freedom unless everyone shares it equally. What we consider to be liberty and freedom really are frail and need our constant attention, our constant vigilance and our willingness to see liberty and freedom encompass even those with whom we disagree. Freedom without full equality for all is not freedom but only special privilege.
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Among the greatest needs for the Orthodox Church today is to be finally liberated from the Byzantine Empire without becoming part of the Russian Empire.
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Mankind is essentially good. True evil does exist though when manifested it is usually tied to psychiatric disorders. I have great difficulty assigning the name “evil” to groups or people in any case. Perhaps the name “in need of our Saviour” is as close as we can come to a label for anyone, including ourselves.
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There is a great danger when any people completely believe their own national mythologies. When they do, their national mythologies become their actual religion, and Christianity (or Judaism or Islam) become perverted and deformed into a prop for the national mythology, and destructive, narcissistic idolatry it created.
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Hate is always dangerous and people in other lands tend to take our flakey Protestants too seriously – ultimately more seriously than they take themselves. In America, religion is a cultural affectation; it is taken much more seriously elsewhere. This is why the angst of American sectarians is so much more dangerous when exported.
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Let us extend the “no us and them” beyond male and female to every other condition and situation of humanity. We know very well that there are many variations and differences, but that does not make it a valid source of condescension or enmity. There is no “us” and “them”, there are only variations on a theme in the great symphony of humanity.
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We are not slaves of history and we have reached a level at which we have a hand in our own evolution. We shape our concepts of equality ourselves. We are not talking about brute force, and that does not always make the physically stronger hyper-equal above the physically weak — though that is the principal form of perceived inequality. One might recall that Cyrus the Great was defeated by a female general in Sogdiana and that a female admiral (an ally of the Persians) outwitted both the Greeks and the Persians at Salamis. In our British based democracies, we shape equality by means of law. Historically perceived inequalities were far more based on relative physical strength, while we strive to structure equality on a far more sound and meaningful bases.
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There is a difference between Tradition and Traditionalism. As my colleague David Goa likes to repeat “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” If one is willing to sacrifice integrity, truth and the lives and well-being of others to tradition, then they are not followers of Christ, to begin with.
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The condition of women in most of the world today is one of the greatest of human tragedies, injustices and sins. The entire world will be infinitely better when women are acknowledged to be equal to men and their intellect and capabilities are fully free to develop.
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A person with a lack of curiosity is like a stagnate pond that produces nothing and only waits to dry out completely.
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Perhaps the worst excuse one can give for receiving Holy Communion only rarely is “I am not worthy.” This presupposes that, when you do receive Communion, you are worthy, and in fact, no one ever is. The prayer that the priest reads just before censing the Church during the Cherubic Hymn begins, “none is worthy…” There is nothing more to say after that. All the preparation we can possibly do does not make us worthy of the Holy Mystery, rather it is by the mercy of God and His Divine ekonomia that we are able to receive Holy Communion. We need to discuss the matter of the actual meaning of the Liturgy and the fact that the Liturgy is there to bring us to Holy Communion. Our spiritual lives suffer immeasurably when we receive Communion only seldom.
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Sometimes we caricature what we perceive to be “righteous indignation” when it really is hate. I don’t buy into the “righteous indignation” excuse. It is like moral outrage, which is a form of public confession when, as Christians, we should feel moral grief, rather than outrage.
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There is no place for so-called “righteous indignation,” when we should feel grief and sorrow over what we suppose to be the target of “righteous indignation.” “Righteous indignation” indicates that we think ourselves to be completely “righteous,” when in fact, our righteousness is, according to a certain authority “as filthy rags.” If we are convinced that some (other than “me”, of course) are sinning to their own condemnation and loss of salvation, then we should imitate Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane and weep with moral grief and sorrow over them.
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I think that this is the whole point that is being omitted. The life in Christ is not a life of indignation and outrage, but one of moral grief and sorrow over the conditions of mankind and each one, including ourselves. Righteous indignation and moral outrage are forms of prelest (plani-spiritual delusion). Moral outrage in particular really is a form of public confession about oneself. You cannot serve for the spiritual rebirth of anyone, or for their repentance and reformation through indignation and outrage, but only through heartfelt prayer and the expression of the love of Christ Jesus.
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It is ludicrous to think that anyone or group can have their own rights and freedoms by defending ONLY their own rights and freedoms. Unless we defend the rights and freedoms of all groups, even those whom we think to be wrong or “sinful,” in error or heretical, then our own rights and freedoms are in complete peril. It is easy to invite demagoguery, even dictatorship by trying to deny full equality and equal rights to those that we think are wrong. The narcissism and paranoia of any religion, religious group or political orientation can undermine democracy and freedom faster than any other force on earth.
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Freedom is easy to uproot, difficult to transplant

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If you are not free, I am not free. I am a Christian, and when anyone is persecuted in the name of Christianity, they are being persecuted in my name, and I AM responsible. No matter how much hatred and malice it brings upon me, to remain silent about it would bring the reproach and torment of my conscience ‒ and that is much more painful. That the persecution is driven by ignorance and fear directs me to try to drive back the darkness of the ignorance and try to help heal the fear.
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Everyone needs to contemplate the ramifications of insisting on akrivia too much. Facilitating people’s salvation under special circumstances is far more beneficial than punishing them for those circumstances. We need to embrace the 21st century with grace, with love, and far more compassion than has often been shown in previous eras. We need also to remember that utopian nostalgia is merely a box of sand into which people bury their heads.
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Where there is sound education, there is growth and development; where there is indoctrination, there is violence; where there is repression, there is rebellion and revolution. Where the citizens allow the corruption and perversion of democracy and constitutions, there is indoctrination and repression. And the cycle is terrible to behold.

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Truth is a river in which the water is constantly renewed. Every new discovery, every new level of understanding, every unfolding of knowledge adds new water, deepens the channel, and broadens the perspective as the old water flows away and new water flows in. The supreme foolishness is to think that we possess any absolute or final truth. Each epoch proves such an idea wanting. Ironically, “truth” consists primarily in searching for it and understanding that when you find it, it will change with the next step in unfolding knowledge. The knowledge and understanding of reality proceeds in the same manner. We engage models of reality that to be truthful, must be replaced with new models of reality when the former ones are found to be only transitions from one level of knowledge to another. Those who think they have concrete and absolute truth or reality are truly deluded and frozen in a time that recedes into the past and becomes more and more disconnected, more and more episodes of cognitive dissonance, and those who hold such faded models and wilted truths generally only become more bitter and dogmatic the further they are left in the shadow of the past and the more their minds become irrelevant.
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We create our own hell in our own hearts already in this life. If we do not struggle to quench the fires of hell in our hearts before we depart this life, we take our own fires of our own hell with us when we depart into the next life. The River of Fire is not poured forth for the sake of burning, because the Fire is the presence of the love and glory of Christ Jesus. It is hell only to those who have taken their own hell with them in their hearts; it is paradise to those who, through the struggle of genuine repentance and having forgiven others, has quenched the fire of hell in their own hearts. Forgiveness is the wellspring that quenches the fire of hell in our hearts: not the forgiveness of us by others, but rather the forgiveness of others that flows from our own hearts. The total and heartfelt forgiveness of all others is the surest imitation of Christ Who spoke on the cross of those who tortured and crucified Him: “Father, forgive them…”
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There can be no peace without social justice. There can be no social justice without women having a full and equal role in every aspect of culture and society. There can be neither peace nor justice until all forms of minorities are accorded the full dignity of their humanity. There can be no peace while the blasphemy and heresy of racism exist or while one nation or people exalt themselves above others. Social justice and peace are twins. All humans share in a common human nature, and perhaps God allows our inevitable death because death itself is the great equalizer.
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Few things are as dangerous to humanity as a person or institution which thinks itself to be in possession of absolute truth, because then it also imagines  that it has the “mandate of heaven” to force and coerce others to submit to its particular “truth.” Individuals and organisations and institutions have long proved to even resort to crimes against humanity in order to enforce their particular “truth.”
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Hate is the steel and flint that ignites the fire of hell.

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We can attempt to force what we consider to be correct social behaviour by means of law, but we cannot enforce true morality by means of law. True morality involves an inner transformation. Even forcing what we consider to be correct social behaviour by means of law has not worked well, and sometimes what one society considers to be correct social behaviour does not match what another society considers it to be. How well we care for one another is far more conducive to true morality than trying to bully people into what we consider to be “correct social behaviour.”
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Why do we repeat “Lord Have Mercy” so often in the Liturgy? The mercy of God is the healing ointment for the wounded soul and heart. The Greek word for “mercy” has the same root as the Greek word for olive oil. In a sense, we are praying, “Lord, anoint me.” Anoint me the with healing oil of Your mercy. “Lord, have mercy,” is the cry of every human heart that is afflicted, that is wounded and in need of comfort. “Lord, anoint me with the healing oil of Your love and compassion. Soothe my troubled soul and mind and lighten the burden of my struggles. Anoint my soul with peace and hope that are in Thee, our Lord and Creator. Anoint me with the grace of Thy Holy Spirit and strengthen my wavering heart.”
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There is a place deep within the heart of a person into which Satan cannot see, nor penetrate (for, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God). And there, the troubled soul can find a peace that passes all understanding; there the wounds from the arrows of the evil-one can find balm and healing, and the arrows cannot penetrate there to wound one again. Here, one does not pray with words or even with actions, but one weeps and the teardrops themselves are prayer and confession and rejoicing and hope fulfilled. Here, there is already communication between God and the soul which is outside the realm of the laws of nature. Here, every thought is known and every movement of the heart is incense rising up to the Creator. Here, one finds the Holy Spirit and understands something of the potential of the soul which longs to cooperate with God’s Grace, and perceives that only its sins form a barricade to that complete cooperation that it so earnestly desires. Here, one cannot remain, no matter how one longs to – longs even to die if, by that, it could remain in this deep place in the heart, being “this day in paradise with Me”. And this is only a shadow of what is yet to come for those who persevere to the end.
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One who fervently and fanatically believes something that is demonstrably false is capable of any extreme, even murder.
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We should speak out of the fulness of our own hearts, and not from bondage to fear, to rules and regulations. Those who are well fast as well as they are able, those who are weak, fast as they are able. Those who are ill fast little. But if the exercise does not come from the heart, no matter how little or how much, it is of no benefit and remains meaningless.
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True morality consists far more in how well we care for others than in the external behaviour we demand of others.
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Moralism is not morality and, moreover, moralism is the last refuge of the pervert.
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What is true cannot be a heresy and what is false cannot be sound doctrine. We must stop telling lies as if we were defending doctrine. We cannot demand of educated people that they must choose between God and truth, but that they cannot have both. Nevertheless, this is being done, and it is not only immoral, but it is feeding atheism far more than any militant atheist could ever hope to.
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Fear cannot produce sincere repentance, but only trigger a survival instinct which produces a false formula of repentance. Such repentance is not about being sorry for one’s sins but only a reaction from the survival instinct.
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Theology exists in more than one register. In the first register, Orthodox theology is expressed in the relationship of the faithful with God, made possible by Christ Jesus. In this register, our theology is unchanging and examines only better and more comprehensive ways of explaining the elements of the Symbol of Faith in a more expansive way. At another level, Orthodox Christian theology explores the life of man, including his spiritual life. Here, it must engage the contemporary life of man, encountering new knowledge and understanding which arises with scientific and medical advances in each epoch. Our theology must examine all this in relation to the dogmas and teachings of the faith without any fear of accepting new understandings which have been proved to be true, in relation to the teachings of the holy fathers. To shun or deny newly discovered truths about the universe, about the earth, and the more complete understanding of the nature of man is to reduce the faith to a blind ideology defended with falsehood and fraud. Truth and reality are not enemies; truth and faith are not mutually exclusive.
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Moral outrage is a form of public confession; we hate most in others what we fear most in ourselves.

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Orthodoxy of the mind is merely an intellectual exercise. Until one attains to Orthodoxy of the heart, one is still an alien to the faith. This is why the prayer of the heart directs us to bring the mind into the heart.
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With some sort of power, you can brutalise and bully people into what you consider correct external behaviour according to one or another “moral code,” but like the law of the Old Testament, this cannot save anyone, it cannot serve for the transformation of the inner person.
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Hypocrisy is among the greatest acts of immorality and sin. It is 100 times worse when the hypocrite is a hierarch or priest. It not only destroys the soul of the hypocrite but forms a stumbling block to others who are seeking to follow Christ.
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Real leadership means to inspire, not to control; to encourage not to bully. It means to give guidance, not to rob another person of their faculties of critical thinking, but rather to encourage critical thinking. If one aspires to be a spiritual father, then one must remember what the word “father” actually means. No decent parent wants to cripple their child and make them dependent, except perhaps for a neurotic mother. Every parent wants their child to become a mature, responsible and independent person, and excel the parent. Someone who would pretend to be a spiritual father but who cripples the would-be spiritual child and makes them mentally and emotionally dependent on him is not really trying to be a spiritual father, but rather a cult leader for a cult of the personality. 
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Faith” used as a weapon against others has nothing to do with Christ Jesus and it can never be faith unto salvation. Living faith in a living Christ is a weapon against no one except Satan, and even there, it is a weapon of peace. It is a transforming faith that is lived in humility, forgiveness and unselfish love. To suggest that it is somehow connected to Christ to say that you are going to bully, humiliate or denigrate another human being because of your “deeply held faith” is to disconnect that faith from Christ and everything that He displayed in His life and miracles. We can serve for the spiritual transformation of other human beings not by bullying them, but by setting a clear example of unselfish love toward them while expressing the reason for our joy in Christ Jesus and the hope that He has vouchsafed to us. Sincere faith is a witness to itself. Through faith in Jesus Christ, as expressed in kindness and spiritual generosity, false faith is exposed by its harshness, and narrowness of perspective and focus on oneself.
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Law can never be a basis for true morality. It can only compel what any given society or culture deems to be externally “correct” behaviour, that is, external behaviour that is of some benefit to the perceptions of that society or culture, and not contrary to what the rulers of that society see as beneficial. However, such constraint and force can compel a certain external behaviour, and behaviour that is compelled by law only produces actions of self-preservation.
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Moreover, such compelled behaviour can produce fraud in politics and the game of power; it can never produce actual morality, but the sham of moralism. And underneath the compulsory correct external behaviour, a river of concealed iniquity and immorality flow. Morality requires the transformation of the inner person, a transformation of the “heart.” The foundation of all true morality is love for God and Love/empathy for others (everyone is your neighbour). True morality consists far more in how well we care for others (Mt.25) than in what kind of behaviour we demand of others. Much of what we seek to impose as “moral law” is seen as baseless and without any intrinsic meaning. The law can compel, but it cannot save.
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The law can bully, but it cannot transform. The law can place in bondage, but it cannot liberate, it cannot give freedom. Faith based in law is mere compliance, it is not Faith. The only basis upon which the foundation of morality can be built is unselfish love, and the apex of the building is co-suffering love. Everything else is mere ideology, and not Christianity, never saving faith, never a reflection of the Gospel of our Lord, God and Saviour, Jesus Christ
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Life is complicated, humanity is complicated, reality is complex. The ideological reductionism concerning the universe and its origins, life, the human person, the nature of mankind and of reality is not only infantile but sometimes truly evil, and widespread.
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Far too many people want to essentially be told what and how to think. It is stunning to see how many people, often including leaders of religious organisations, have no curiosity, no desire to probe more deeply into the complexities of humanity, of personhood and the various conditions in the nature of humanity.

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People who purport to have some divine right or authority to dictate, often in a most detailed and harsh fashion, the lives and thoughts of others, so often have no desire themselves to think, to reason, to learn to discover, to verify the ideologies and over-simplified concepts that they are demanding that others blindly follow and obey.
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It is genuinely shocking to find such a gross lack of curiosity in people who have the ability to either destroy the lives of others through dogmatic over-simplification or to elevate the lives of others by increasing their own openness through genuine learning, mental exploration and intellectual integrity.
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The oversimplification, the reductionism that we see so much of really is infantile, and sometimes genuinely wicked. So much of the evil in our world is manifested in administrative niceties and “just following the rules.” Evil is often born of oversimplification and reductionism. It is, as Hannah Arendt says, “banal.”
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What glory hath stood unchanging on earth, and what joy has not been wedded to sorrow.” [St John Damascene] The fragility of greatness is far too often discounted by any nation and people who have gained power and wealth. The treadmill of history is circular, repeating the same history over and over again, producing the same arrogance, the same lack of wisdom, the same errors, the same violent attempts to resolve conflicting ideologies and desires that result only in greater violence, more deeply entrenched folly, more devastating absolutisms, more profound religious and ideological narcissism; and all this in the face of the tenuousness of our very existence.
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The wonder is that humanity has produced such greatness at all and such profound ideas and creativity, But since we have, then the wonder is that we have not developed greater and more creative means for resolving our conflicts.
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We Christians, Muslims and Jews are religions of “The Book,” but many of us, especially among Christians and Muslims, have fallen into an idolatry of “The Book,”. Fundamentalists are the worst of these idolaters, and they have placed themselves into complete bondage to a book they may not even have read in any detail. It will be far better when Christians and Muslims begin to socialize, and hopefully invite each other to participate in their significant holidays and celebrations, on an even basis. Once we discover that we are all just human beings, struggling in this world, human beings who hope and fear in the same way; who feel joy and sorrow in the same way; who, above all want to love and be loved in the same way, we may be able to heal our own idolatries, our own tribal narcissism, and realise that we have to share the air we breathe and the water that sustains us, and cannot afford to burn up our energies in fear and hate of each other. Democracy and secular civil law help to facilitate that by constraining our more radical religious inclinations.
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How do we minister to the world and to the society around us in this 21st century?
First, we should take the love of everyone seriously as genuine love, even if it is different than our own; and we should accept that every human and even every creature needs love as they need blood in order to live.
Second, we must validate in our hearts the humanity of every other person, even those who seem to be “enemies,” are outcasts and disenfranchised, otherwise we cannot validate our own humanity.
Third, the Orthodox faith must be separated in our minds from nationality, and we must come to understand that for each one of us who believes, Orthodoxy is our nationality and Paradise is our homeland.
Fourth, we must be careful that we shed the true light of Orthodoxy upon the world, and not some re-cycled scholasticism.
Fifth, the “models of reality” from the past are not all valid, and we must see the creative power of the faith to help us shape new models of reality based upon genuine advances in knowledge about the universe and about mankind. To demand obedience to disproved models of reality is simply to demand that people accept and try to live a lie.
Sixth, the faith is dynamic, not static. We cannot just “ritualise” our way through life and into Paradise. The faith is a dynamic transformation of the human conscience and person, not just a series of rituals to be done correctly and nothing else, and not just a series of catechism “facts.”
Seventh, neither priest nor bishop is “above the people,” rather we are “of the people,” and if we are to be true to our calling, then we must have an open-hearted co-suffering love for the people and find a way to embrace everyone with that love. Otherwise, we cannot truly proclaim Jesus Christ and the heavenly kingdom. We must accept into our hearts every person just as they are and trust in the grace of the Holy Spirit to express Itself in each of them if we minister to them with co-suffering love, without judgment or condemnation, without condescension or contempt. We must not look down to anyone, but look directly across at them, eye to eye.
This is the only way that we can minister to the world we live in, and to the people around us – every one of them beloved by Jesus Christ.
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A saint is one who, through the conquest of his own passions, has acquired the grace of the indwelling Holy Spirit, and reached a stage of co-suffering love so that he is able to heal the soul and restore the conscience in others. He leads others to the door of metanoia and reminds them that repentance is not an event but a process of inner healing that leads us back to true humanity.
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Grace is the uncreated energy of God. It is the way that we have personal knowledge of God, through his grace – his uncreated energies. I am sure that various things are expressed about the Theotókos in different places at different times, but the grace of God needs no mediation. Perhaps this is one of the differences in our understanding of the Holy Mysteries as opposed to “sacraments”. While many people use this latter term in English, it does not at all express the Orthodox understanding of the Holy Mysteries. Not only is Grace uncreated, but it does not come in distinct “species” but is the ever-present Energy of God working in mankind, and it is available to everyone directly and without mediation, without the intervention of a priest serving sacraments.
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Let me suggest that the Holy Mysteries – or if you please to use the word sacraments – occur wherever the people of God are gathered together to call down the grace of the Holy Spirit in faith, and with the leader of the Synaxis – either a priest or Bishop, since the priesthood is necessary – and that there is not a number seven, but a multitude of these “sacraments” Since the Orthodox Church does not have a doctrine of specifically seven.
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Let us not forget that the grace of God is communicated from God to the believer, but we receive this grace not only in Holy Communion but in a multitude of ways and at a multitude of times.
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When one has lived long enough, and especially when one has heard confessions long enough, it becomes clear that hatred of others is almost always a form of self-hatred. We hate most in others what we fear most in ourselves. It appears to me that Satan has his own immoral imperative to counter Christ’s moral imperative. “Thou shalt hate thy neighbour as thyself.” The first step to curing the disease of hatred is sincere self-examination.
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One must read the Epistle to the Hebrews precisely in the context of a passing away of the old law and the coming of the law of love, the presence of the fulness of Grace, not a negative remission of sins through the Blood of Christ, but a new font of healing through cleansing. Just as one begins to treat a wound by cleansing it, so Christ first cleanses our spiritual wounds and then heals them, and this is just what Isaiah is speaking of in his prophecies about the Messiah. But the Epistle to the Hebrews is written for the understanding of the Hebrews, and not that it could be so easily comprehended by the Gentile Christians, since all the things Paul speaks of are elements of the first Covenant, which must pass away as one enters the Covenant of Christ. The Jews would have understood all that is being said, the Gentiles would have been left to guess at the meanings. Paul must here use the language of the Law, the concepts familiar to the Hebrews.
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If one were to carefully study the several ways in which Christ Himself turned much of the understanding of the Old Testament on its head, one might end up being very surprised. The woman taken in adultery was forgiven, not stoned. The Sabbath was not kept in order to demonstrate that the “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” He exalted and healed those who were not Jews, but “sinners” from among the nations. The Old Testament forbids the deformed, maimed and unclean to enter the temple; Christ fellowshipped with them and healed them. The Prophets rebuked the wealthy and Israel in general for ignoring the plight of the poor, the widow and the orphan; Christ made caring for them a prerequisite for entering the heavenly kingdom.
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Christ said that no point of the Law would pass away until all things were fulfilled, although He had already overturned major elements of it, but when He proclaimed “It is Finished,” all things were fulfilled and, as our beloved father Paul tells us, the Law was set aside for something greater. If the Law is replaced by Grace, for the law could neither sanctify nor perfect, nor could it transform the inner person, nor could it save,  and replaced also by a new law of Love, then why should any hunger for the law when a banquet of love and grace has been set before it?
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If we seek to reinstitute the law of the Old Covenant, then by that do we not renounce the New Covenant, and with it the High Priest by Whom it is established in His own precious blood? Should those who wish now to reinstitute even one jot or tittle of the Old Law, thus reestablishing the Covenant that has passed away, not rather tremble and repent for having renounced the blood of Christ which established a New Covenant and a priesthood after the order of Melchisedek, abolishing the priesthood after the order of Aaron? Can one embrace one jot or tittle of that Law without renouncing the Grace which replaced it?
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If the encounter with reality undermines one’s faith, it means that they never had faith to begin with, they were only in a blind subservience to an ideology. Reality must take precedence over imagination, antique models of reality and ideology; reality cannot be bullied into submission.
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Indeed, the impure heart is the location of hell. The fires of hell are the hate, fear and malice that accompany the darkened heart into eternity. 
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Is the subjugation of women really a necessity of the faith, or more of an institutional fixation?
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The mystery of the Gethsemane prayer and the “cup” that weighed so heavily on Christ is precisely His moral grief over the condition of mankind. Christ’s moral suffering, in which, in His co-suffering love for mankind, He took the burden of our alienation upon Himself and bore it to the Cross — His moral suffering in Gethsemane was heavier and greater than His physical suffering on the cross. His cry on the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken Me,” is the cry of one who has taken the fulness of mankind’s alienation upon Himself, and then He conquers that alienation, which is the source of death, by His Resurrection. Moral outrage destroys, but heartfelt moral grief over the condition of others is creative and healing. Heartfelt moral grief, mixed with sincere compassion which does not judge that seeks to uplift and heal, is the mark of one who has heard Christ and believed Him.
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More properly, it was Satan who brought sin into the world. Sin is the misuse of our energies. Satan certainly initiated that. The fall was a fall into egoism and self-love — in other words, an adaptation to the image and likeness of Satan in opposition to the image and likeness of God in man. (the word “energy;” “energies” occurs 26 times in the Epistles of Paul — in the original Greek). Man was always mortal and had the capacity of immortality-by-Grace. Separating himself (themselves) from the source of Life and grace, their mortality took over from Grace, and death became inevitable. Thus man became “through fear of death, all his lifetime held in bondage by him who held the power of death” that is, the Evil-One. The Theotókos became the gate to paradise by serving the Incarnation. Christ redeemed us from the fear of death, and thus delivered us from the evil-one (as the Lord’s prayer says) by conquering death, and the power of Satan. As Christ is the New Adam, the Theotókos is the New Eve. Women had a very powerful role in the ancient Church before Hellenic prejudices asserted themselves.
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Young people are not less spiritual than previous generations; in fact, they may be more spiritual than the generation of the 70s and 80s. Many of them will seek faith as a means to give meaning to their lives. It is evil for people who market faith to package it with fear and hate for “the other.” Religions that appear to be bound up in a political ideology or absolutism really are evil. Religions that wish to impinge on other people’s freedom and use some manner of force and fear in order to do so are dangerous and negative forces in the world and really should be rejected for the sake of humanity. A religion that attempts to institute a system of law contrary to civil law, is a true danger to the human race precisely because it has replaced “faith” with coercion and spiritual transformation with an imposed conformity.
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On 5 June of this year, one single man, carrying only a shopping bag, stopped a convoy of the world’s most disciplined army at Tiananmen Square. He stepped in front of the convoy of tanks which was moving to stop a pro-democracy demonstration in the square. For one brief moment in history, he came to represent the power of courage and the greatness of the human spirit. Then, he simply walked away and remained a nameless, faceless monument to the aspirations of mankind. He should never be forgotten.
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 Words about morality do not always predict acts of morality or guarantee no acts of immorality. Moreover, morality is a heresy when it is used as a substitute for a life in Christ

Faith is an existential experience, an orientation of the heart toward the will of God, responsibly chosen, not a legal agreement between God and the believer for mutual recognition of each other’s existence. Nor is it an “emotional high.”
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There is no morality without compassion. No deed has any real moral value unless it proceeds from the heart motivated by love. Mere obedience to a law, rule or code is not an act of morality; it is only an act of mere obedience.
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The word “passion” also bears examination. The word means “suffering.” Inner human suffering is the great tragedy of alienated humanity. Inner suffering in the mind, the soul, the conscience, can often be more intense and painful than physical suffering. The passions, so far from being expressions of any “wickedness”, rips in the depths of our minds and consciousness, disturbs the peace of our souls and assault our consciences. Passions should never be spoken of in vulgar, moralistic terms, but with a compassion that acknowledges the pain they cause. The passions are an affliction of our fallen humanity and we are in need of a healing balm with which to treat them. Often enough one “commits a sin” more in an effort to assuage the inner pain of the passions than from an actual desire to sin or even to find pleasure.
From this reality alone, we should realise that mankind is in need of healing, not punishment and that for the Church to reflect our Lord Jesus Christ, it can only be understood as a spiritual hospital. Punishment may induce repression of the passion, but it will never heal them, never assuage the pain and suffering that they cause, and it will never, ever be found to be in accord with the Gospel, with the words and teachings of Jesus Christ.
The Church is not on earth to punish but to heal, not to induce repression but to offer hope, to support our struggle to rise to the true humanity manifested in Christ Jesus.
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The Church is a hospital, not a court of law; priests are called upon to be spiritual healers, not prosecuting attorneys.
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People who make use of the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to promote intolerance, hate, malice, or to promote prejudices, ignorance, the dehumanisation of other human beings, or to strip people of their personhood are blaspheming the name and the sacrifice of Christ. We are called upon to strive toward spiritual perfection, not to bully others, to heal others through co-suffering love, not pejorative and accusations, to first become an example, and then to speak with humility and love to all. Only in this way can we encourage people away from darkness and toward the light, away from spiritual destruction and toward spiritual healing.
Every act of hatred and malice separates us from God, and the separation is greater when we pretend that the hatred is an act of love. 
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As we move from the early anthropocene epoch into the technocene era (late anthropocene), we need leadership that can give a profound spiritual gift to generations who have grown weary and suspicious of the dry, brittle moralism – a tree whose fruits are all too often fear and hate – generations that desire something living, vital and of consequence. There is no greater moral issue than the wanton destruction of the Earth’s life-support system, and that destruction is a clear rebellion against God. 
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Petty, but often destructive,  moralisms arise almost entirely from those who support that rebellion against God by denying the climate crisis that besets the world and destroys the lives of millions of people already. Even the beginnings of the war in Syria stem from an ecological crisis in that nation. This avaricious, greed-driven assault on God’s creation is 
supported by so many religious people that it is hardly a mystery why atheism is triumphing over the narrow, bigoted and hypocritical hyper-religious forms of Christianity that cloak and hide the real moral issues of our day, that attempt to cast a fog around the greed, corruption, bribery, rigged politics and gross corporate immorality that controls our political systems degrades the earth’s life support system. Overlooked in so much controversy is the great work and gift that His All-Holiness, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has invested in the defence of our ecosystem. We should be looking to him more for leadership in this struggle, and acknowledging more openly the great work that he has done in this effort to defend God’s creation. Almost all future wars will be ecology-based wars, rebellions and revolutions, such as that in Syria, which originated in the collapse of the North Syrian aquifer. How many tens of thousands of people will be slaughtered in such wars in the next few decades: this is unimaginable. There can never, ever be any peace in the face of these ecological crises which rip life away from millions of people and render their existence untenable, bound to hunger and grinding poverty. The struggle for any kind of peace must be waged through the ecological struggle and a greater sense of equality. The blind, petty moralism that consumes so much energy is among the greater evils of our epoch and among the most distracting from what is most urgent. And what is most urgent can be encountered neither from self-interest, but only from the greatest of all graces: unselfish love, co-suffering love for humanity.
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Rather like Josef “K” in Kafka’s “THE TRIAL” who never realised that he was his own accuser, prison and executioner, the cage is fear. That is what has turned America into a self-imposed prison, even while it locks up a realtime prison population that exceeds that of any harsh dictatorship on earth: a per capita prison population greater than that of Iran, China and North Korea combined. A cold, crippling fear that makes police shoot dead unarmed people, a nation so imprisoned in a  stifling paranoia that the populace has become trigger-happy and the likes of Donald Trump can be president of the nation in a political party that specializes in fear and hate. America has become “Josef K” in a massive production of Kafka’s “THE TRIAL.”
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No tyranny is so vicious and cruel as religious tyranny. When religious and political tyranny merge, hell triumphs and civilisation is vanquished. When tyrants think that they have a mandate from God there is no limit to their wickedness.
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If we, throughout the Orthodox Church, practised the consensus of the fathers and the actual commands of Jesus Christ, we should all be labelled “progressives” and never “fundamentalists.” We would all cease to be moralists and become actually moral, we would always put humanity above our political ideologies – and indeed above our blind religious ideologies.
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I wish to advocate the teaching, often proclaimed but not always observed, that the Church is a spiritual hospital in which there is healing, not punishment. No hospital is worthwhile if it does not adopt new, proven medications and better means of surgery when they become known and proved. No healing system is useful if it does not recognise better and more correct diagnoses and deeper understandings. In our case, it is not only our cosmology that changes but our understanding of the human person, of humanity itself that has grown deeper and more comprehensive. If we wish to heal, we must have better diagnostics, and better, more humane and compassionate ways in which to respond and treat people. Let us replace vain accusations with knowledge and better understanding – and better diagnosis and treatment.
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Religion per se cannot give us love; it might teach us that we ought to love, that we are required to love but it doesn’t teach us what that love actually is and cannot produce actual love, as history has demonstrated so cruelly. Indeed, in and of itself, it often leads to hatred, strife and war. Religion often demands external enforcement, as we have seen in the past, and see so clearly around us.  Only a living Faith can give us the basis for that love, and Faith cannot be enforced. It has to be a natural disposition of the heart, an orientation of the soul toward the will of God.  
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Faith, it is said, is the evidence of things not seen, religion is often the evidence only of our ideology.  Faith engenders love, religion merely engenders rules and regulations.  We confess the Orthodox Faith, we do not confess “religion.”  
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The one principle that is consistent is change. Fear may keep us from accepting change, but it will not stop change from happening. Courage and integrity give us the ability to accept change and even sometimes to help shape it.
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The tyranny of ignorance is the twin of the bondage to fear.

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It is a tragedy that right-wing “culture warriors” think that the struggle of the LGBT community is about “sex.” This struggle is not about “sex”, but about social justice and human dignity, and maybe even about filtering of our faith so that we find time to focus on the profound elements of the Gospel rather than upon our irrational fears of everything that appears to be different — and perhaps even our irrational fears of our own selves.
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Faith is an existential experience, an orientation of the heart toward God, responsibly chosen, not a legal agreement between God and the believer for mutual recognition of each other’s existence. Nor is it an “emotional high.”
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Do we really need all the anti-Jewish rhetoric in our divine services? It becomes obnoxious during the Paschal cycle, and even in the troparion “when the stone had been sealed by the Jews…” could we not as well just sing “when the stone had been sealed…”?
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We are constantly engaged in the dialectic of conformity and creativity; between static existence and diversity, between fear and progress. People who are courageous enough  choose creativity, embrace diversity and lead in progress.
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I believe that we need to take a much more open attitude toward climate refugees. We should extend that to other types of refugees. It seems to me that we are making a great mistake if we do not continue to have an open dialogue and conversation with our Muslim brothers and sisters. It is singularly unjust and irrational to class all Muslims with extremists. We need to progress from an open conversation to one that embraces actual love for the humanity of others. We also need to contemplate what we in the West are doing to provoke more extremism in the Islamic world. Occupying and exploiting predominantly Muslim nations is certainly not going to ameliorate extremists and fanaticism among the more militant Islamists, who after all, often consider themselves to be defenders of their homelands from the century of exploitation that they suffered from European colonial powers. However, they are not the primary issue here, but rather our relationship with non-militants and non-extremists in the Islamic world. Our relationship with them should never be one of condescension or some sense of superiority or religious absolutism. We should have every dialogue and conversation on the basis of full equality and a sincere desire primarily to understand one another and bring our relationship to a higher and more moral level. If we do not do this, then we will be compromising so much of what we at least pretend to stand for both as democratic nations and as Christian people.
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Is it not so that fearmongering is the last resort of someone who doubts the validity of his/her own arguments but has an ideology to defend at all costs, even at the cost of their own integrity and credibility?
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I have often made comments about the preaching of “culture wars,” from the solea on Sundays or feast days. I want to say something more about that, because, in some cases, the Gospel is being put aside and not preached because of an unhealthy preoccupation with what are perceived to be “culture wars”, but are often philosophical positions, or even “conspiracy theories.” 
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Radicalism seldom has time to pause to think its thoughts all the way through to the end, and it is generally lacking in common sense and humanity. Moderation in all things is still good advice. This is as true about religion as it is about political theories and philosophy.
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It seems that in some quarters of our Orthodox Church we are still haunted by a dark medieval concept of God’s wrath and punishment, one that ties it to every adverse natural event. This is one of the things that drives a generation toward atheism. I do not imagine it can be overcome because it practically dominates much of our monasticism and many of our clergy think that fear is a way to bring people to Christ. This is a serious error and it is very difficult to counter with concepts of faith, hope and love.
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The notion that is often put forward of lowering self-esteem as a part of the spiritual life is simply wrong. I realise that it is often spoken of, but it is counterproductive and destructive. Also, couching everything in terms of “sin” is often counterproductive also, and does nothing to get to the root of people’s problems. There is always some kind of fear or alienation at the root of many of people’s problems and failings. Fear is the primary source of hate and anger and one needs to find out what the source of the fear is. Addiction is a special situation that is often genetic at its source. When people have low self-esteem and are crushed further with burdens of priest-imposed guilt and are told that the whole problem is sin, this is sheer ignorance on the part of the priest and it helps to push a person further down into the darkness. Somehow we really have to master the concept of co-suffering love – we have to enter into the person suffering in order to help them. We must never forget that the word passion means suffering and that people often fall into sin because of the pressure of their inner human suffering which is seeking the safety valve.
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I am an old man at the end of life. I have seen how many Christians think that fear must be added to fear in order to bring people to faith. Bishop Gregory told me that very thing during the tollhouse debate, but I have seen over and over again how the fear of hell is used as a cudgel in order to provoke “faith” so-called. The actual reflex is only the activation of the instinct for survival and not something that could be called “faith” or love. Fear does provoke hate. The words of the apostle that perfect love drives out fear, and those who still fear have not yet learned how to love perfectly are certainly on my mind. Some people are driven to try to seek reasons why “those people are going to hell, and I am not one of them so I will not go to hell.” Fear provokes only fear, which too often leads to hate. A true and living faith in God is an antidote to fear, and fear being the source of hate, it should also be an antidote to hate. We should rather try to see why “those people” are genuinely loved by God and so must be loved by all His servants. The tacky and singularly unconvincing slogan “love the sinner hate the sin” will simply not do because it requires a firm judgment of another person, and if it applies at all, should only be applied to the one you see in the mirror.
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One cannot overemphasize the extreme danger of religious fanatics and of those who follow the heresy of “the rapture”. Religious fanaticism is one of the most destructive forces on the face of the earth, especially ones that follows a fantastic delusion of apocalypticism. This is the imminent danger of evangelicalism in America and of those who have become embedded in the United States government. These would be architects of Armageddon could destroy the nation and cause irreparable harm to the world.
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Obsession is not faith; religious addiction is not piety. Evangelicalism, including that which has polluted the Orthodox Church, is not Christianity by any definition, rather it is a religio/political ideology which betrays both Christ and the American nation. It is clear that Evangelicalism is the largest and most successful cult in history, and it is one of the most dangerous, being basically an apocalyptic cult that seeks to subvert the American government and the American Constitution. The leaders of this cult have turned Christianity into a commercial enterprise that has enriched its leaders and spiritually impoverished its followers, and totally distorted and perverted the gospel of Jesus Christ. It should be resisted at all costs.
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Ecumenism is fine, as far as it goes. It is a theological process where we try to find some sort of commonality amongst various co-religionists. However, we need to find the commonality in our basic humanity. Instead of looking primarily at those with whom we have some agreement and some special identity beyond our humanity, we need to make humanity itself of the pivot upon which we view each other. Our religious particularity should not limit our openness to each other. Another point is that racism is based on a complete misunderstanding about the nature of humanity. Race is a social construct generally based on our own feelings of superiority because of skin colour. Race is not a scientific reality. Genetic science completely overturns the idea of race as we generally understand it. There is no such thing as “genetic” race, only a cultural and social construct which is artificial. Until a critical mass of humanity gains that understanding and acts accordingly, we are going to continue to suffer from endemic social racism. Our common humanity is the only real foundation and basis upon which we can move forward to a better world and a peaceful world. It is something to struggle toward.
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Bigotry and gross hypocrisy are not things that our Lord Jesus Christ suffered gladly. Hate does nothing more than kindle the fires of hell in one’s own heart. It seems to me that there is quite enough suffering in our world without us blindly contributing more to it.
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Gnostics believed that one is “saved by knowing.” Orthodoxy of the mind is merely an intellectual exercise. Until one attains to Orthodoxy of the heart, one is still an alien to the faith. This is why the prayer of the heart directs us to bring the mind into the heart.
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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions, but to destroy the capacity to form any” (Hanna Arendt). Let us hope that, in the Orthodox Church, we are educating people to utilise critical thinking, and not simply promoting “totalitarian education.”

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Let me add another pointed observation of Ms. Arendt: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be [either] good or evil.” It seems to me that religious people can be extraordinarily evil, while never weighing the ramifications or end results of their deeds or pronouncements; never taking the time to consider whether their deeds or assertions have evil effects or promote evil deeds. Sometimes religious organisations are like amoebas in defence mode. They will cover up for, even promote, evil deeds, in order to do what they think is necessary for the survival and promotion of their power and status or to protect the leaders within their organism.
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I concluded a long while ago that ignorance which justifies itself with one or another Scripture is far more potent at causing misery and suffering than any ordinary form of evil. Or rather, ignorance that justifies itself with an appeal to Scripture, is the most potent form of evil.
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Arendt says that evil is banal. Sometimes, it is a product of bureaucratic monotony, but usually, it is identifiable and one can resist it. Ignorance justified by an appeal to God is much more treacherous and difficult to deal with. Ignorance can take a human toll that no evil on earth is any match for.
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Usually, fanaticism is a sign of mental illness, but sometimes, it is an ideology-induced egoism that exceeds all bounds in its ability to cause human misery. When an ideology is developed by Scripture-induced ignorance, it can create a fanaticism that is 1000 times worse than any other, and infinitely more homicidal.
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I have said before that forgiveness is the wellspring that extinguishes the fires of hell in our hearts. Tonight’s meeting of Narcotics Anonymous at the monastery reiterated this concept in my mind. The other subject that came up this evening of the way in which fear can paralyse a person. Forgiveness of oneself is as important as forgiving others. One of the primary aspects of confession should be helping people to forgive themselves once they have received God’s forgiveness. Failure to forgive oneself can also be crippling and could cause a person to fail in their struggle against addictions. This is an aspect that is often overlooked by those who hear confession. Building up one’s self-esteem is also a necessary aspect of helping to achieve a remission of addictions. 
Addictions are diseases, and they should not be over moralized. Everything that helps to crush or lower a person’s self-esteem must be studiously avoided when working with people who are addicted. An addiction is never “cured”, it can only be put into remission. It is a lifelong struggle to maintain their remission. One of the primary strengths of Narcotics Anonymous is the sincere co-suffering love among the people who attend these meetings. They really understand each other’s suffering and are genuinely committed to helping each other in the struggle.
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Sometimes prayer and a form of faith are actually primarily a mantra with which we hope to drive away punishment after our departure from this life. In such instances, the outward signs of faith and words of repentance are manifestations of fear. We feign faith in order to keep from being punished and for such a person, prayer is often the mantra.  When we do that it usually manifests itself as a kind of harsh and brutal moralism because in this system it is psychologically comforting to see ourselves as better than other people. Thus trying to hype up our ego leads us to a kind of moralism where we have to denigrate others in order to make ourselves “feel better.”
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When we talk about sin and transgressions, we usually end up accusing God as much as the ordinary sinner. Saint Anthony the Great tells us that God does not turn his back on the sinner, and the parable of the prodigal son really gives us the whole story.
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We constantly think of sin as breaking a law. Apostle Paul, however, has assured us that we are no longer subject to the law, and Christ when He said on the cross, “it is finished,” announced that the old testament had to been completed and all things had been fulfilled.
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[Remembering the Kennedy/Johnson civil rights legislation and the Selma, Alabama freedom march]
Well worth remembering as among the greatest moments in human history. And what an unspeakable tragedy, what a triumph or evil, won a victory for Satan it is that the Republican Party today is trying to destroy the civil rights legislation and trying to erase the right of a huge mass of Americans to vote and to participate in the democratic system. We should also remember that Archbishop Iakovos represented the Orthodox Christian Church in this great moment. Representing Orthodox Christianity, he marched in Selma together with Martin Luther King and the thousands of true Americans and those who actually believe in God who created all men equal. . How sad it is that there are among us even some clergy that want to erase this great accomplishment. And it is one of the greatest tragedies that he later endorsed the war in Vietnam. But even that catastrophe should not be allowed to mar its weight and courageous accomplishment in passing the civil rights bill and the right to vote legislation that right- wing Republicans are now trying so desperately to abolish.
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The Idea that one can quote the Old Testament to convict people of sin may be a renunciation of Christ and his sacrifice. Both the moral imperatives given by Christ and the words of apostle Paul certainly replace the law of Moses in the lives of Christians. We are, after all, made children of Abraham not children of Moses, and therefore we are children of the promise and not children of the law.
This does not mean that we are free of moral behaviour. But even this is not the issue. The problem is that sin is anything that alienates us from God and neighbour. Even the most moral behaviour can alienate us from God just as it did the pharisee well the repentance of the publican united him with God. Repentance is higher than righteousness since everyone can repent but no one can be truly righteous. Even our positive deeds and supposedly morality can be sinful because they can alienate us from God even as they did for the pharisee and for the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son.
Avoiding the purely juridical, legalistic definition that so often makes God appear petty and mean-minded, let us follow up on St Antony the Great’s words “To say that God turns His back on sinners is the same as to say that a man becomes blind because the sun turns its back on him.”
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I have a feeling that fundamentalist Christians actually frightened themselves into searching for a “way out” of the terror that they were predicting, and so they came up with the idea that they would be ruptured before all of their terror fantasies came to pass. That apocalyptic cultism helped to inform the deep structural fear that haunts the American psyche.
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The word passion does not mean sin, the word passion means suffering. Passions are something we suffer from, they’re not sins we commit. That is even the purpose of this kind of temptation, it has a purpose. We are not tempted beyond what we are able, but we are tempted so that we will understand and know both our humanity and our mortality and also so that we will understand the meaning and the principle of cosuffering love. Our own  passions – our own inner suffering – should teach us, above all, to understand the sufferings of others that lead to the manifestations of actions that are called “sin.”
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When we talk about sin and transgressions, we usually end up accusing God as much as the ordinary sinner. Saint Anthony the Great tells us that God does not turn his back on the sinner, and the parable of the prodigal son really gives us the whole story.
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We constantly think of sin as breaking a law. Apostle Paul, however, has assured us that we are no longer subject to the law, and Christ when he said it is finished announced that the old testament had t been completed and all things had to come to pass.
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The Singularity represents an “event horizon” in the predictability of human technological development past which present models of the future may cease to give reliable answers. In the 1950s, legendary information theorist John von Neumann was paraphrased by mathematician Stanislaw Ulam as saying, “The ever-accelerating progress of technology…gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” A number of noted scientists and technologists have predicted that after the Singularity, humans, as we exist presently, will no longer be driving technological progress, with models of change based on past trends in human behaviour becoming obsolete following the creation of strong AI or the enhancement of human intelligence.
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Do we think that our cursing and our condemning and our hatred is going to soften someone’s heart and change them? Will it not rather drive not only them but even other human beings who do have compassion, will it not drive all of them away from the Gospel, away from Christ, away from Orthodoxy, away from Christianity? As Lord Bertrand Russell said: “ Love is the reason why hate is foolish.”
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It seems to me that we have lost the significance of the Church as the body of Christ, and instead have become enmeshed in more or less meaningless legalisms and over-definition.
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Redemption is an ontological process, not an historical execution understood as a juridical payment to an all too human “God.”
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Fear is a potent tool with which to get people to yield their freedoms and liberties. Nevertheless, people will surrender their liberties more quickly for the sake of convenience and comfort than they will from fear. Fear at least involves an engagement, even if it is only an illusory one. Loss of liberty for the sake of convenience and comfort requires only acquiescence.
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Retributive justice is no justice at all. It is merely revenge.
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Grace is the uncreated energy of God. It is the way that we have personal knowledge of God, through his grace – his uncreated energies.
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The conscience is a holy prophet that has been implanted in us by God. It testifies to us if we are undertaking an action or entertaining a thought which is wrong, leads us away from God, harms someone else, etc. It is our conscience that informs us that we are guilty of something wrong and calls upon us to correct ourselves.
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Our Saviour tells us, “Be reconciled with your accuser/adversary [i.e., our conscience] in the way [in this life], lest he …deliver thee to the judge…”( Mt.5:25). According to Abba Dorotheos of Gaza, He is surely speaking here about our conscience. Having a healthy conscience is as important, perhaps even more important, than having a healthy body. Enmity with one’s own conscience can not only rob one of peace but even result in genuine mental illness.
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One of the things I most ardently long to see at this end of my life is a time when people are each accepted for who and what they are as human beings without all of the brackets and hyphens we inflict on people, to see people accepted for the quality of their lives and not disdained because of their ontology because of people’s fears and superstitions. I wish to see it accepted that every creature, just as they need air to breathe, needs love and companionship and that we accept the kind of love and companionship that pertains to their personhood without fear and hatred. Whatever excuse people give for that fear and hatred, the real root of it is their ego and self-idolatry. I wish, for the very soon ending of my life, I could see some sign that it is going to come to pass in reality and that we would no longer use our religion as a tainted pool from which we can draw buckets of prejudice, spite, judgment and hatred but rather as a clear spring from which we might draw tolerance, acceptance patience and love. That is what I want to see in the twilight at the end of my day.
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Hatred is a heresy; it is alienation from God. Like Cain, it leads us away into “the land of Nod.” A person who tries to pass hatred and prejudice off as a form of love is genuinely wicked and has succumbed to the demons in his own mind. Such a person is in schism from the kingdom of God.

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The great First Nations poet Kicking Bird once prefaced an observation with the words “looking back from a high hill of my old age,” so let me begin with these same words and say to my colleagues in the Church who are so filled with neurotic fear and hatred, and so totally compromised with worldly politics, that they can no longer sincerely and without compromising their own souls, proclaim the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: struggle to come out of the darkness of your own bitterness and fear into the light of the love and joy of God and of his creation – of all other human beings, who are, after all, His image and likeness, and find the real joy that is offered to you but which you refuse. Realise that your attitude and your disposition, your neuroses are not normal human emotions. Jesus Christ commanded us to “go forth and teach…” not to “go forth and persecute…” Or “go forth and hate…”, Not to “go forth and oppress.” The spitefulness and misery which you spread to others is a manifestation of the rot and decay in your own souls and hearts. I urge you to come out of the darkness into the radiance of the fullness of God’s cosuffering love for mankind.  True morality is a product of genuine love and of a struggle for inner transformation and not the result of the oppression of a moralistic dictatorship.
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To boast of being “pro-life” while acceding to the removal or denial of health care from millions of people, many of whom, children in particular, will die from lack of adequate health care, is surely one of the most gross and egregious hypocrisies of our epoch. Universal healthcare is a profoundly Christian concept.

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REPLY TO A QUESTION: I am over 80 years old so I am certainly living in my “last days.” I would avoid eschatology cults if I were you, there is no reason for the present age to come to an end as long as there is still a harvest in the field, as long as some people are still seeking God and seeking their salvation.
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We cannot function without “models.” The complexity of systems requires a model-dependent view of reality.
It is important that models be kept flexible and have input from as many disciplines as feasible. Models of reality that become rigid and narrow generally collapse into erroneous ideologies about reality, and this can lead to a doctrinalized ignorance and violence — usually sectarian violence. However, the economic near-collapse in America during 2008-2009 was also the creation of a false model that had become an ideology of deregulation and the withdrawal of government oversight.
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There is a concept in physics called a “reality tunnel.” It involves a naive concept of reality. “Reality” is seen only according to the instruments with which we view it, and within the framework of the paradigms with which we use the instruments. If the paradigms begin with the proposition that there is an actual “black and white” in the human condition, then the reality tunnel has no light at the “other end.” There is nearly no capacity for such people to come to a more mature and true understanding of the human condition, let alone a more complete concept of the state of affairs in the universe. Rather like a tea party with no tea bags in the cups, the lack of capacity for, or the fear of, learning and expanding one’s knowledge base is part of the problem. Reading the Scripture through the lenses of scholastic eyeglasses is a more prominent problem. But hardness of heart is also an aspect of the problem.
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Like absolutes and certitude
based on custom and platitude,
A rock resists both tide and wind,
with both pride and attitude.
Its conceit is solemn solitude
which will neither yield not bend.
Its cracks and faults cannot withstand,
and tide and wind reduce it to sand.
Its certitude and absolute
leave only sand and gravel, destitute.
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The passion for absolutes and certitudes are products of fear far more than of faith. They produce a destructive rigidity, and mental and emotional rigor mortis that makes one brittle, sometimes bitter, and can often seed fear-based hate and malice in the heart of one who cannot grasp the difference, change and development. Frightened because evolution is not linear, but creates a great variety which should be embraced with wonder and appreciation rather than fear of anything that does not fall within our delusion of absolutes and certainties.
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Truth cannot be harmed by reality and reality can never be alien to truth.
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Bringing our heart and our conscience into full communion with one another is both the guarding of the mind and the prayer of the heart, and it is truly the path toward theosis. Theosis is an inner transformation of each person and that requires reconciliation and concelebration of our heart with our conscience. This is the only way to transform our hearts.
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The best way to acquire unselfish love is to have children. Our children always elicit the most complete unselfish love from us and most parents would even give their own lives for their children. Marriage should, but does not always, give birth to unselfish love in our hearts. Unselfish love cannot be contrived, it  has to simply be manifested and nourished.
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Because we use the metaphor of the Church as a spiritual hospital, we need to call upon our clergy to follow the dictum of Hippocrates of Kos who said of the medical profession, “above all do no harm.” 
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 Let us say that the Holy Mysteries – or if you please to use the word sacraments – occur wherever the people of God are gathered together to call down the grace of the Holy Spirit in faith, together with the leader of the Synaxis – either a priest or Bishop, since the priesthood is necessary – and that there is not a number seven, but a many of these “sacraments.” Since the Orthodox Church does not have a doctrine limiting the sacraments to seven.
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One cannot help but notice how many conspiracy theorists are forging absolutely false quotations from the Saints and supposed Saints about vaccines and immunization. Of course, there is nothing new about pseudo-epigraphica, trying to give credence to your own ideas or conspiracy theories by claiming that a saint had said them or that you got them from some learned elder. Indeed, the monks of Mount Athos and various other mystics, holy or not, have no business speaking about such things as vaccines and immunology unless they are highly trained medical doctors, with training in those specific medical fields. But I think that few, if any, of them have made such pronouncements and that statements attributed to them are actually falsified by some conspiracy theorist. One high-ranking priest of the Greek church wrote to me once complaining about how many completely falsified quotes had been attributed to Saint Paisios. One wonders how many such falsifications have taken place throughout history. People who are fanatical about one or another subject are completely without conscience and do not consider it wrong to immorally contrive such things.
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Some people had asked me if there might be a “rule of thumb” for telling if reports of miracles, both contemporary and in the hagiographies, are to be taken seriously or not. I would suggest that if the miracles reported are meaningless, more theatrical and look too much like “magic,” then they probably should not be taken too seriously. There is a reason for healing, but there is simply no reason, if it is magical and theatrical to report that some notable person could walk through walls or closed doors, float on the ceiling or levitate, something regularly reported of Hindu mystics. Christ rejected theatrical, meaningless miracles during the temptation on the Mount, and we should take that as an object lesson. Our faith should not be made dependent on various reports of phenomena, but on a heartfelt conviction to which our soul is oriented. In the resurrection, Jesus Christ could pass through a closed door, but then He is God and that makes a huge difference. Moreover, there was even a purpose to Him having done that. We need to be sober-minded about every aspect of the faith.
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 Kindness is a milestone on the road to holiness.

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Few accomplishments come close to the spiritual grandeur of making marriage work for a lifetime and raising decent, honest children who have integrity and faith.
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The Nativity of Christ is the incarnation of co-suffering love; a manifestation of God’s co-suffering love for mankind.
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Faith is not simply coming into accord with a system of doctrine; faith is an orientation of the soul toward the will of God.
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RANDOM THOUGHT ABOUT BAPTISM: 
When Christ stated that we must be “born again of water and the Spirit,” He was referring directly to baptism as a rebirth, a regeneration. We must contemplate that this rebirth takes place in an image of Christ’s own incarnation. The Church is referred to as the “virgin bride of Christ.” The baptismal font becomes the womb of this virgin bride. Just as Christ was incarnate in the womb of the Ever-Virgin Theotókos by the descent of the Holy Spirit, so we are reborn in the waters of the baptismal font -the womb of the “virgin Bride of Christ”- by the descent of the Holy Spirit.
As Christ recapitulated our human nature in Himself, and the Church is the “body of Christ,” so baptism is our rebirth into that recapitulated human nature in Christ. A birth indicates a need to grow and develop, and the grace of baptism gives us that possibility. The Chrismation which is part of the baptismal service is, in a manner of speaking, ordination into the “Royal Priesthood,” and that opens the door to Holy Communion for the baptized one, makes it possible for that person to “partake of the things of the altar,” something which was only open to the priesthood in the Old Testament.
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Fundamentalism is the death of a living faith because it transfers our veneration away from the object of that faith and focusses it on ideologies that reflect the condition of our own hearts rather than on the true Object of a living faith in the living God. People become idolaters who worship a book about God but forget who the true God of that book is, that Christ Jesus is the only Word, the express Image, the whole fullness of the Godhead, and that we know nothing about God except what is revealed in Christ Jesus. What is not in accord with that image, the life and words, the example, of the Living Word, is idolatry. All Fundamentalists are idolaters.
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One important thing is to never lie to your kids and to try as hard as you can to live up to everything that you teach them – and do not be afraid to apologise to them when you need to.
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Slogans will always be more powerful than reason and common sense. Reason takes mental effort and a bit of actual education. Slogans are simple, require no reasonable thought, and play to the emotions, which are well known to be more powerful than reason and thought. That is precisely the catastrophe of modern North American society and why it is so divided and full of anger and fear. Common sense is an illusion. Mass rallies filled with mindless slogans will always be more effective than reasonable and civilised convocations.
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Raising children in a greenhouse is very dangerous for them. For one thing, it shields them from the reality of a world that they must face fully as adults. It may also hinder the development of critical thinking. In fact, a greenhouse only functions when the sun is shining or when completely artificial light is installed to hide the dark days from the things that are growing in the greenhouse.
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We often hear the slogan, “pull yourself your own bootstraps.” A person who has no money with whicfh to buy boots with and the person who has someone else’s boot on his neck cannot pull himself up by his own bootstraps.
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Discussing sexual relations in marriage is always difficult. Apostle Paul does command that abstaining from sex in marriage depends on mutual agreement between husband and wife, and married couples are obligated to care for the sexual needs of their partners. Some monks will insist that husbands and wives should not have sexual relations except for the purpose of procreation. Those monks should not interfere in the relationships in marriages. These are private matters for a husband and wife and they should work out the details between them and not have anyone trying to interfere in the privileged and sacred realm of marriage.
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It is ludicrous for laypeople – and most especially married people – to receive monastic style prayer rules and to try to practice hesychasm. That is simply Manichaeism writ large. Monasteries have long been a pressure outlet for Gnostic tendencies within the Church. The pursuit of “spirituality” rather than the indwelling of the Holy Spirit will always lead to a Messalian mysticism or an outright Manichaean theology of prayer. Ranking married people as second-class, as many monastic leaders most certainly do, really is pure Manichaeism.
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Morality is a condition of the heart, not mere conformity with the law. To become moral one must undergo a transformation of the inner person into the realisation of Christ’s moral imperatives. Moralism is to demand obedience to laws that may themselves be arbitrary and ideological, often without comprehension or knowledge of reality. Moralism is often subversive and practised with feigned compassion, but with underlying absolutism which cannot yield when proved wrong or contrary to reality.
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We are not “all different,” rather we are all variations on a theme in a symphony composed by God.
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If the Church impacts at all on civil or secular society it will be because Her healing ministry has been heeded and re-enabled the Church to minister to the world in truth — not just the truth of words, but the truth of deeds and of the lives lived by the hierarchs and the people. This ministry is not manifested in histrionic sermons or angry moralistic preaching, but in the transformation of the lives of the faithful and the manifestation of such transformed, even transfigured, lives in the world. This is the core of a prophetic ministry. We must not take flight from the creation or from our humanity, but from the world’s perception (images and words) of creation. For, one who has glimpsed the energy of creation has an increased capacity to love God and minister in co-suffering love to creation. He may be able to heal the wounds of perception, the broken images of life which skew our regard for creation and for our shared humanity..
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Realities about our humanity do not consist in abstract, disembodied ideas, but in that which we actually experience. We experience that humanity is essentially good and that our prejudices and fears of “the other” is essentially baseless. Fear needs to be justified by experience and modified by sound reasoning, otherwise, it is just a control mechanism misused by unscrupulous politicians and preachers.
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There is no violence in love; there is no punishment in mercy. If one thinks to the contrary, then one understands neither love nor mercy, and since God is both, then one simply does not understand God.
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Solidarity in our faith does not require opposition to others, nor does it call on us to bully, coerce or oppress others.
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The oversimplified slogan will always be more popular than critical thinking or searching for understanding.
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We usually think that we are making decisions based on our experience, but in reality, we are making decisions based on our memory of those experiences and even a subconscious interpretation of those experiences.
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The quest for “spirituality” can easily lead one into a form of Messalian mysticism, and we have actually seen this unfold in the past. In fact the Tollhouse myth depends very much on a Messalian demonology and a Gnostic concept of “purity.” In this regard, it can set “spirit” against the material, and consequently accept a Platonistic antagonism between body and soul which the holy fathers simply do not allow.
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The idea of “natural law” is actually a philosophical fiction. What is called natural law is really nothing more than a collection of statistical averages with one or the other interpretation rather than any form of “law”. If quantum mechanics has taught us anything, it is that there is a great deal of randomness in the universe rather than obedience to some form of legislation, some concept of “natural law.”
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The aim of totalitarian [and ‘faith based’] education has never been to instill convictions, but to destroy the capacity to form any” (Hanna Arendt). Let us hope that, in the Orthodox Church, we are educating people to utilise critical thinking, and not simply promoting “totalitarian education.”
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Let me add another pointed observation of Ms. Arendt: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be [either] good or evil.” It seems to me that religious people can be extraordinarily evil, while never weighing the ramifications or end results of their deeds or pronouncements; never taking the time to consider whether their deeds or assertions have evil effects or promote evil deeds. Sometimes religious organisations are like amoebas in defence mode. They will cover up for, even promote, evil deeds, in order to do what they think is necessary for the survival and promotion of their power and status or to protect the leaders within their organism.
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One thing that our Narcotics Anonymous group reconfirms in me, as I look at all these different people – different “races,” different sexualities,  straight, Gay, trans, people with religious faith, some who have no religion, various religions and atheists: men who are reestablishing their relationship with their wives and children by striving to overcome their drug addictions, with the help and sustaining friendship of everybody else in the room, with all of what we perceive to be differences – differences of which the members of Narcotics Anonymous seem to be almost oblivious of in their sincere desire to recover and to be a source of strength to others who are recovering. My experience with these people reconfirms in me that we are not different, we are all simply variations on a theme from a symphony composed by God. Oh that all of our pompous and proud Christians could be this actually Christian, actually be this committed to the moral imperatives of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ.
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Our struggle is not to merely suppress the passions; that often leads to the pressure cooker effect. When the rocker arm on a pressure cooker ceases to release steam the entire pressure cooker can explode. Neither is our goal the repression of passions since repression often elicits an equal and opposite reaction. Our goal through spiritual struggle is to gain control of the passions and manage them so that they do not manage us. Passions should be identified with inner human suffering which requires as a response inner human transformation. Not an easy goal but the safest and most conclusive one. This is the way to genuinely heal the inner human suffering that afflicts all humans.
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The main division in our Church today is not among jurisdictions, but among those for whom Orthodox Christianity is the struggle toward a life in Christ and those for whom Christianity is a soul consuming obsession rather than a living faith. The division that most needs to be healed is not the demand for administrative unity, but the quest for a living faith rather than a blind obsession.
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One serious problem which needs to be thought about in some depth is this: women who have a psycho-sexual need or desire to be subjugated by men have encapsulated this aberration into a religious concept which has thereby become a political ideology that they wish to impose on all women, even those who are educated, independent and contributing to the world at a higher and more important level. There are plenty of men around who think that their “masculinity” depends on them being able to herd such women and subjugate them.
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You cannot support a tornado while condemning a hurricane.
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Struggling, but not struggling alone. Struggling in the bosom of a struggling community. No legal fiction and no moralistic flights of fantasy. Those who are sincerely and humbly struggling recognise their co-strugglers and any differences in what they are struggling to overcome are not even the point and not so important. Recognising that we are a community of co-strugglers is an important step to overcoming alienation. This should be the spiritual life of all Orthodox Christians.
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It is one of the ironies of our humanity that it is the absurdities in life that give it texture and meaning.
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Religion is not always about faith. Sometimes it can be a prop for narcissism or an addiction..
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To have sincere and unfeigned knowledge and understanding about ourselves is to have compassion for all of mankind, a compassion we can only achieve when we put aside our delusions about ourselves and cease deceiving ourselves about ourselves.
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Without responsibilities, are you really necessary to anyone? Love entails the greatest of responsibilities.
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We know ourselves through other people and our relationship with them. We know Christ and can measure our relationship with Him through our relationship with other people, with the quality of our unselfish love for our brothers and sisters.
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If the gospel impacts civil or secular society at all, it is because its ministry has been heeded and re-enabled the Church to minister to the world in truth — not just the truth of words, but the truth of the lives lived by the hierarchs and the people who claim faith. This ministry is not manifested in histrionic sermons or angry moralistic preaching but in transforming the lives of the faithful, not into a feigned “purity” or “holiness,” but into a genuine, unselfish, compassionate love. This is the core of the prophetic ministry
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The Law of love and mercy is greater than every kind of Law because love is greater than law. 
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Realities about our humanity do not consist in abstract, disembodied ideas but in that which we actually experience. We experience that humanity is essentially good and that our prejudices and fears of “the other” are baseless. Fear needs to be justified by experience and modified by sound reasoning; otherwise, it is just a control mechanism misused by unscrupulous politicians, preachers and parish cults..
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Our faith should amplify our humanity, not curtail it. Chrysostom tells us that the oil that was missing from the lamps of the foolish virgins was the “oil of humanity.”
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One who has learned the meaning of cosuffering love thru his own trauma and turned his own tragedies into spiritual healing does not take flight from the creation but from the world’s perception (images and words) of creation. For, one who has glimpsed the energy of creation has an increased capacity to love God and minister in cosuffering love to creation. He may be able to heal the wounds of perception, the broken images of life which skew our regard for creation, for humanity. Reality does not consist in abstract, disembodied ideas but in that which we experience. What we do with that experience can make either emotional vampires or spiritual healers. Assimilating cosuffering love as a real manifestation rather than an emotional affectation makes much difference. Understanding that true righteousness consists in such cosuffering love is to comprehend the nature of Christ Himself. 
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One reason that Narcotics Anonymous succeeds were where religions so often fail is because NA does not retraumatise people as moralistc religion so often does. NA does not start off with a real or implicit condemnation of one’s personhood. To paraphrase a sectarian hymn, “Just as I am, without one plea except my desire to be free.”
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Faith engenders love, religion engenders rules and regulations, and it can collapse into ideologies and engender fear, prejudice and hate.
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We should make sure that we have a living faith in Jesus Christ, and that means clearly obeying His moral imperatives and resisting the ideologies, fear, prejudice and hate that are the death of a living faith.
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With prayerful contemplation, it is necessary to determine whether what you think are roots are not actually anchors. If they are anchors, it is not sufficient to weigh anchor and go back to sea. It is necessary to cut the chains and let the anchors fall away.
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Everyone needs to contemplate the ramifications of insisting on akrivia too much. Facilitating people’s salvation under special circumstances is far more beneficial than punishing them for those circumstances. We need to embrace the 21st century with grace, with love, and far more compassion than has often been shown in previous eras. We must also remember that utopian nostalgia is merely a box of sand into which people bury their heads.
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Morality is a condition of the heart, not conformity with the law. To become moral, one must undergo a transformation of the inner person into the realisation of Christ’s moral imperatives. Moralism is to demand obedience to laws that may themselves be arbitrary and ideological, often without comprehension or knowledge of reality. Moralism is often subversive and practised with feigned compassion but with an underlying absolutism that cannot yield when proven wrong or contrary to reality
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Reality is a mystery. The more deeply we penetrate into it, the greater the mystery becomes. We ourselves are the greatest mystery, and we are a mystery most of all to ourselves
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Where there is sound education, there is growth and development; where there is indoctrination, there is ultimately violence; where there is repression, there is rebellion and revolution.
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Moral absolutism is likely much more dangerous and destructive than moral relativism. Moral relativism can at least require some thought and consideration. Moral absolutism forbids thought and consideration and requires only blind reaction without any critical examination or consideration.
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Peace without social justice is a fantasy. There is more to peace than the absence of armed war. There are more forms of warfare than “boots on the ground” and firing of artillery, Greed and indifference are forms of warfare. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction and intolerance is an armed conflict that not only makes life unbearable for many but destroys the lives of many and pushes some to suicide. There is no such thing as peace without social justice, without moving beyond tolerance, without caring about the conditions of the lives of other human beings. When the weapons of hate, intolerance, avarice, and indifference are silenced, there can be talk of peace.
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It is clear that the New Testament baptism is equal for both men and women and establishes a new level of equality.
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Religious fanaticism is not a sign of deep faith but of mental disease. No matter how much one exhibits the outward signs of religiosity or how loudly one voices one’s own righteousness by condemning others, it is all of no avail. Without sincere compassion, without remembering that God, by His own word, declares, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice” 1000 prostrations a day, swinging 1000 knots of a prayer rope and living on a single slice of bread a day, will be of no use, of no value when driven by fanaticism and a harsh, brutish moralism. A single word of hate erases a year of prayer.
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When the Church becomes the bride of the state, it is no longer the bride of Christ. When the church and a political party begin to woo each other, it is ultimately the church which gets seduced and led away from her first love.
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Ignorance is a poor basis for dogmatic and self-assured statements; but, alas, it the most common platform from which such statements are made.
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It is such a tragedy  that so many cannot realise that the differences among human beings are all variations on a theme from a symphony composed by God. The effort to narrowly categorise and Corporatise humanity remains one of our existential tragedies.
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One of the problems, or complex of problems, with resisting deconstructing when one feels inclined to do so (but resists, perhaps from a feeling of guilt) is that one struggles to reconcile oneself with, rather than resolve, the questions or issues that trouble one. One can end up frustrated and cynical, even a bit angry. In such a case, this can end in a bitterness that causes a person to actually give up their faith rather than losing it. At least the process of validly deconstructing requires thought and challenge that leaves a basis for resolution and reconstruction, sometimes on a firmer foundation, especially when one’s “faith” is cultural indoctrination or “inherited” from family rather than personally acquired. “Deconstruction” (rather than blanket rejection) does provide an opportunity for discovery and seeking to correct one’s understanding — perhaps finding better answers than one started out with, and eventually, a thoughtful and informed reconciliation.
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The main division in our Church today is not among jurisdictions, but among those for whom Orthodox Christianity is the struggle toward a life in Christ and those for whom Christianity is a soul consuming obsession rather than a living faith. The division that most needs to be healed is not the demand for administrative unity, but the quest for a living faith rather than a blind obsession.
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The preaching of fear and hate is usually a devious technique to distract and deflect people from what you are really up to and to deflect your attention from reality and rational thought. Fear is the best tool for controlling and manipulating people. 
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Hate is an expansion of fear and is the cult leaders’ and autocrats’ best tool. Crippling people’s prefrontal cortex and hyper-activating their amygdala is a “demonic” enterprise with nefarious motives and results.. It is often a religious activity.
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It is easy enough to catechise the brain, but much more difficult to catechise the heart.

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History is a constant struggle for balance. To find this balance, we need to be open to insights of wisdom from those who oppose our struggles and goals. A liberal movement needs a sound conservative opposition to guard against moral chaos and even collapse. Conservatism needs to be offset by a sound liberal opposition to keep it from developing into stagnation, repression and absolutism (think Al Gezali). We need liberal democracy in order to make progress in science, literature, art, etc, and conservatism to remind us that liberalism is subject to the same “law of diminishing returns” that economics is. We need liberalism and progressives to remind us of the horrors of repression, stagnation of knowledge, dictatorships, and theocracies. There is little difference between right-wing fascism and left-wing fascism (communism). The struggle for balance is part of the drama of history. It is a constant in all human societies. Both sides are subject to the law of diminishing returns.  
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Belief becomes faith when fear gives way to love.

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The 12-step programs are “living theology” rather than theoretical theology. Any theology that is going to embrace the teachings of Jesus Christ must be existential rather than philosophical.
Incidentally, the two things that seem to preoccupy my mind this morning: 1. If the prodigal son was tending a herd of swine, he must have been in bond to someone outside, to a gentile an unbeliever. It may not actually have that meaning, but it is worth contemplating that he had also turned away from the faith and was in bondage to unbelief. It was his realisation of the father’s love that brought him back – perhaps he deconstructed all he had been taught. Having cleared his mind enough to understand that love is the whole essence of faith, he could put every fear of any retribution or rejection aside, being given hope in the father’s love.
The other thing that comes to mind this morning is the social scope, the scope of humanity encompassed by shepherds and Magi. The shepherds from the lowest levels of society, the poorest of the poor, and the Wise Men who were advisors to Kings, the Viziers, who ranked next only to the King – surely there is a message in the fact that both of them came and offered the best that they had to Christ, the whole spectrum humanity worshipping one who was found in abject humility, one whose glory could be seen in his humility.
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History is not just about yesterday, it is the vestibule of today and the prologue to tomorrow.
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The Gospel teaches that forgiveness of sins is not a result of a change in God’s attitude toward us but rather a change in our attitude toward God. This is an essential teaching of St Symeon the New Theologian and, indeed, of the whole of patristic teaching. God is changeless in nature and does not desire the destruction of sinners. He is forever disposed to us and never turns away from us but awaits our free response to His unceasing love, and our return to Him so that He may heal our souls and restore within us our heavenly legacy. The Saviour tells us that, at the first impulse of a soul’s response, of a prodigal’s return, to God, He hastens to embrace, nurture, and sustain him: “When he was yet afar off, his Father saw him and had compassion, and ran, and embraced him and kissed him.” (Lk.15:20)
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I do not see how we can even think of recovering from the catastrophe into which the earth has been delivered by our excesses unless everyone fully accepts and understands the nature of evolution and the intricate relationship of humanity to every other living thing on earth. Our relationship is not just with other mammals but with every lifeform in whatever form, condition or state. Every action we take impacts the whole because we are only a part of the whole. Unless we come to fully comprehend and accept that we are evolutionary lifeforms ourselves and totally interdependent with every other life form on earth, there will always be an adamant and militant resistance to the undertaking of the processes which might possibly deliver humanity from the unimaginable catastrophe and tragedy that awaits us just down the road of this century.
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When we think about the Nativity, remember the other katavases – the “coming down to see ….-” When man did not properly respond, then God “came down,” He  undertook the ultimate katavasis, He was incarnate and took on our “image and likeness” in order to recall us to His image and likeness, and even offer us participation in His Divine Nature by condescending to participate in our human nature [though without our sin]
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Mystical theology is the contemplation of the unknowable. Things that cannot be comprehended or experienced through reason can be apprehended noetically through prayerful contemplation, with the grace of the Holy Spirit. The existence of God cannot be “proved,” reason can only assert it. We can infer the existence of God through experience of His energy (realising that such experience is a subjective interpretation.) One can have faith without knowledge and interpret faith as knowledge. It is easy to interpret transcendental thought as transcendent knowledge. Faith is as much an orientation as a condition. Mystical theology can be a practical means for exploring constructs that are transcendent and cannot be explored rationalistically provided we enter mystical theology within a matrix established by and guided by the Church. Otherwise, we can find ourselves engaged in flights of imagination and fancy. Mystical theology involves deep, prayerful contemplation of things established by the Orthodox Church, guided by a consensus of the holy fathers, or at least not violating them.. 
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One of our difficulties is distinguishing between things that we can think about and things that we can actually know. Much of theology (and philosophy) consists in thinking about things we cannot actually know.
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Masculinity itself is not toxic. The right-wing religious ideological understanding of masculinity has created a toxic perversion of masculinity. The autocratic, religious concept of masculinity in some older cultures gave a man life-and-death authority over his wife and children (and slaves). The evolution of Christian societies has led to detoxing of masculinity which has made for less violence in some cultures and equality among men and women and less violence toward children. Domestic violence is often regressive toward a more toxic era. Some men are just “throwbacks” to a previous era. Ultra-right-wing religiopolitical ideologies embrace such atavistic manifestations as “expressions of true manhood.” They would like to see a re-toxification of masculinity.
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Defining “mysticism” as “union with God” is a fallacy. Union with God is the prize of All Christians. That is basic to Orthodox soteriology, that is the very reason for the incarnation, for the life and ministry of Christ. The Incarnation, God taking on our nature, uniting in Himself the Divine nature and the human nature was to redeem humanity from their alienation from God. Union with God is the calling and destiny to which all are called. Orthodox Christian life is in itself “mystical.”
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God is love and what is alien to godly love is alien to Christ, alien to the nature of God. Godly love is love without excuses.
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One of our difficulties is distinguishing between things that we can think about and things that we can actually know. Much of theology (and philosophy) consists in thinking about things we cannot actually know.
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One problem with the philosophy of “natural law” is that nature feels no obligation to obey it.
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It seems that some of us have difficulty distinguishing between Tradition and nostalgia. There is a difference between keeping the faith and embalming it.
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History is not just about yesterday, it is the vestibule of today and the prologue to tomorrow
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Sincere repentance is a conscious act of acknowledging our alienation from God and striving to turn our lives around, reorienting them toward the will of God and a life in Christ, with the grace of the Holy Spirit helping us to complete this act. Here, once more, we see the active participation of mankind in his redemption and salvation. We see the call to actively cooperate with the grace of the Holy Spirit in the process of our coming out of alienation through participation in Jesus Christ. We are able to participate in Christ because He participated in our human nature. We are not forced or coerced; rather, we receive illumination through divine grace to reorient our lives toward the will of God.
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Grace does not compel or coerce us but rather illumines, guides and strengthens us in responding to Jesus Christ and accepting the healing of our human nature.
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Existence itself is a spiritual experience

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Righteousness” does not consist of a cold, stony “correctness” but in a loving and compassionate commitment to the commandments of Christ.
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Sometimes people are afraid to understand others they see as “different.”. Sometimes trying to understand others leads to understanding one’s own self in uncomfortable ways. To often this provokes a cloak of disdain and hate as self-recognition can often be frightening or painful.

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Christ told us that he did not come to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved. Priests who condemn the world or any people in it from the Solea must surely think that they are making up for some shortfall in the ministry of Jesus Christ, that they are correcting him and doing what he failed to do. The great commission at the end of Matthew’s gospel says nothing about attacking, humiliating, degrading, condemning, coercing or manipulating or inspiring hate. Read it again and see what it does command and preach accordingly. Unless you consider yourself greater than Christ and able to correct Him.
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One thing that the major feast days teach us is that humanity is called into an active participation with Christ in the redemption of mankind. This is one more thing that the human sacrifice doctrine of atonement obliterates. Man was never meant to be a robot (In Capek’s original meaning of the word), but a coworker with the Holy Spirit in the working out of his salvation, even as apostle Paul says: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” The one thing I wish I could convey from the feast of the Nativity of Christ is that Christ IS the incarnation and manifestation of the co-suffering love of God for mankind. Not a human sacrifice but an embracing and all-encompassing manifestation of divine love. The kind of love that will deliver all humanity from any form of torment and into blessedness in the end.
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Perhaps a major, but unidentified, aspect of the religious/political disorientation is the myth of a Judaeo-Christian culture. We have been living in a Greco-Roman culture with a Christian facade, but nevertheless Greco-Roman, and a Christianity that is heavily dependent on the State and civil, secular law. This is the structure that is in retreat. The mythology of “holy nations” is collapsing also.
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Prayer is a matter of putting our self-will aside and listening as well as speaking, and worship is a matter of focus and listening. I have been amazed by the number of priests who raise questions that have already been answered in the priests’ prayers during the divine liturgy. This indicates that the prayers are being read only by rote with no attention being paid to them, yet they are there to teach deep things. If we think we come to church primarily to give glory to God, we should think again because God does not need our glorification. We come to church to receive, not to give, but unless we are aware of that and open our hearts to “receive,” we sometimes close ourselves off from “receiving.”
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Getting God’s forgiveness is much easier than getting your own forgiveness. One of our main tasks in confession, when someone has repented, is to get them to accept God’s forgiveness and forgive themselves.
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EXCERPTS FROM EXHORTATIONS BEFORE HOLY COMMUNION
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Brothers and sisters, today, as we approach communion, it is well that you believe IN Jesus Christ. But do you BELIEVE Jesus Christ? Do you understand what the Law was about? Today, Jesus Christ gave us a revelation of what the Law was truly about. According to the law, a leper was unclean. He could not enter the holy city, and certainly not into the Temple. If one touched a leper one became unclean, impure. Nevertheless, our Lord Jesus Christ reached out and touched the leper, placing His hand on the unclean man’s head and both blessed and healed him. Today, as we approach Holy Communion, Christ is going to reach out and touch each of us no matter what our sins and passions. Holy Communion is the healing and purifying love of our Lord Jesus Christ
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Today, as we approach Holy Communion, we come near to the body of Jesus Christ. And we understand that this time, it is a life-giving body— that this time, the touch of Jesus Christ raises our souls from spiritual deadness and fills us with life again. When we approach Holy Communion, the only thing that should be in our mind is that our Lord Jesus Christ is offering Himself to us—that he is actually reaching out to touch what is considered unclean. To touch our dead souls—to touch the deadness in our hearts and give us life—to quicken our spirits and raise us up from the dead works of the world around us
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Why did he establish this ritual to give us his body and blood at every liturgy, except to call us back out of the deadness of the world into the life of the kingdom of God? When we receive Holy Communion, we manifest the fact that we are citizens of the kingdom of God, that we are a royal priesthood, and we are a kingdom of priests.
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So today, as you approach Holy Communion, contemplate in your mind as you prepare what it actually means—what it means that Jesus Christ is going to touch you today and enter into your being today and raise you from the deadness of the world around you, and the dead works of the world around you, and the vanities of the world around us.  And for this moment, to raise you, as it were, from spiritual death and bestow upon you that life that comes only from God and only from union with God. For God is life, and to be separated from God is death. To be United with God Is life.
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Today, Jesus Christ will unite us with God through His own precious body and blood and remind us again that what the world might consider unclean in its own folly, Jesus Christ considers clean and makes clean through his touch.
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The only thing that can render you unclean, according to Saint John Chrysostom, is an evil disposition or a heart turned against God and turned against neighbour. Today, Jesus Christ invites us to turn toward God and toward neighbour—to receive him, to receive his touch, to receive the touch of life that makes us worthy, no matter how unclean, to enter into the Temple and receive the things of the altar—to receive the things from the Holy of Holies, because the Law of Mercy is greater than the Law of purity.
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The Law of love and mercy is greater than every kind of Law because love is greater than law. As you prepare yourself to approach Holy Communion in these few minutes, try to contemplate what it means that you’re about to do—to partake of the Holy Mysteries. So you can truly rejoice in heart, having been touched with the gift of life from our Lord and God.
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Our own ego prevents us from discovering ourselves. Unselfish love reduces our ego and at least disrupts our attachments by refocussing them. 
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When we find out that “the kingdom of God is within you”, then we realise that, while even happiness is transitory, like Paul, we can be content in whatever condition we find ourselves.
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There is a word that belongs in our vocabulary of Soteriology. The word is ἑπανισοϋν, which I understand to mean “restoring the balance.” It seems to me also that “dikaiosyne”  should be translated more as “righteousness” and not in any juridical sense as “justification” (or, justification in a non-juridical sense of “putting in balance.) If I recall correctly in classical Greek Hermes was once tasked with giving man “diki”, which in classical times would have meant something like “social correctness” rather than something juridical or “legal.” 
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It seems to me that a better translation of  κοινωνία  has to encompass more than “communion” but must also bear the concept of “commonweal.”
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The torments of hell must surely be healing torments of the conscience that ultimately carry us to the other shore of the River of Fire as we realise, even in that darkness, that, as Isaak and Ephraim tell us, the torments of the betrayal of love are the greatest torments of all. As we come to realise that the One betrayed grieves with the betrayer even as the conscience of the betrayer is being harrowed until it finally realises that the love of God has never abandoned it but rather co-suffers with it in that darkness until it illumines the heart and carries it across the fiery stream, which from fire becomes light.
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Hate is a foolish vanity, the steel and flint that ignites the fire of hell.
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We can sometimes degrade and ham people with our eyes. The eyes are more truthful than the tongue and speak more directly from the heart. The asceticism of the eye begins with a transformation of the heart.
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It is easier to work with non-religious or  semi-religious people than it is to work with religious fanatics. Religious fanatics also have some kind of spiritual trauma and deep structural fear that is very difficult to overcome. It is the deep structural fear that makes fundamentalists so impervious to reality and so utterly superstitious. It is clear that Apostle John is correct that “those who still have fear have just not learned how to love…” This deep structural fear, actually induced by revival preachers and the hysterical preaching of mega-church pastors, generates hate that grows like dandelions on your lawn and is as invasive as wild blackberry vines. It generates the most vile and malicious actions and attitudes imaginable. At the root of it, one will find the most immoral behaviour cloaked in a hyper-religious vocabulary.
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Faith, it is said, is the evidence of things not seen, religion is often the evidence only of our ideology.  Faith engenders love, religion engenders rules and regulations, and it can also collapse into ideologies and engender fear, prejudice and hate. We should make sure that we have a living faith in Jesus Christ, and that means clearly obeying His moral imperatives and resisting the ideologies, fear, prejudice and hate that are the death of a living faith.
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One can make a lot of money peddling fear. Perhaps love is not remunerative enough, and often “love” is just a slogan. The “love” that is mentioned is so bound to fear and “only if” that it is more “control and manipulate” than authentic love. Such fear/feigned love is not only a trademark of Evangelicalism but also a hallmark of parish cultism in our own Orthodox Church.
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When new and well-founded information becomes available, we  must recalibrate what and how we think about a given subject. The Symbol of Faith (creed) is immutable, and, for us, all sound theology is really commentary and explication about the Symbol of Faith. So much else is subject to development; the Creed is subject only to deeper explanations. Many things must be changed if we are not to end up with a lie instead of reality, so we must be willing to recalibrate in the face of new knowledge, new discoveries, and unfolding reality. If we remain always the same, with the same ideas, concepts and understandings about everything, then we will live a lie and be alienated from reality.
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Fear is a “gateway drug”. The real source of hate is fear and the culmination is murder or suicide. We hate most in others what we fear most in ourselves, this is why moral outrage is a form of public confession. As a narcotic, fear leads us, on the one hand, to prejudice, self-fortification, and cruelty. On the other hand, it leads us toward a kind of prejudice against our own self, a loss of self-esteem which can push us into other forms of “narcotics.” We have heard the saying, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” If the truth that you think you know is placing you and some form of bondage rather than freedom, it likely means that it is not truth that all but some form of mythology that was born of fear in the first place. Fear is ultimately a “gateway drug” that leads to hate and religious addiction, addictive extremism in politics and fanaticism in religion. Religious addiction does not equal faith but only a deep structural fear that is a spiritual, psychological and moral bondage. Hate, repression and arrogance are inevitable aspects of this addiction. We need to view it as an addiction and treat it as one. Sincere and active faith and an actual trust in God-an understanding of God that is not perverted by the projection of our own fear and guilt-ridden addictions is the therapy that is most needed, and perhaps the only cure,
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Anyone who fervently and fanatically believes something that is demonstrably untrue is capable of any extreme, even murder.
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Surely it makes Angels weep that those who boast most loudly about their piety are the ones most apt to oppress others, and to use their religiosity as an excuse for their oppression and persecution of the vulnerable. Charity is not simply about material things, but also about spiritual things and about the humanity of others, and about life itself.
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Falling into extremes is one of the main pathways to prelest and spiritual self-destruction. Sometimes, severe struggle is necessary, depending on what one is struggling with. One should never try to make one’s own necessity a “norm”, however.
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Fear-mongering is the last resort of someone who doubts the validity of his/her own arguments but has an ideology to defend at all costs, even at the cost of their own integrity and credibility. This includes  Fundamentalism, which demands that people believe things they know are untrue, and the number of outright lies told by religious leaders.
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To wait for the Lord means we are looking to Him with joyful expectation and with peace concerning the days to come. “Because our hope is in Him, we can discover courage! The Lord is faithful, and all who put their trust in Him will find strength and courage to endure. Take heart today!” (Psalm 27:14)
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The preaching of the Gospel was never meant to colonize people’s minds with fear. Sometimes “deconstruction” is actually the effort to decolonize one’s mind.
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The colonialism of fear no longer works except in a neurotic mind. If we do not wish to, in the words of Pope Francis, “inoculate young people against faith” we have to stop making it fear-based and restore it to Christ’s message of hope, love and joy.
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Along the way, we need to “deconstruct” the wall we attempt to erect around Divine Grace. We may know where Grace is, but we do not know where it is not. There is no darkness into which the light of Grace cannot penetrate
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If you wish to know the quality of your relationship with Christ, examine the quality of your attitude toward the poor, the outcast, the disenfranchised, and those who are persecuted. When we remember that, in the time of Christ, lepers were considered unclean, untouchable, and were not allowed into the precincts of the temple, yet Christ did not simply heal them with a word but reached out and touched them, we realise that no one is unclean, outcast, or disenfranchised in the eyes of Jesus Christ. We cannot possibly have a relationship with Christ if we do not have a Christ-like relationship with the poor and the outcast.
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Fear is a “gateway drug” that leads to hate and religious addiction and addictive extremism in politics and fanaticism in religion. Fear is a “gateway drug” that leads to hate and religious addiction, addictive extremism in politics and fanaticism in religion. Religious addiction does not equal faith but only a deep structural fear that is a spiritual, psychological and moral bondage. Hate, repression and arrogance are inevitable aspects of this addiction. We need to view it as an addiction and treat it as one. Sincere and active faith and an actual trust in God, an understanding of God that is not perverted by the projection of our own fear and guilt-ridden neuroses, is the therapy that is most needed, and perhaps the only cure.
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A gift of “deconstructionism” is that it can liberate us from our “projection” of ourselves upon God and alert us of the distortions of our own image. If we can grasp that we have projected our own distorted image onto our concept of God, that excesses in religion have deluded us into recreating God in our own image and likeness, we may find solid ground upon which to build a sanctified temple, a living faith, upon the rubble of our idolatry.
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Whenever I have ordained a priest, I have taught them never to begin Confession by asking “What sins do you have to confess,” but rather, “Is anything weighing on your heart or troubling your peace.” When we approach difficult situations [you will have an idea what I mean], our first thought should not be “sin,” but “pain or trauma.”
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The Church is not a system of moral philosophy or an adjudicator of laws. The Church is the vector to theosis, it is the vestibule of the manifestation of “ exceeding great and precious promise: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature.” (2 Peter 1:4). The purpose of the Church is to bring us thru illumination and purification to ultimate glorification in Christ Jesus. Those who try to reshape it into political ideology or weaponize in some ideological “culture wars” blaspheme the Holy Spirit.
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When we remain stuck on the surface of the text of Scripture, its literal register, we do so to ignore what the narrative is unveiling for us and inviting us to understand.
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If our faith is primarily a mantra to drive away punishment, our “faith” isn’t really a faith, rather it is a fear with a response of the instinct for self-preservation. We feign faith in order to keep from being punished. We believe in an uncertain way only from fear of hell, and so our “faith” is without love and self-serving, a mere survival instinct. When we do that it usually manifests itself as a kind of harsh moralism. In a maturing faith, hope and love displace fear, even as the Holy Apostle John tells us (1Jn.4: 18).

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SAILING IN THE WINTER SUN: JOURNAL OF AN OLD MAN AT THE END OF LIFE:

✑Anyone who fervently and fanatically believes something that is demonstrably false is capable of any extreme, even murder.

✑ABOUT FAST PERIODS: We should speak out of the fulness of our own hearts, and not from bondage to fear, to rules and regulations. Those who are well fast as well as they are able, those who are weak, fast as they are able. Those who are ill fast little. But if the exercise does not come from the heart, no matter how little or how much, it is of no benefit and remains meaningless.

✑The only acceptable theocracy is a theocracy of the heart, not a theoretical political construct. God does not force His will on the unwilling. When we pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we should understand, “Let your kingdom enter in and reign in my heart, Lord, for I am willing. Let your will be done in my heart as it is done in heaven, for I am willing.”

✑Until love is embraced as the only commodity of genuine value, we humans will be programmed to fear and, in turn , have that fear sold back to us as freedom.

✑The preaching of the Gospel was never meant to be a means of colonizing people’s minds with fear. Nevertheless, this has become a primary element of far too many Christian preachers, and it has clearly contributed to the rise of atheism, which often results from the effort to de-colonize the mind. The colonialism of fear no longer works except in a neurotic mind. If we do not wish to, in the words of Pope Francis, “inoculate young people against faith” we have to stop making it fear-based and restore it to Christ’s message of hope, love and joy.