The Spirit’s unceasing prayer in the heart glorifies the Father with the Son, ascribing glory to God in the midst of all falls from glory. It does not wallow in the falling gravity of endless falls, but undoes the power of falling by reversing it in accordance with the ascending gravity of heaven. The Spirit proceeds from the Father to abide… Read more »
It is self-evident to pride that we must save ourselves by believing right things and doing things right, because being saved by grace is literally inconceivable. Proud self-righteousness is a very anxious business because it is haunted by fear that it is in the wrong, anxious that pride puts it in the wrong by falling short of glory. Pride lives very close to… Read more »
Standing back from the incompleteness of life’s strains and stresses, wisdom turns and sees the glory of timeless freedom in the hallowed realms of union and communion. Anxiety resists hallowing communion but dissolves when union weds time with timeless wisdom, releasing illumination into glorification. Prophecy regenerates the imagination with new ways of telling old stories, whilst prayer of the… Read more »
Wisdom releases her reifications by liberating the intelligence, the will and the emotions to abide in the timeless freedom of God’s presence. Hells of separation are freed in union with heavens of infinite grace. Extinguishing deception, delusion is extinguished by the Spirit of truth, freeing all things in uncreated light, transfiguring all things in uncreated glory. Hearts are freed in… Read more »
Patristic Orthodoxy centres on Christ’s divine humanity as the living heart of human redemption and deification. Saints Irenaeus, Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzus and Gregory Nyssa all bear witness that God became human so that humanity may be deified. For Patristic wisdom, Christ’s birth, life, transmission of gospel wisdom, death, resurrection, ascension and glorification, together save and deify humanity, not the Cross of… Read more »
The blood of red martyrdom is the life-blood of Holy Orthodoxy, the costly glorification that gives life to the tradition in the light of the Name. The blood of white martyrdom, on the other hand, is the life-blood of Hesychast solitude, the life of desert silence, the beauty of hidden stillness. Both martyrdoms bear witness to Christ in the Spirit of the… Read more »
Wisdom shepherds guide hearts because wisdom herself shepherds hearts into illumination with luminous discernment, discerning the grace of Christ’s resurrection and ascension at work in angels and saints, overcoming death by death with deifying glory. Wisdom liberates seers by purifying hearts, blessing saints in realms of light and glory. Uncreated light communicates the timeless life of wisdom by illumining hearts with glory,… Read more »
Sudden presence is Christ’s timeless mystery, piercing through conditioned, temporal progression, uniting the uncreated and the created, time and the timeless, NOW, suddenly, timelessly, immediately. Christ is this timeless immediacy in the temple of the heart and in the eucharistic mystery of communion, as ecstatic suddenness, exaiphnes, which Saint Denys speaks of in his third epistle, describing it as unknowable and ineffable. Ecstatic suddenness… Read more »
Saint James tells us that God will draw near to those who draw near to God, purifying the heart of double-minded ‘dipsychoi,’ divided psyches suffering divisive confusion (James 4:8). Divided minds are riddled with doubt, split by habitual uncertainty and addicted to compulsive wavering, quite unable to abide steadily in God, whose certainty of God is unwavering wisdom. The purified heart is not… Read more »
The heart is purified by turning the light of awareness round to remember God, stepping back to recognise God in the midst. The remembrance of God opens the eye of the heart to God’s own vision of God through God, restoring the heart to the uncreated light of hallowing wisdom. Wisdom unites the mind with the heart in primordial, pristine awareness, liberating… Read more »