Quote of the day: "We know many people, especially other German home-schoolers, have been praying for us. Their prayers and ours have been answered," Mr. Romeike said. "We greatly appreciate the freedom to home-school we now have in America and will be building our new life here."
CHRISTIAN LIFE BEGINS WITH ARDOR OF ZEAL
There is a moment, and a very noticeable moment, which is sharply marked out in the course of our life, when a person begins to live in a Christian way. This is the moment when there begins to be present in him the distinctive characteristics of Christian life. Christian life is zeal and strength to remain in communion with God by means of an active fulfillment of His holy will, according to our faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, and with the help of the grace of God, to the glory of His most holy name.
The essence of Christian life consists in communion with God, in Christ Jesus our Lord - in a communion with God which in the beginning is usually hidden not only from others, but also from oneself. The testimony of this life that is visible or can be felt within us is the ardor of active zeal to please God alone in a Christian manner, with total self-sacrifice and hatred of everything which is opposed to this. And so, when this ardor of zeal begins, Christian life has its beginning. The person in whom this ardor is constantly active, is one who is living in a Christian way. Here we will have to stop and pay attention to this distinctive characteristic.
I am come to send fire to the earth,the Saviour said, and what will I, if it be already kindled! (Lk. 12:49). He is speaking here of Christian life, and He says this because the visible witness of this is the zeal for the pleasing of God which is in the heart by the Spirit of God. This is like fire because, just as fire devours the material which it takes hold of, so also does zeal for the life in Christ devour the soul which receives it. And just as during a time of fire the flame takes hold of the whole building, so also the fire of zeal, once it is received, embraces and fills the whole being of a man.
In another place the Lord says, For every one shall be salted with fire (Mk.9:14). This is also an indication of the fire of the spirit which in its zeal penetrates our whole being. just as salt, penetrating decomposable matter, preserves it from decomposition, so also the spirit of zeal penetrates our whole being, banishes the sin which corrupts our whole nature both in soul and in body; it banishes it even from the least of the places where it has settled in us, and thus it saves us from moral vice and corruption.
The Apostle Paul commands, Quench not the Spirit (I Thess. 5:19), to be not slothful in business; fervent in the spirit (Rom. 12:11). He commands this to all Christians so that we might remember that the fervor of the spirit, or unslothful striving, is an inseparable attribute of the Christian life. In another place he speaks of himself thus: Forgetting those things that are behind, and reaching forth unto those things that are before, I press toward the mark for the high prize of the calling of God in Christ Jesus (Phil. 3:13-14). And to others he says, So run, that ye may obtain (I Cor. 9:24). This means that in the Christian life the result of fervor of zeal is a certain quickness and liveliness of spirit, with which people undertake God-pleasing works, trampling upon oneself and willingly offering as a sacrifice to God every kind of labor, without sparing oneself.
Having a firm basis in such an understanding, one may easily conclude that a cold fulfilling of the rules of the Church, just like routine in business, which is established by our calculating mind, or like correct and dignified behavior and honesty in conduct, is not a decisive indicator that the true Christian life is present in us. All this is good, but as long as it does not bear in itself the spirit of life in Christ Jesus, it has no value at all before God. Such things would be like souless statues. Good clocks also work correctly; but who will say that there is life in them? It is the same thing here. Often thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead in reality (Apoc. 3:1).
This good order in one's conduct more than anything else can lead one into deception. Its true significance depends on one's inward disposition, where it is possible that there are significant deviations from real righteousness in one's righteous deeds. Thus, while refraining outwardly from sinful deeds, one may have an attraction for them or a delight from them in one's heart; so also, doing righteous deeds outwardly, one's heart may not be in them. Only true zeal wishes to do good in all fullness and purity, and persecutes sin in all its smallest forms. It seeks the good as its daily bread, and with sin it fights as with a mortal enemy.
An enemy hates an enemy not only personally, but he hates also relatives and friends of this enemy, and even his belongings, his favorite color, and in general anything that might remind one of him. So also, true zeal to please God persecutes sin in its smallest reminders or marks, for it is zealous for perfect purity. If this is not present, how much impurity can hide in the heart!
St. Theophan the Recluse. The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation. Trans. Fr. Seraphim Rose. California: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1996.
Girls may like weapons, but boys like the actions that weapons enable. They like shooting and slashing and stabbing at things, and if they don’t have anything to shoot, slash, or stab with, punching is good, too. Hand a girl a rock, and she will make a pet out of it. Hand a boy a baby doll, and—if no adult is looking—he will point its head at somebody and say, “Pow.”From my own observation, I was perhaps of the last generation to be raised in the "boys will be boys" climate. The movement to 'equalize' boys and girls that has resulted in the documented stunting of young males' development over recent decades, was the result of a confusion between the materialistic parochialism that had developed in twentieth century Western society and the natural differences between males and females. This confusion influenced many areas of Western culture, particularly in anxiety that boys might actually behave like boys (a sort of 'cultural emasculation') and the consequent deforming of the 'ideal' of what young females should become (an equally healthy 'cultural defininization' of girls). As a former teacher, I have witnessed this unnatural exercise unfold in the classroom and on the playground, wherein boys instincts were stifled as 'aggressive'. To give food for thought, I recall it being raised as a concern when one year's class had only boys and members of the administration were desperate to remedy this potentially dangerous development. Of course, the boys did just fine; in fact, possibly becoming the highest achievers I ever had the privilege to teach.
The default mode of many parents is to be as alarmed by this proclivity in their sons as my friend was by the deer hunters. To be sure, it is wearying, sometimes, to live with a person whose way of greeting you is to line you up in imaginary sights. I can see that, after a while, if you didn’t just become oblivious to it, an obvious fascination with shooting things might come to seem like one of those warning signals we all read about: If Johnny does X, call Dr. Y. It used to be that parents waited for Johnny to start torturing the cat before they worried. My generation of parents seems to worry that owning a rubber-band shooter will make Johnny want to torture the cat.
Often what passes for Orthodoxy or another Christian confession is simply natural religiosity which, in its own right, is a kind of opium of the people. It functions as a sort of spiritual anesthetic, it helps a person adjust to his surrounding world, over which one can hang the slogan: ‘Blessed is the one who believes that it is cozy in the world.’ This is all wrong! …Your God is a consuming fire and not a warm hearth, and he is calling you to a place where all sorts of cold winds are blowing, so that what you imagine does not exist. You adapted and developed a completely different teaching to suit your own human needs. You transformed Christianity into a mediocre, popular religion. …Christianity can be authentic and it can be false. The false form is always more convenient. It always suits us better, which is why contemporary religious life is often characterized by a churchly falsehood when people prefer that which is convenient, calm and pleasant, conforms to their own ideas, consoles them, and which they enjoy. It is not at all to this that the Lord called us when he said ‘the gate is narrow’ and ‘the way is narrow.’ Again and again we need to understand that this Spirit is not warmth, but a fire. It is a fire.Would that we all recognized the truth of this quote and took it to heart with seriousness and commitment. No one is immune from such temptations, the laity, the clergy, or the hierarchy.
Several themes emerge from the articles.As an aside: Whenever I pass an abortuary or "Planned Parenthood facility", I quietly make the sign of the cross and ask our Lord to close all abortuaries in our country and return our nation to a respect for the dignity of all human life from conception to natural death. I encourage you the reader to do so as well.
First, the very existence of legalised assisted suicide leads to an expectation that the disabled, elderly and infirm should shuffle off their mortal coil a bit early to relieve the burden on their carers.
This fear has been ridiculed by supporters, who contend that all they want is choice at the end of life and that a lifelong experience of disability is different from the pain of seeing one’s life ebb away. They think that disability advocates are demonising euthanasia lobby groups and exaggerating their own vulnerability
Nonsense, says Diane Coleman, of the lobby group Not Dead Yet. She points out – quite eloquently -- that pity can be more dangerous than a mad doctor in a nursing home. We are, she says, "more frightened by the doctors who are out to help us but who see our lives as burdensome and who know little about options that make life with disability valuable."
Why should valuable resources be wasted on them, anyway? "Every week, I hear another person with a disability recount a disturbing interaction with a physician, nurse, or other health professional who clearly transmitted the view that life with a disability is inherently burdensome," she writes. "It does not feel safe to have one's life in the hands of someone who views that life as unfortunate, maybe even tragic or unfair."
