Tag: Eastern Orthodoxy

I have Orthodox friends that find our little chapel concerning, and they are certainly right that a casual use of icons for decorative enhancement is to be avoided. Still, their chief complaint should be directed to the monks of Mount Athos who, infused with God’s flagrant generosity, so recklessly gave their replica icons away.

I had seen the worst of America: the brittle surface of “good design” shattered by rage, and the reverse snobbery of the rest of America. Still, I wasn’t about to permit myself a trip like this, with such visual and emotional assault, without some kind of further insurance.

" None of your readers need me to tell them that the useful work is practical, particular, small and careful: to get away from screens as much as we can, get close to the woods, get close to God, get close to real community. All of the small, old things. Build networks of grounded reality that are not entangled in the wires of the technium. Forge independence."

So long as old Christianity is treated as an aesthetic or an alternative lifestyle or a set of values contending against alienated modernity, it will never be anything more than a therapeutic commodity. But if we allow it to reckon with us, we may find ourselves snared in the grasp of “something real.”

We are limited beings distinct from God, but our earthly nature becomes beautified when it participates in the infinite. Christ’s humanity was thought to make it possible for every person to share in the divine life without ceasing to be human.

Marian devotion remains stubbornly enduring.