Blessed feast of the mighty St. Nicholas!

https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/asd/2016/12/06/st-nicholas-battle-idolatry/

Giving Tuesday is tomorrow. As if you haven't been reminded 100 times already!

I know you're being asked for money a lot right now. I also know that there is a very good chance you have benefited from the work I do and that which is done by my colleagues at Ancient Faith Ministries. AFM exists and thrives because of you.

We're now almost to $50k for our Giving Tuesday campaign, and we are trying to reach a $75k match. That means every bit you give is doubled.

You know the deal. Here's the link: https://afm.kindful.com/?campaign=1336738

Thanks!

“Our religion is perfectly and profoundly conceived. What is simple is also what is most precious. Accordingly, in your spiritual life engage in your daily contest simply, easily and without force. The soul is sanctified and purified through the study of the words of the Fathers, through the memorization of the psalms and of portions of Scripture, through the singing of hymns and through the repetition of the Jesus Prayer.

Devote your efforts, therefore, to these spiritual things and ignore all the other things. We can attain to the worship of God easily and bloodlessly. There are two paths that lead to God: the hard and debilitating path with fierce assaults against evil and the easy path with love. There are many who chose the hard path and ‘shed blood in order to receive Spirit’ until they attained great virtue. I find the shorter and safer route is the path with love. This is the path that you, too, should follow.

That is, you can make a different kind of effort: to study and pray and have as your aim to advance in the love of God and of the Church. Do not fight to expel the darkness from the chamber of your soul. Open a tiny aperture for light to enter, and the darkness will disappear. The same holds for our passions and our weaknesses. Do not fight them, but transform them into strengths by showing disdain for evil. Occupy yourself with hymns of praise, with poetic canons, with the worship of God and with divine eros. All the holy books of our Church—the Book of the Eight Modes, the Book of the Hours, the Psalter, the books with the Office for the Feasts and Saint-day Commemorations—contain holy, loving words addressed to Christ. Read them with joy and love and exaltation.”

- St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia, "Wounded by Love," pp. 135-6

More and more, I think the best advice for how to be a Christian navigating this nutty world is this:

Just be normal.

Freighting in some agenda along with one's Christianity -- even an agenda that sounds high and noble -- inevitably distorts Christianity and obscures Christ at least for oneself and probably for others, too.

A long contemplation of what humility and love really mean is deeply needed in this time and place.

Is injustice going to be done to me if I try to follow that path? Almost certainly. But in this world we will have trouble. Christ said that. A lot of our problems stem from trying to make His words not true for ourselves. Surely I ought to be exempted from trouble.

And many problems also come from trying to be of good cheer because we will overcome the world, not because Christ has overcome the world, as He said He did.

We do have something to overcome, though, and that is ourselves. That's the path to humility and love, and that's the path to the Kingdom of God.

And the first step on that path is just to be normal -- do your duties to the people in your life, give up your preferences a little more today than yesterday, set aside your resources for those who need them, and participate in the life of the Church.

I've just returned from 2 weeks back in Lithuania - with a quite notable evening in Latvia - and I'm now in the phase my wife calls "PPD," "Post Pilgrimage Depression." It's a sense of sadness and loss that comes after the wonders of pilgrimage fade in the face of the return to everyday life.

This is normal.

With every pilgrimage the story of life changes, and the challenge is to make the narrative of the pilgrimage constituent to everyday life.

Only a few ascetics live in permanent pilgrimage. For the rest of us, the task becomes integration, to turn our experiences on pilgrimage not into a "vacation" but rather into rites of passage and formational initiation to inform and shape the next chapters of life.

Many places one might visit on pilgrimage sell souvenirs. This word is from the simple French word meaning "to remember," and the goal of course should not be to accumulate tchotchkes but rather to form memories that are not only returned to with fondness but are for the enrichment of life.

God willing, every pilgrimage not only brings us a little closer to and deeper into the Kingdom, but also forms us a little more into its citizens.

(Photo: Next to a statue of the legendary Iron Wolf, an iconic image of Lithuania and of Vilnius in particular. Hear the story in Ep. 1 of "The Wolf and the Cross," my pilgrimage documentary about Lithuania: https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/wolfandcross/01_the_wolf_lithuania_before_the_cross/)

I just learned that Fr. James Bernstein passed away this morning.

He is known to many as the author of "Surprised by Christ," the memoir of his conversion story from Orthodox Judaism ultimately to Orthodox Christianity.

May his memory be eternal!