#monastic

[medievalreligiousfanatic]

[bebemoon]

look for the name SAINT (requested by anonymous) | ann demeulemeester loose white dress (s/s 1997), { hair } audrey marnay @ tse a/w 1999, zoran light brown soft leather sandals, alkemia "gothique" perfume ("a byzantine monastic incense recipe of somalian frankincense, styrax benzoin, arabian myrrh, cassia, spikenard, canella, liquidambar orientalis, labdanum, atlas cedar, and vetiver."), lamagdala (on etsy) "our lady of kevelaer crowned by angels" genuine gray druzy agate choker necklace (featuring german inscription: "O Mary Conceaved Without Sin Pray For Us Who Have Recourse To Thee.") (medal c. 18oo's)

[preciosu]

Local monastery at dusk vibes

[kesara]

Glendalough [IMG_2972] by Kesara Rathnayake Via Flickr: Gleann Dá Loch, Contae Chill Mhantáin, Éire. Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland

[dramoor]

“Silence is precious; by keeping silence and knowing how to listen to God, the soul grows in wisdom and God teaches it what it cannot learn from men.”

~ Blessed Anne of St. Bartholomew, O.C.D. (1550-1626)

(Image via facebook)

[orthodoxydaily]

NEWS: Arrest of Metropolitan Arseny, Abbot of the Holy Dormition of the Svyatogorsk Lavra, Ukraine

On April 24, 2024, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) conducted a search in the Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, detained the abbot of the Lavra, Metropolitan Arseniy, and informed him that he is suspected of disseminating information about the movement or location of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which is punishable by up to 8 years in prison. The accusation is based on the fact that in September 2023, during a sermon in the church, Vladyka allegedly told the faithful about the locations of checkpoints of the Armed Forces of Ukraine near the Lavra and thus disseminated information of a military nature.(1)

After that, Vladyka Arseny was taken by the SBU to the city of Slavyansk, and then to the city of Dnipro.

That very night, the night of April 24-25, 2024, the Oktyabrsky District Court in the city of Dnipro fully upheld the prosecutor's petition and chose a measure of restraint for Metropolitan Arseny in the form of detention for a period of 60 days. The court ignored the defense's petition for house arrest and the possibility of applying bail. At about three o'clock in the morning, Vladyka was sent  immediately from the courtroom to the Dnipro pre-trial detention center.

Metropolitan Arseny suffers from serious illnesses and therefore requires constant medical supervision and treatment, which cannot be provided in the conditions of the pre-trial detention center. The arrest of Vladyka is a blatant violation of human rights and is aimed at forcibly removing Metropolitan Arseny from fulfilling the obedience of the abbot of the Svyatogorsk Lavra, which is one of the main spiritual centers of Ukraine, and isolating him.

The brethren of the Svyatogorsk Lavra prayerfully support Metropolitan Arseny, await his speedy release from arrest, and consider the accusations against Vladyka artificial and far-fetched. Despite the large-scale destruction of the monastery, with the support of Vladyka Arseny, divine services are held in the Lavra to this day, and the brethren of the monastery continue to carry out their monastic podvig every day. Also, a large number of people who lost their own homes as a result of hostilities live in the Lavra.

Metropolitan Arseny is, as it were, the heart of the Lavra, without him it is impossible to imagine the Svyatogorsk monastery. For all of us living in the Lavra, Vladyka Arseny is an indispensable spiritual mentor, administrator, and man of prayer. Therefore, the isolation of Vladyka is a heavy blow for all of us.

We thank all of you, dear brothers and sisters, for your prayers and words of support for the Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

(1) WHAT MOTIVATED THE ARREST OF THE MOST REVEREND METROPOLITAN ARSENY?

The checkpoint Vladyka mentioned in that sermon was explicitly set up in the neighboring village to block pilgrims from coming to the celebration of the Synaxis of the Saints of the Svyatogorsk Lavra last fall.  It functioned for only one or two days  - for that particular purpose. Vladyka lamented that people were being prevented from coming to worship at the Lavra and from bringing the monks and refugees badly-needed humanitarian aid. Busloads of people from far away, including families with children, were held up and turned away.

[blackcrowing]

Book Review of 'Polytheistic Monasticism: Voices from Pagan Cloisters'

I wasn't entirely sure what I was expecting when I picked up this book but... generally I was expecting... more.

I don't feel like I learned much from reading this book, aside from prehaps that (unsurprisingly) those being called to deeper devotional practices in the Pagan/Polytheistic world are mostly being offered options based firmly in Western traditions. While I was sure that inspiration for such a movement would draw from monastic Christian traditions I had hoped to see it also drawing from antiquities temple traditions and, more modern, Eastern traditions where temples for worship are often maintained by monks/nuns and in this way monistaries and temples are one in the same.

Aside from getting a feel for the current climate and areas of inspiration that seem to be present inside this community... I don't feel like I learned... much of anything... most of the essays felt... a bit like advertisements to me... and most didn't feel particularly helpful to one interested in the path or particularly insightful in anyway.

To be honest this felt like a book that was created mearly to mark the phenomenon and offer a screenshot of it for the purposes of third-party study as opposed to a tool for someone genuinely seeking information about what this kind of calling might look like in their own lives.

[lettersoftherainbow]

Geghard Monastery, Unesco World Heritage Site in central Armenia

[dndcharactersinfo]

Monastic Traditions by Laser Llama

[errantabbot]

On Renunciation, Ruses, and Reality

More often than not renunciation is but a ruse, a smokescreen erected by those who have no choice left in their psyche but to hide in plain sight from the transparency demanded of intimacy. The spirituality of intimacy, which is plainly open to all things (and they to it) is one that requires no small amount of courage.

Renunciation is in essence a commitment to casting away the world as if one were somehow distinct from it. An attractive ideal to the ego who still believes, which is to say, who lusts after the notion that reality could be somehow other than it is. It’s an escapist urge that serves to distract the seeker from the sought which is somehow too difficult to face.

True cultivation avoids nothing, it grows and matures where it is, weathering the unfurling moment with open eyes. This isn’t to turn from virtue to vice, nor to obscure reality by covering oneself in things- commitments, debts, and stuff of all sorts. It is, however, to truly don one’s life already in progress, finding it as the truest habit, and the vest most ready suited for surrendering to the realities of being, liberated and unbounded as they’ve always been.

It is high time not only to move from worship to wonder, but also from turning away to leaning in, letting the self dissolve into its true form rather than trying to extricate it from that same state. Who is it, after all, that could be rendered distinct from themselves, and where is it that they could be delivered unto but the eternal fabric of reality, already everywhere present?

~Sunyananda

[medievalreligiousfanatic]

[brendanelliswilliams]

My Extemporaneous Homily for Trinity Sunday

[This extemporaneous homily given today on the Feast of the Holy Trinity at The Chapel of St. George is transcribed from an audio recording. I added a few clarifying words to the transcription, but I’ve otherwise preserved the spontaneity of the form in which it arose and was originally shared. Subsequent to the Mass this morning, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the work of the éskhaton (the ‘last things’, the ‘completion’) and its relationship to related notions in other traditions. I will likely do some reflective writing on that to share with all of you soon. But, in the meantime, here’s my little ‘Word of Life’ from this morning’s Mass. May it bless.]

The concept that is really in my heart and mind this year as I reflect on the Feast of the Holy Trinity is ‘participation’. And I’m thinking of this in terms of a particular technical theological framework, which has real application for us, I think. It’s known as ‘participatory eschatology’. ‘Participatory eschatology’ simply means that the way the final or last things, the completion of things, comes about is through our direct participation in the divine work. That’s all it means. Rather than us sitting around waiting for something to come from the sky and magically change everything, we participate in that transformative power of the divine will, as it goes out into the whole of Creation, and, according to an ancient mode of Christian theology I very much embrace, eventually brings all life back into union with itself. That notion is called apokatástasis: the ultimate ‘wholling’ or re-union of all Creation. 

We’re all invited to participate in that movement, in that divine unfoldment. And I think if the doctrine of the Trinity is worth anything, it’s that. It’s a reminder that we’re being invited to participate, not merely to have ideational constructs that sound fancy or that we’ve inherited and assumed as ‘beliefs’ without really understanding what they point to. If we get stuck there, we’re in trouble. And we’ve been stuck there a lot throughout the history of the Church, particularly in the West. We’ve been stuck a lot in ideas and beliefs. And that’s not a good place to be.

I’d like to read you something from the early Church. It’s a wondrous thing to look back at some of this theology—particularly the monastic witnesses from the early Church—and realize that a more expansive, breath-embracing understanding of Christian tradition was present in the beginning. It’s not a trend that we came up with because we wanted to conform the Church to our own modern ideas—it’s not that at all, actually. This expansive, mystical understanding of theology is really present in the early Church. This is from St. Macarius the Great. He says:

‘The soul that is found worthy to participate in the Holy Spirit and be illuminated by Her radiance, and by the ineffable glory of Her beauty, becomes Her throne and Her dwelling place. Such a soul becomes all light, all face, all eye. The soul becomes entirely covered with the spiritual eyes of light; nothing in it is left in shadow.’

Elsewhere St. Macarius also says that ‘God reveals God’s own nature to the soul and is discovered by the soul in direct knowledge (gnōsis), in wisdom, love, and faith….[with] the overseeing guidance of the spiritual intelligence’, so that the soul’s divine participation might blossom. ‘In short,’ he continues, ‘God made the soul like this so that it could be His own bride, that it might have communion with the Divine, to be merged in union with God, and so become as one spirit with God.’

That’s the journey, my friends—nothing less than that. To become merged in totalizing re-union with the Divine Ground: that’s our task. Not just to help a few things in the world here and there—that’s great too, but it’s really this divine re-union or ‘divinization’ (theosis) that we’re called to. In that, we participate directly in the life of the Trinity, in its spiritual economy: we are not looking at it as an object somehow removed from us, outside our direct experience, but we each become a Son or Daughter: we become another ‘Anointed One’, the Divine Child in Trinitarian reckoning, which lives and moves in unceasing communion with the Source, through the power and energy of the Holy Spirit. That’s what it means to be sanctified, to become a Saint.

And I want to say that we don’t have any more time to waste on anything short of this. I think you all have a sense—whether it’s consciously, not fully consciously yet, or whatever stage of processing you happen to be in—that the world is unraveling: the external world that we find ourselves in is unraveling. And we’re rushing head-long into these unprecedented modes and degrees of novelty, of bizarreness, of deconstruction and collapse: in our institutions, in the way we sustain ourselves on and with the Land, and all these other things. 

So, we don’t have time anymore to be stuck in beliefs and strange ideas we don’t fully grasp the application of. That was a luxury of the past. And now it’s incumbent upon us to do what St. Macarius is pointing to: to engage this process of real interior transformation, so that the whole Creation may be helped in its transformation, to come back into union with its Source. 

For these words, and all that has been offered here this morning, Amen.

Fr. B.+

[bowelfly]

Brother Ignatz trying to get out of dish duty by pretending to be a stand of reeds. again.

[kesara]

Ruins of Glendalough [IMG_3238] by Kesara Rathnayake Via Flickr: Gleann Dá Loch, Contae Chill Mhantáin, Éire. Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland

[dramoor]

"Gather your nous and force it to enter into the heart and remain there.  When your nous is established in the heart, it should not remain empty, but allow it to continually perform this prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.  Never allow it to be silent.  Because of this, the entire chain of virtues will enter into you: love, joy, peace, and all others, because of which your every petition to God will be fulfilled later."

~St. Nikephoros the Hesychast

[dramoor]

"Let us then trust ourselves entirely to God and His Providence and leave Him complete power to order our lives, turning to Him lovingly in every need and awaiting His help without anxiety. Leave everything to Him and He will provide us with everything, at the time and in the place and in the manner best suited."

~Fr. Jean Baptiste Saint-Jure, S.J.