I once heard a fascinating interview on NPR with writer Marie Mutsuki Mockett about her journey to Japan to grieve the death of her father. While there she met a Buddhist priest and had a conversation with him about her frustrations with meditation. She describes it like this: I told him about my meditation training. And I told him how irritated I was to have to sit there for three hours...because I had thought that if I wanted to understand anything about Buddhism…I was

It is, I believe, most fitting that the Church, in preparing us for Great Lent, follows the Sunday of the Prodigal Son immediately with the Sunday of the Last Judgment. Fitting because, like a diptych, it causes us to see the two parables together, in relation to one another, a seeing that should, perhaps, create within us a certain tension. We don’t like tension that much. And in the American (meaning primarily Protestant) context, theologically speaking, I think it is fair

From the life of St. Arsenius of Paros (commemorated Jan 31) A certain girl from Syros came to the Convent of the Transfiguration to visit her sister, who was a nun. The nun had previously been informed that her sister had fallen into a serious sin. When she learned that the girl was outside the doors of the convent, the nun screamed at her, “Go far away from here. Since you are defiled, you will defile the convent and the nuns.” Instead of feeling pity for her sister, and tr