Why I Write
This blog began with a single confession: I was reading the Church Fathers and finding that I had nowhere to put what I was discovering.
Not because the words were obscure - though sometimes they are… but because they were too alive to simply highlight and move on from. St. Maximus on the logoi of creation. St. Isaac on the heart that weeps for all things. St. Gregory Palamas on the light that was always there, waiting to be seen. These were not artifacts. They were - are - addresses. Spoken to me, directly, across fourteen centuries.
I am not a theologian by training. I am not clergy. I am a layperson who found his way to the Orthodox Church through a long detour - through doubt, through philosophy, through the kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to think your way into God rather than pray your way in. The Fathers were the ones who finally made sense of the door I had been standing in front of.
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What I offer here is not scholarship. There are far better scholars than I am, and I point to them freely. What I offer is something more modest and, I hope, more honest: a weekly sitting-with. One text. One Father. Long enough to let it do something to you.
Each meditation appears once a week — unhurried, because these writings were not written to be consumed quickly. They were written by men who prayed for hours before they wrote a sentence. The least I can do is slow down when I read them.
ON THE PRACTICE
"Theology is not a subject to be mastered. It is a fire to be approached carefully, with shoes removed - knowing that the ground on which you stand is holy."
The Fathers I return to most often are the ones whose theology never floats free of prayer — Maximus, Isaac, Symeon, Palamas, John of the Ladder. But this blog casts a wide net. The Eastern tradition is vast, and its voices are not a chorus that all sound alike. Part of the joy of this project is learning to hear the differences.
If you are Orthodox, I hope these meditations offer a point of re-entry into texts you may already know. If you are not Orthodox — if you are curious, searching, or simply drawn to depth — you are equally welcome. The Fathers wrote for the world, not merely for a communion.
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