Our children

How do we train up our children to love the pursuit of holiness? For one, to love holy things, they need to know what these are.  To love holy things means to love those things that will purify our souls and draw us to God.  Meaning also they need to learn to not love unholy things.  This is tough to do in modern America, with the constant barrage of godless media and instant gratification.
What is best way to teach them to love the pursuit is holiness? It's definitely not by lecturing them. They need to see us loving this, first and foremost. The details of how to pursue this needs to be put before them. Fortunately, the church has the tools to do so, and the church is eager to move us this way.
Of course, one of the most difficult aspects of all this is their maturity level.  The pursuit of holiness is very hard work and a serious matter of self denial and an attention to things not material.  Children are immature and "play" focused.  This is a big obstacle to overcome.
Probably the best place to start in all of this is to pray for them.  St Seraphim of Sarov has a great love for children. We should ask for his intercession.

Unseen

Kind of like seeing your own eyeball, seeing and critiquing one's own worldview is rather difficult.  One of the best tools for accomplishing this difficult task is the spiritual father.  The church has established for us this wonderful blessing.  We need to take the responsibility of using the tool.
The spiritual father is one who has spent many years and effort in cleansing his soul from sin and learning to listen to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  This is so incredibly foreign to our modern American thinking that it almost sounds ridiculous.
The spiritual father is one who can see our hearts and our weaknesses and guide us toward holiness.  He can see things that we cannot see.  He is familiar with the lies that we tell ourselves and that the demons tell us.  He knows how to avoid certain sins, how to work past certain sins and how to repent.
The hard part is finding one, for as Paul tells us in 1 Cor 4, there are not many fathers.
The place to start is your local Eastern Orthodox church.

Refusal

It's been awhile since I have academically interacted with atheists, so this recent activity has been interesting. One thing that atheists repeatedly miss and misunderstand is that of categories.  Whenever the subject of God comes up, the atheist always demands some sort of proof, something empirically verifiable.  But as I point out, over and over again, they are confusing categories.  You don't ask what blue sounds like, you don't ask about the texture of yellow, you don't mine diamonds with qtips.  In the same way, you don't understand the things of God by scientific study.
And a recent revelation has moved me to the point of not even engaging atheists any longer.  One atheist actually said, you Christians can offer no proof.  Even if you managed to show something, we wouldn't believe because it might be a hallucination.
In other words, atheists refuse to believe.

Hell as algebra

It is both sad and maddening.  If you listen to atheists and even many Christians, God is a homicidal tyrant, ever waiting to damn us to hell, if we don't behave exactly right.
I have been interacting with some atheists as of late and have been trying to clarify the Orthodox position.  And I came up with an analogy.
Imagine you are in high school algebra class.  You are one of those students who sleeps through most classes, never studies and rarely does homework.  Your teacher warns you over and over but you don't listen.  The semester comes to an end, you miserably fall the final exam and you receive a failing grade. Whose fault is it?
So too our earthly life.  We have been born into life, free of charge and we receive instruction, daily. If we choose to pay attention, do what is required to learn and God examines us and finds that we have worked out our salvation, we can come into the glorious presence of God.  If we fail, it's not God's fault.  If we have not prepared our souls for eternity, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Jesus did his work of freeing us from the power of sin and death, we need to work out our salvation and sanctify our lives, purifying our souls.

An experiment in music

As some of you may know, I am a huge lover of music.  My appreciation of music covers a very wide range of styles, with the exception of county and marching band.  Other than that, I can see the skill, or lack thereof, in many didn't genres.
As of late, something has popped into mind.  I have noticed that my appreciation of Orthodox church music is in a completely different category than my appreciation of any other music style.  Initially, my thought was simply that, because church music is music for church, ones like or dislike would need based on one's view of church. In other words, I appreciate Orthodox church music simply because I am Orthodox.
But I think there is more to it than that.  I am starting to think that 99% of music is made from a very worldly, temporal perspective.  It seems that music is created out of one's passions.  This would explain why the "best" music (or even just art in general) is made by people who have done sort of issues, whether due to really bad childhoods or did sin/perversions in their life.
If this assessment is correct, then the conclusion we must draw is something painful.  If all music, with the exception of actual religious music (and I'm not talking about contemporary Protestant music, that's just bad all together), is based upon and created out of the passions, then listening to it would only move us into passion instead of into things godly and eternal.
I don't think I like where this is going...
Any thoughts?

Atheists

At a foundational level, the atheist denies the existence of deity based on the idea that because proof cannot be given for the existence of deity, they cannot exist.  But they are confusing categories.  They want a tangible, physical, logical proof for something that is not in those categories.  To use an illustration, they want to know the color of sound.  As a side note, it seems that many of them don't want answers, they just want to argue.

Part two

As i began in my last post, I'll try up finish here.  Having our priorities in proper place can only happen when we understand what is actually important.  We all have very many little things that are important for the moment.  This happens because of so many decisions we must make.  If we are not monks, then we live in the world and thus have wants, needs and responsibilities.
But not being monastic does not mean that we cannot be godly.  We all must strive after a path of godliness, regardless of how full our plate is.  The challenge is in discerning the plates contents.
Especially living in America, it is far too easy to get distracted with all that takes place, far too much of it is mere frivolity.  Not being a monk doesn't mean we can waste our time on foolishness.
In short, assess where you are, don't get distracted by frivolity and give up what keeps you from the pursuit of holiness.  Temporal life is very short.  Out eternal life will be determined by this short time here. What are you doing to form your soul into one that is pleasing to God?

The money trail

If I told you that if walked down a certain road, you would be able to find $20 bills for every ten feet you walked, I can guarantee you would be there immediately and would walk a long ways, probably to the point of exhaustion.
I'm sure you can guess where I am going with this. The illustration is a metaphor of the Christian life. And like it or not, it's a very small picture.  That which we will gain by walking the path of sanctification of far, far greater than a handful of cash. Personally, I think the metaphor is somewhat childish, but still true.  My point in bringing it up is that the truthfulness of the metaphor exposes just how little we actually believe it to be true.  If we truly believed it, our lives would look different.  We would not be drawn away by every shiny bauble the world throws at us.  We wouldn't be wasting so much of our time on such foolishness and distraction.
The fact that we waste so much time shows us where our heart is at.

Football, again

Despite appearances, I honestly have absolutely no interest in American football, or any football for that matter.  But another illustration came to mind, in this regard.
Every since the NFL began, no one could simply throw together a couple of dozen guys in football uniforms and call themselves an NFL team. And even more so, imagine if there was a team in that league and they decided that they should be in charge and be allowed to make the rules.  Upon being ousted from the league, then began calling themselves alone the NFL.  No one would believe them and they would be ignored.
Why is the church any different?
From the apostolic time forward, those who followed and submitted to the apostolic teaching and authority were part of the church.  Then 1000 years later (AD 1054 actually), the Roman Church decided to claim to be the sole authority over the Christian church.  Upon being rejected as such, they tried to excommunicate the other patriarchates but then were themselves excommunicated.
This has been the situation every since.  Yet somehow, they now claim to be "the" church.  Of course, the Lutherans followed suit and then the multitude of Protestant sects followed after them.  Now we have multiple thousands of separate groups not in communion with one another and not in communion with the historic church.  Why does this not seem to bother anyone?
I think a good place to start is to recognize the wretched influence of individualism from America, upon everyone's thinking. As well as the influence of politically-correct thinking as well.  We need to start thinking more like Christ and less like the world, political correctness be damned.