Choosing Life

Dcn. Paul Siewers

Source: Ecosemiotics.com

August 23, 2020

    

Our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ said, “I have come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). Indeed, our Lord said He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Holy Prophet Moses, to whom Christ had revealed the Ten Commandments and His name “He Who is” and much else, had written much earlier, as recorded in Deuteronomy 30:15-16: “Behold, I have set before thee this day life and death, good and evil. If thou wilt hearken to the commands of the Lord thy God, which I command thee this day, to love the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to keep his ordinances, and his judgments; then ye shall live, and shall be many in number, and the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all the land into which thou goest to inherit it.”

Today our country struggles with global plague, civil unrest, paralyzing social division, economic depression, forest fires, tropical storms–and now even the threat of a reported meteorite hit to earth this fall around the time of the presidential election!

But Christians receive the grace of finding identity in Him, the source of our personhood, not in an essentialized or objectified identity based on race, ethnicity, class, culture, or sex, essentializing our self-willed fallen human passions and will to power. For millennia this good news has been the source of true freedom, which as the Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher S.L. Frank notes, is voluntary service to universal truth, in the Person of Jesus Christ: Loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and our neighbor as ourself.

... Read the rest at Ecosemiotics.com.

Dcn. Paul Siewers

9/2/2020

See also
Grounded in the Beginning: Father Seraphim Rose and the Patristic View of Creation Grounded in the Beginning: Father Seraphim Rose and the Patristic View of Creation
A.K. Paul Siewers Grounded in the Beginning: Father Seraphim Rose and the Patristic View of Creation Grounded in the Beginning: Father Seraphim Rose and the Patristic View of Creation
A.K. Paul Siewers
The patristic teaching on Creation does not fit comfortably with today’s efforts in liberal religious circles to synthesize secular accounts of evolution and “non-intelligent design” with “theistic evolution,” let alone a Deistic view. Natural Death and the Work of Perfection Natural Death and the Work of Perfection
Fr. Alexey Young Natural Death and the Work of Perfection Natural Death and the Work of Perfection
Fr. Alexey Young
Physician-assisted suicide, aside from being a violation of both Christian law and Christian simplicity, should be absolutely avoided in order not to deprive the terminally ill of the full human and spiritual experience of dying, an experience which, within the context of a traditional Christian way of thinking, living, and acting is far from intolerable or negative; rather, it is exceedingly enriching and valuable, offering another way of knowledge—that of experience informed by theology—a way of knowing of which modern man, in his race to avoid all that is uncomfortable or unpleasant, has almost no understanding. “Father, bless me to hang myself!” “Father, bless me to hang myself!”
Victor Kasyanenko “Father, bless me to hang myself!” “Father, bless me to hang myself!”
Victor Kasyanenko
A man came to him and said, “Father, life is hard. Bless me to hang myself.” Fr. Anatoly listened to him, heard him out, and explained to him that taking one’s own life by suicide is a terrible sin, and that human life is a priceless gift of God. But the man would not hear it, and continued trying to bend the priest’s will to give a blessing for suicide.
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