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Following a bit of the Protestant polemics against Orthodoxy recently, and I realize just how difficult it is to communicate the mind of the Church across these lines. A simple example is seeing people confused about whether someone who is not baptised and participating in Orthodox communion can be "saved". Protestant are noticing that there are different answers in their estimation, and so are confused about them. The confusion comes from the belief that being "saved" or not is about "where you go after you die", when for the Orthodox "saved" means being made whole, being healed, being restored to the original purpose God had for us. For this reason, when Protestants see declarations of how communion in the body of Christ is the only way to salvation, they immediately think this is a declaration that all the non-Orthodox are going to hell after they die. When Protestants then hear the very same person who just told them that salvation is in full participation to the body of Christ go on to intimate we have nothing to say about the eschatological finality of any specific soul, it is like a short circuit that many Protestants cannot compute. This is what I could see when @OrthodoxEthos and @Acts17David were discussing and it is what I have seen in @gavinortlund's videos. In a similar vein, when a Protestant says he has the "assurance of his own personal salvation", this is confusing to the Orthodox. Orthodox also obviously have assurance of salvation, that assurance is Christ. He shows us what it means to be made whole and makes us participate in that wholeness. But how can I say that I am "saved" if I see that I am still a wretch, still prideful and arrogant and sinful? So the Orthodox, knowing they are are still sinning, though also knowing Christ has made them grow in the virtues will say something like: "I know that I am being saved." That is I can see that I am being healed, being made whole, being reformed to the resemblence of God. But again, this completely confuses the Protestant who just wants to know what will happen when you die. What side of the fence will you end up on? I am not sure how to get accross these lines, and I feel that unless we can, we will perpetually be talking past each other.

This is unironically how it works You have much more power over yourself than you realize if you but exercise it.

Why does Mary look younger than Jesus in Michelangelo's Pietà? The answer is one of the most beautiful in art history... Mary is holding the body of her 33 year old son, but she looks 20. Critics noticed it the moment the sculpture was unveiled in 1499. The mother of a man who has just been crucified would have been in her late forties or early fifties. Michelangelo had carved her as a girl. His own biographer, Ascanio Condivi, was the one who finally asked him why. The answer Michelangelo gave is preserved in Condivi's Life of Michelangelo and has been repeated for centuries: "Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?" Most modern critics treat this answer as a half-serious deflection. Michelangelo was famous for his sharp tongue and refused to explain himself to people he considered beneath his intellect. The deeper answer is older, and it lies inside one of the greatest poems ever written. In the final canto of Dante's Paradiso, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux begins his prayer to the Virgin with one of the most extraordinary lines in Italian literature: "Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio." "Virgin mother, daughter of your own son." Michelangelo, who knew Dante by heart, was carving that line into stone. Mary is younger than Jesus because Jesus is older than the universe... because she gave birth to her own creator. But there is another reading, simpler than either of those, and it is the one I find myself thinking of today. Every mother who has held her child has held them at every age at once. The infant is still inside the toddler. The toddler is still inside the teenager. The young man on her lap, even dead, is also the boy she nursed and the baby she first carried home. And maybe that's why Michelangelo did not carve Mary as the years had aged her. He carved her as love had kept her: outside of time, outside of grief, holding her son the way she had always held him... Happy Mother's Day. -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: James-lucas.com/welcome I write about beauty in all its forms. If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

I don't remember where I found this, but its spot on.

Jesus Gotchu

Real

Often times desolation devastates the soul because it feels like God has completely abandoned it. But the truth is, it only feels that way because the body is being brutalized. Often pain is lived in the body last. It pays a real cost. People dont recognize the pain as God being close, because the mind wants to associate Him with soothing consolation only. But I’ve come to see the pain as evidence that Christ is near. So near that He is sharing His flesh with your flesh. The sorrow you feel is His sorrow being offered, the bodily pain you feel is His agony. The reason He can be conceptually seen as closer than ever is because in the midst of great suffering, you can almost feel that He is giving you the chance to see what He bore for you in love. Love pressed so close it entered the heart, nerves, breath, muscles, and bones. Every ounce of the body paid the cost. That is not God abandoning you, it is Him letting you experience Him without buffering the encounter. Pain is not the opposite of consolation, it often is consolation stripped of anesthesia. When I say that He is sharing His flesh with your flesh, I’m saying that not as a metaphor but as a true encounter with Christ Himself. That doesn’t make it less brutal. It often makes it more brutal. But with that framing, for what it’s worth, it makes it meaningful. 🙏🏻

Thoughts aloud: 1. What you know - keep silent. 2. What you hear - keep silent. 3. Don't interfere in others' conversations. 4. Answer questions, but don't say much. 5. What you want to do - think it over with prayer, and don't tell others before you've done it. 6. Don't point out people's shortcomings. 7. If your pride is hurt or you're reprimanded - stay silent. 8. If they're unfair to you - say it quietly and calmly. 9. Don't speak harshly or get upset yourself. 10. Look at everything as "God wills it! It's all His Holy Will!" Always remember God, the Mother of God, and pray. Saint Philaret (Drozdov)