Creation World: The Kingdom of Miracles

As God's creative Thought proceeds from Him to you, so must your creative thought proceed from you to your creations.

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Only in this way can all creative power extend outward. God's accomplishments are not yours, but yours are like His. He created the Sonship and you increase it. You have the power to add to the Kingdom, though not to add to the Creator of the Kingdom. You claim this power when you become vigilant only for God and His Kingdom.

• Reward, Lost Cat, The Search for Spock;
• Miracles and Creation?
• Chapter 7: THE GIFTS OF THE KINGDOM.

By accepting this power as yours you have learned to remember what you are. You are part of God, as your sons are part of His Sons.

Orthodox Christianity, Culture and Religion, Making the Journey of Faith

To create is to love. Love extends outward simply because it cannot be contained. Being limitless it does not stop. It creates forever, but not in time. God's creations have always been, because He has always been.

• You are here.
• Hudson River Crossings: A Novel.
• Miracles and Creation - Glory to God for All Things?

Your creations have always been, because you can create only as God creates. Eternity is yours, because He created you eternal. It is always willing to strike a bargain, but it cannot understand that to be like another means that no bargains are possible. To gain you must give, not bargain. To bargain is to limit giving, and this is not God's Will. To will with God is to create like Him. God does not limit His gifts in any way. You are His gifts, and so your gifts must be like His.

Your gifts to the Kingdom must be like His gifts to you. What you believe you are determines your gifts, and if God created you by extending Himself as you, you can only extend yourself as He did. Only joy increases forever, since joy and eternity are inseparable. God extends outward beyond limits and beyond time, and you who are co-creator with Him extend His Kingdom forever and beyond limit.

Eternity is the indelible stamp of creation. Therefore you cannot find better expression — except of being silent — for moral kingdom than the nature. Therefore we can never clearly speak about moral kingdom unless we borrow from nature the facts, that is the most expressive pictures of that higher, silent kingdom. Because our language stands in relation to the nature as nature to one higher kingdom.

Nature much more clearly expresses the moral kingdom, than the human language is capable of. That is why the nature is created, i. Thus we borrow the facts from nature because that is why those facts are there for , to help our language to express, beside everything else, the horror of sin. And thus so we ask: Who will take the worm out of the oak? Who will cleanse the tare out of the wheat? Who will pull the sin out of the soul?

Yes, but we must be careful, it seems to me. There is clearly a distinction between humans and animals. As moral beings we have a duty to treat animals humanely. For example, some Christians say that the faith pushes us toward vegetarianism. He cooked and ate fish after the Resurrection.

He did not rail at the animal sacrifice happening at the Temple, but at the money changing. Paul called vegetarianism the weaker approach to food. So certainly we should all abhor animal abuse. But let us not conflate human life and its value with those of animals. I grew up with grandparents down the road on a farm. There are strange spiritualities out there today. People who worry about the carbon-footprint but do not oppose abortion there was a tragic story of such in a recent Orthodox podcast.

There is a proper Orthodox theology of creation that has consequences for how we live. Green is a growing political position with some very strange ideas about creation and humanity. Paul really call vegetarianism the weaker approach to food or was he teaching something else? It seems to me that Wonders question remains unaddressed: Or more generally, where a creature like the spider evolved to perfection through death selection as a creature of venom and death?

I am not aware of St. Paul actually discussing vegetarianism at all. Vegetarianism was not a topic of controversy or discussion particularly in the Churches to which he wrote. I let the comment go in the earlier post because it was not germane to the question asked. There are certainly saints — and Christ Himself — whose encounters with nature yield glimpses of the glory that shall be. I would readily agree that the glory that shall be will not be built on corruption and death. I think it is problematic to suggest that the spider has developed solely through death. I trust that He is at work in what I cannot see or know as yet.

The primary revelation of God at work in creation is and always has been the death and resurrection of Christ. Though it is still but a shadow of what we have been promised. And they speak of these logoi as something that can be mystically perceived. I trust this teaching, but have no experience of it. But those so gifted seem to have about them a witness that I cannot see and a quality of relationship with nature that is not yet mine.

I simply try to live from the commandments and the canons. Even so, it is a rich banquet.

I believe the reference was to Romans There was no other meat to be had. But the issue here of weakness is St. Monastics in Orthodoxy do not eat meat. Only fish or certain festal occasions. Of course their way of life is an asceticism of obedience and not a fastidiousness of conscience. Those who would preach an abstinence from meat for any reason other than fasting are teaching contrary to Scripture and the canons. I do not mean that one cannot be a vegetarian I know plenty of them but such a one cannot claim to be a vegetarian in obedience to the teaching of Christ or the Church.

Yes, I was thinking of Romans Paul is not writing as I see it about food sacrificed to idols, but about those who will only eat vegetables being a weaker approach. This is from the Orthodox Study Bible: For one believes he may eat all things, but he who is weak only eats ONLY [emphasis in the text] vegetables. In Orthodox Christianity, there are things that cannot be compromised, and there are areas of flexibility. God is gracious and allows diversity in doubtful things, matters not related to essential doctrines and moral teachings.

The weak in faith are people who assign primary importance to secondary matters. The two examples of flexible areas here involved food restrictions and the observance of liturgical calendars [later in v. As to monastics, as you pointed out Fr. For ascetic reasons they choose not to eat what they would be legally allowed to eat.

It is self denial for themselves only.

It is not a statement that the Church as a whole is morally required or best off doing likewise. You put my point well, Fr. And as I was reading this post just now, I thought: Once the recovery is complete, many things will change back to normal — although for most of us they will be new and unknown before. Father, I sent you an email on the 21st, did you receive it? In particular, then, a man is free not to the extent that his will is unfettered, but rather to the extent that he resembles Christ, in Whose image he is made.

Thank you very much for this. I asked about something similar on my blog at What is a miracle? Khanya , and someone pointed me to this post, and I think you have expressed it very well. Do you know of any? For one reason, the questions of the fathers are generally asked in a cultural setting far different from our own. An example is in the implications of the prayer for the blessing of waters which I cited.

It is certainly patristic, but somewhat oblique. Yes, I think a large part of the problem is the mindset of modernity, of which Scholasticism was the precursor. It is modernity that is wedded to the dichotomy of secular and sacred, natural and supernatural, and those too were distinctions that were promoted by Scholastic theology in the 13th century.

It seems to me that Orthodoxy draws the line in a different place. It is not between natural and supernatural, but between creator and creature.