Status Updates From The Human Icon: A Comparati...

“Christ is not limited by space and time; his Spirit lives, speaks, and acts in human history everywhere, often through mysterious and humanly unintelligible ways. What human being or organization can limit the Spirit’s involvement?”

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Syrian Orthodox theologian Mar Eprem…[on] Hindu holy men:
Where there is a genuine love of God and unselfish love of one's neighbour, compassion for the poor and the oppressed, wherever one sees sacrificial love at work, and glorification of God, there the 'energies of God' are present.

By reminding us that we are each made in the image of God, and that our vocation is to love and be loved, an Elder may free suffering individuals from the vicious circle of blame and guilt and set them free to love their enemies'- something only possible once they cease to see them as 'enemies'

Elder Amphilochios…said: “I was born to love people. It doesn't concern me if he is a Turk, black, or white. I see in the face of each person the image of God. And for this image of God I am willing to sacrifice everything.”

constant repetition is not required. What is reguired constant aliveness to God - an aliveness present when you talk, read, watch, or examine something.

What is Hesychastic Prayer?
The word hesychia means stillness, rest, quiet, silence.

there tends to be an underlying assumption that to be 'spiritual' is to be somehow 'bodiless’ and 'ethereal'. But the call to a Christian to be holy' is to the whole person…so it follows that to 'spiritualise' the body would not mean to ‘dematerialise' it.… for a Christian to be 'spiritual' means not to reject but to sanctify the physical.

the conflict is not that between body' (söma) and 'soul' (psyche) but between flesh' (sarn) and 'spirit' (pneuma)

hesyehasm offers a thoroughly Christian alternative to yoga that does not compromise any aspect of Christian faith, theology or worship. In Some respects the hesychastic tradition is so close to meditative yoga that one might be tempted to describe it as Christian yoga, were it
not for crucial differences in spiritual goals and in the guidelines tor attaining them.

A body soul is a corpse and a soul without a body is a ghost.' The soul is not just in the body, nor is the body some kind of cage that constricts the soul: rather, the soul is to be seen as the inward and the body as the outward expression of one distinctive individual.

Where Christianity, especialy Orthodox Christianity, differs from Hinduism is that it can take discussion of suffering beyond a virtue-oriented, conventional moralism to that volatile, mysterious,metaphysical dimension where human-divine encounter seems for the believer to fail utterly.

Job's so-called Comforters are altogether too ready to explain to him…his suffering. Their traditional wisdom not only fails to appease Job,…but is implicitly rejected when Yahvweh appears ‘out of the storm' and answers Job. A revelation of the unknowable yet self-revealing God quells all karmic calculations of offence and punishment,leaving only a consciousness of the aching gap between human and divine

Karma is conquered not through human moral effort but by reciprocal love: the love and longing of a devotee are met by an overwhelming love and light from God.

“In the Orthodox Christian vision, one's earthly life is not something to be forgotten or obliterated, but something to be transfigured.”

Much more than just one’s own life right? Much more than “going” to heaven. It is a transfiguration of the whole world. A renewal.

“An Antiochian bishop[Metropolitan Paul Yazigi of Aleppo] whom I once interviewed on this question [that the Orthodox Church alone contains the ‘fullness of truth’] reflected that if one travelled deep down to the core of differing Christian denominations, one would find Orthodoxy there”

Both Hindu bhakti and Orthodox theology, at their best, steer away from the crude notion of a vengeful, condemnatory, external deity who consigns human beings to heaven or hell - a notion that Hindus have all too often learned to associate with Christianity as a whole.

the Scandal of particularity': the apparent injustice that the Saviour's birth In a particular place and time would seem to give opportunities for Salvation not open to all human beings. God has not in fact left himself Without witnesses in every time, place and age; hence the strange consonance of many Hindu approaches to the divine with Christian experience.

Modern Hindu teachers…will assiduously proclaim that there is only One God, though he may be approached through any of his many manifestations.

Christians, if they recover the insights of the Church Fathers, may be able to free Christian discourse from the injurious associations of a colonialist, imperial past.

[cross dialogue between Christian and Hindu can happen well]: provided only that Hindus are prepared to see the value of certain Christian theological concepts, and that Christians are willing to locate, explore and appreciate the work of the Holy Spirit in Hindu traditions.

This is my hope and so far my experience

When we say God is Father, we do not limit Him to the male sex. We can also say God is Mother without limiting him to the female sex. God's Fatherhood includes his Motherhood, Sonship and Daughterhood as God is beyond sex and yet includes masculinity, femininity and essence.