The Antiochian Archdiocesan website has a Glossary of Orthodox Terminology.
The AA site is also offering daily meditations. Scroll down, left center column.
Those interested in parenting issues — especially the campaign of Planned Parenthood to sexualize our children — should check out the Dawn Patrol.
Looking for Orthodox prayers? Go here.
Those who would like to make a donation for the assistance of the victims of the terrorist attack at the school in Beslan should send their contributions to:
St. John Russian Orthodox Church
4001 17th St. NW
Washington, DC 20011
(In the memo section of the check, please note, “Beslan.”)
September 4, 2004 — THE mass murder of children
revolts the human psyche. Herod sending his henchmen
to massacre the infants of Bethlehem haunts the
Gospels. Nothing in our time was crueler than what
the Germans did to children during the Holocaust.
Slaughtering the innocents violates a universal
human taboo. Or a nearly universal one. Those
Muslims who preach Jihad against the West decided
years ago that killing Jewish or Christian children
is not only acceptable, but pleasing to their god
when done by “martyrs.”
It isn’t politically correct to say this, of course.
We’re supposed to pretend that Islam is a “religion
of peace.” All right, then: It’s time for Muslims to
stand up for the once-noble, nearly lost traditions
of their faith and condemn what Arab and Chechen
terrorists and blasphemers did in the Russian town
of Beslan.
If Muslim religious leaders around the world will
not publicly condemn the taking of children as
hostages and their subsequent slaughter — if those
“men of faith” will not issue a condemnation without
reservations or caveats — then no one need pretend
any longer that all religions are equally sound and
moral.
Islam has been a great and humane faith in the past.
Now far too many of its adherents condone, actively
or passively, the mass murder of school kids.
Instead of condemnations of the Muslim “Jihadis”
responsible for butchering more than 200 women and
children in cold blood, we will hear spiteful
counter-accusations about imaginary atrocities
supposedly committed by Western militaries.
Well, the cold fact is that Western soldiers,
whether Americans, Brits, Russians or Israelis, do
not take hundreds of children hostage, then shoot
them in cold blood while detonating bombs in their
midst. The Muslim world can lie to itself, but we
need lie no longer.
The tragedy in southern Russia occurred thousands of
miles from the United States, but, in essence, that
massacre happened next door. The parents, teachers
and students kept for days without water or food in
a sweltering school building before being butchered
were our children, our sisters, our wives, our
parents.
The mass hostage situation wasn’t about Chechen
rebels (and at least 10 Arabs) opposing the Russian
government. It was a continuation of the universal
struggle between good and evil. And there is no
doubt which side is evil, scorned though the word
may be by our own elite.
How can any human being with a shred of conscience
dismiss what occurred in that school as anything
less than evil?
The attack in Beslan wasn’t about Russia’s brutal
incompetence in Chechnya — as counter-productive as
Moscow’s grim heavy-handedness may have been. It was
about religious bigotry so profound that the
believer can hold a gun to a child’s head, pull the
trigger and term the act “divine justice.”
We will hear complaints that the Russian special
forces should have waited — even after the
terrorists began shooting children. Negotiations are
the heroin of Westerners addicted to self-delusion.
Who among us would have waited when he or she saw
fleeing children cut down by automatic weapons? The
urge to protect children is as primal as any impulse
we ever feel.
Make no mistake: No blame attaches to the Russians
for the massacre at that school. The guilt is
entirely upon the Islamic extremists who have led
the religion they claim to cherish into the realms
of nightmare.
There will be repercussions. Having suffered the
hijacking and destruction of two passenger jets, a
deadly bombing at a Moscow subway station and a
massacre in a primary school all in less than two
weeks, the Kremlin will have learned to rue the day
it imagined that there was anything to gain by
opposing American efforts against terrorists,
whether Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein.
As they inevitably do, the terrorists reminded the
world of their heartless barbarism. Even if France
manages to beg the release of its kidnapped
journalists in Iraq, it has begun to sense its
vulnerability. And all Europeans with a vestige of
sense will recognize that the school seizure in
Russia could easily repeat itself in Languedoc or
Umbria, Bavaria or Kent.
An attack on children is an attack on all of
humanity.
No matter what differences Western states discover
to divide them, the terrorists will bring us
together in the end. Their atrocities expose all
wishful thinking for what it is.
A final thought: Did any of those protesters who
came to Manhattan to denounce our liberation of 50
million Muslims stay an extra day to protest the
massacre in Russia? Of course not.
The protesters no more care for dead Russian
children than they care for dead Kurds or for the
hundreds of thousands of Arabs that Saddam Hussein
executed. Or for the ongoing Arab-Muslim slaughter
of blacks in Sudan. Nothing’s a crime to those
protesters unless the deed was committed by America.
The butchery in Russia was a crime against humanity.
In every respect. Was any war ever more necessary or
just than the War on Terror?
And what will terror’s apologists say when the
killers come for their own children?
From a NY Times Article
BY RALPH PETERS
Ralph Peters is the author of “Beyond Terror:
Strategy in a Changing World.”
Do you, dear reader, know of anyone working through Julia Cameron’s stuff – The Artist’s Way or Vein of Gold? I would like to meet some Orthodox folks who are doing it or have done it. Reply to my email: orthodixie at aol dot com
During my summer vacation, I reread, for the first time since college (25 years ago), Marcus Aurelius’s MEDITATIONS. Marcus was emperor of Rome from 161 – 180 A.D. He was not a Christian, but he was wise. Here’s just a sampling …
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.
Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people — unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.
You’re better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.
Constant awareness that everything is born from change. The knowledge that there is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants or children? Go deeper.
Nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can harm you. Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you. Then where is the harm to be found?
Suppose that [God] announced that you were going to die tomorrow,or the day after. Unless you were a complete coward you wouldn’t kick up a fuss about which day it was: what difference could it make? Now recognize that the difference between years from now and tomorrow is just as small.
The best revenge is not to be like that.
Not to assume it’s impossible because you find it hard. But to recognize that if it’s humanly possible, you can do it too.
Care for other human beings. Follow God.
It’s quite possible to be a good man without anyone realizing it. Remember that.
It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. The are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.
Give yourself a gift: the present moment.
It doesn’t matter how good a life you’ve led. There’ll still be people standing around the bed who will welcome the sad event.
