A Pilgrimage Towards Monk Hood

St Anthony the Great, called ‘The Father of Monk.’ He was born in Egypt in about 251 AD; in about 269 he heard the Gospel read in church and applied the reading “Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor and come…” to himself. He sold all and went into the desert. After a time he attracted followers and acted as their spiritual father. He lived to the age of 105. His history was written by St Athanasius.

When asked what one must do to be saved he answered, “…always have God before your eyes; whatever you do, do it according to the testimony of the holy Scriptures; in whatever place you live, do not easily leave it. Keep up these three precepts and you will be saved.” Anthony thought it a great work to take blame for his own sins before God and expected temptation to his last breath.

Abba Anthony knew the limits of men and did not stretch his brothers beyond their limits. St Anthony was blessed with the gift of discernment. He was able to perceive demons and knew of the miraculous works of men.

One time the brothers came to St Anthony and asked him about a passage in Leviticus. St Anthony went out into the desert, he was followed by Abba Ammonas. Abba Ammonas saw St Anthony cry out to heaven saying, “God, send Moses, to make me understand this saying.” Abba Ammonas heard a voice speaking with him but he could not understand it. It was said of St Anthony that he was “spirit-borne.” Meaning that the Holy Spirit carried him along. He could see what was happening in the world, as well as knowing what is going to happen. He never spoke of this, because of his humility.

St Anthony was once asked to go to Constantinople by the Emperor Constantius, Constantine’s son. He asked Abba Paul if he should go Abba Paul said, “If you go, you will be called Anthony; but if you stay here, you will be called Abba Anthony.”

With a such a list of sayings and deeds it is easy to tell that St Anthony was a great man of God. He was one of the greatest of the early monks. He also participated in the great Council of Nicea where he defended the orthodox faith against Arianism. Being as humble as he was he instructed his followers to bury him in an unmarked grave lest his body become an object of veneration. Countless monasteries have been based off of his monastic rule.

Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we pray that we might follow after your Servant Jesus, just as Anthony followed after our Lord. We pray for humility, that we would seek to keep our deeds secret that all glory and honor might be given to you and none to us. We pray that we might heed his advice that most assuredly came from you. Allow us to always have you before our eyes and to always defier to the Holy Scriptures when we have a question, allow us to be content with where we settle. Make us remember that we have been tempted from our birth and that we will not stop being tempted until we die; but allow us when tempted to always turn towards you as our examples Jesus and Anthony did. And forgive us when we sin; make us grow from it, we pray never let us blame any other for our sin. Pour out your Spirit on us; so that we will know when you are present and that we will know when Satan and his demons are tempting us. Give us discernment that we might know how to bring the most glory to you. Conform us in to servants like Anthony, who like Elijah and John the Baptist sought you in the desert. Father Anthony intercede to Christ for us that our souls might be saved. We ask all these things through our mediator, your Holy Son our Savior Jesus Christ who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit now and forever. Amen.

So what I thougth I would do now that I am reading a lot of stuff about the church fathers is that I would start to blog about them. My basic lay out will be to give a little bit of a history about them and why I think that they are important. Then I will write a prayer that is inspired by their life and example. So I hope you enjoy.

St. James is I believe the most important person in Christian history, after Jesus of course. St James is the brother of our Lord, but this is not the reason that he is so important. St James is important because he foregoes his own love of Judaism and it’s connection with Christianity in order that Gentile might be brought into the faith more easily. He is the one that decided that Gentiles do not need to be circumcised to become Christians.

Some other information about St James called the Just. He was the head of the Church of Jerusalem, the most important church in Christianity until 70 AD. St Jeromewrites this about St James “After the apostles, James the brother of the Lord surnamed the Just was made head of the Church at Jerusalem… This one was holy from his mother’s womb. He drank neither wine nor strong drink, ate no flesh, never shaved or anointed himself with ointment or bathed. He alone had the privilege of entering the Holy of Holies…and went alone into the temple and prayed in behalf of the people, insomuch that his knees were reputed to have acquired the hardness of camels’ knees.” From Jerome’s writing it would seem that James was a Nazerite from birth.

St Paul calls St James with Sts Peter and John a “pillar of the Church.” St James is also thought to be the author of the Letter of James in the New Testament.

He was killed at the hand of Pharisees in Jerusalemin 62 AD. Eusebius, in his book Historia Ecclesiae, states that St James was thrown off the summit of the Temple, stoned, and then had his skull bashed in with a fuller’s club.

Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we pray that we may follow after our perfect example Jesus, just as your servant James followed after the example of his brother. Allow us to give up our own opinions so that we may follow after your holy way and lead others to you more easily. Give us a heart that we may pray unceasingly we ask this through your Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ who, with the Holy Spirit lives and reigns with you, one God now and forever. Amen.

Regent Woes, the title of the last post, has turned to Regent Joys.  Seeing as how I just got an e-mail saying that I was accepted to Regent College.  So I am pretty excited.  Too bad I am fasting today because I really want to go have a nice dinner to celebrate, but thus is Lent.   For Lent I am doing a full fast on Fridays, giving up music in my car and while walking to classes, and I am going to try and do a week long fast at some point.

Peace

Well I sent out my application to Regent College on Saturday.  There has already been some woes, since I one forgot that I needed a character reference for the school.  Thankfully, Bryan Sherwood was able to get that done for me very quickly.  Then I read the writing sample requirements and found that my preferred writing sample was about five pages too long.  So, I went with a shorter but not as good writing sample.  Lastly when I sent out the application I sent it the fastest I could so that it should have gotten there yesterday.  And to my surprise when I checked the mail today I found my application here.  The man at the post office did not make sure that everything was fully filled out on the shipping information.  So it came back to me because it did not have a customs value which is $0.  So now I am going to be charged a $20 late fee by Regent.  So I am going to complain to the post office and see if they will take off $20 from the shipping fee or give me $2o since I sent the package in this manner to make sure that it would get there in time.  Hopefully I am not out this $20 because that would really suck.

Well I thought now that finals are over I should post something.  Thus, this post.  Nothing much going on with me; I am starting to finish filling out grad school applications.  It looks like one of the people that I asked to write my letters of recommendation, has just given birth.  So I am not sure if she will be able to write them since the Duke letter was not written as of the other day.  The priority deadline was due today so maybe they will take one a few days late since I also need to have my transcripts sent to them along with my writing sample and letter of intent.   Well  I don’t know what else to write about right now.

Peace

I went on yahoo.com this morning to check my e-mail and saw this video on the homepage.  Check out the video here.  It is a four minute video about young preachers.  One child is seven years old, the other is nine.  Is this too young to be preaching.  From what the video shows it seems that these kids at least somewhat know what they are talking about.  I am going to try not too outright criticize these kids and their parents.  But I really don’t think that these kids should be preaching.  I mean really let the kids be kids for a while and then if they want to preach they can go to seminary and learn about the religion, then preach all they want.  The kids say that they are the ones that want to do this, I am sure they really do want to, but I also think that adults may be pushing them a bit.

Also on another topic some friends and I have started a new blog where their are multiple authors.  Since as you can see I don’t update this blog as often as I would like.  So the idea was get more authors get more posts and different ideas.  There are still a few people that said that they would post on it that have not yet but when they get there school work done I am sure they will.  You will notice a new link in the sidebar, the name of the blog is shared religious thought.  Oh and if you might want to post on it let me know and we can work something out.  And if you know anyone that knows a lot about Eastern religion or Islam let them know about it.  We want to be able to talk about more then Christianity and Judaism.

Alright Grace and Peace all.

Well I just saw a plug for the news here in Lexington.  It looks like we are going to have billboards for God here in Lexington.

Question:  Does  God really need advertising?  I think not.  He did fine with out billboards for a long time.  But it is not like this is anything new.  Years ago there were some that I saw in Huston.  Well I will let you all rant on this a little bit too.

So I started watching Heroes Thursday night and finished the first season on Sunday.  The season premier was Monday.  It is a really good show.  It is like X-Men but with out the team aspect and no central leadership.  But some of the key characters are there.  You have the telepath, the superhuman strength person, a teleporter/time traveler (maybe my favorite), the girl with an advanced healing factor, a mimic (one who can leach off of other’s powers, but he can retain the powers and can have more then five, unlike Mimic from Marvel), and a professor who does not have any powers but may be the key to survival for the mutants; because of his antibodies.  So that is all for that topic.

Also I was accepted into a weight loss study at the Central Kentucky Research Center.  They are going to give me an appetite suppressant.  I am not sure what else but I do know it pays 35 bucks a visit.  Which I think is pretty good.  Some one is going to pay me to lose weight.  Haha suck it Jenny, Weight Watchers, and other diet programs that people pay for.  I am getting free drugs and weight loss; best of all they are paying me for it.

Last week in my Backgrounds class I was too smart for my own good.  I knew all the answers, which I thought was a good thing, but apparently it is not to this too good in this class.  I knew all the vocabs questions and some others.  Apparently I was being a crutch for the rest of the class.  When asked how I knew all the stuff I knew I explained that I had classes in 2nd Temple Judaism and Dead Sea Scrolls in my undergrad work.  Where as if anyone had read the reading assignment then they would have known the answers too.  I did not read the assignment because there was not much in it that I would not have known.

That’s all I have now.
Grace and Peace.

Well I think it is about time I updated this it has been a little while since I did that. Classes have been going alright. I am kind of struggling with my Greek class but I should be able to catch/keep up soon. It is just learning a lot of stuff that I had never gone over before, like the Optative case, conditional sentences, and the vocab is a lot different from what I did before. So I need to get working on it some more to start memorizing the endings and the sentence forms.

My Classics/History class is going pretty good. I think that I will know most of what the prof. is talking about most of the time. The 2nd class I was fine. The last two are fine we went over Greek and Roman history. Next week we get into Jewish literature, mainly that of 2nd Temple writings, this will be a lot of fun. Mostly since I studied it before and it is one thing that I would like to continue studying in grad school.

Speaking of grad school I need to start studying for the GRE and applying to grad schools. I also need to start looking into going to a monastery in the winter. I am not sure if this will be possible at this moment since I might need to visit schools in the winter.

Hebrew is going fine I had the class last year using the same books so I am doing fine and it is going pretty good. English is alright we had some stupid writing assignment due today. It had to be about a place that gives some insight into ourselves and shows how we interact with society. I did mine on the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Well that is all I have for now. I am thinking about posting some stuff on Scholarly Ideas, my other blog where I explore issues of scholarly interest and other stuff I feel like. I am thinking about doing something on the Papacy of Rome, mainly why I do not see it from early church history or Scripture.

Grace and Peace

Well UK classes start today.  I have one class today and then three tomorrow and I am done for the week.  I have had one problem with my classes.  I have two classes that overlap by 15 minutes so that means that I have to get approval from the instructors.   I did that but  I think my advisor needs signatures from the teachers.  So I think that is taking a little while to get if she does not have it.  Oh well I think it will work out in the end.

I thought I had some good ideas for some post the other day but they were going to take a while and I totally forgot what I was going to talk about.  Oh well I guess they will come back to me at some point.  Well that is all for now.  Peace.

So as some of you all may have known I went to the Abbey of Gethsemani last week.  Other then being really, really, really hot it was really nice.  I spent most of the time praying, reading, and thinking about Catholicism.  I figured out a few things one that I probably could be a monk.  Two that I could not be Catholic.  Mainly because of the issue of the Papacy.  I do not see any support for it, in Scripture or in the very early Church.

It was interesting to see that most of the people on the retreat could not stay quite for a few days.  Even when there were signs everywhere that said “Quite Please” or “Silence is Spoken Here.”  It was alright though some people just cannot really keep quite in their mouth but might be able to in there heart.

I spent a lot of time in my cell, following the advice of the desert fathers.  It was nice I got to experience some real silence.  I was able to turn off my thoughts/brain for a few moments.  It was really nice.

I would like to go back sometime and I think I will I am going to be talking with Bro. Luke to see if I could come there in the winter and stay with them for a little longer and really experience the Monastic life.

I have also started to work on another icon for my friend Justin who is in rehab for the next 20 months from what I hear.  I am also going to write a prayer for him.  When I get that done I will post it on here and send it to him and some of his friends and ask them to pray it every day for him.  Well that is all I have going on now.

Peace