St Mary of Egypt Orthodox Church

© 2002 by M. K. Weston

As I was first approaching Orthodoxy in the early 1980s, I remember that friends were reading a book that advised Christians to stay away from psychology. It was called Psychology as Religion– The Cult of Self-Worship by Paul C. Vitz.¹ The title was enough to convince me, and I continued my search for the soul’s healing through strictly Orthodox texts. “Psychology” means the knowledge and science of the soul, and the Orthodox Church has had true, spiritual psychology and soul therapy from the beginning. On the other hand, there was always the struggle to apply what was written for other generations and cultures and conditions. The particular genius of the Eastern Church is to seek and to “baptize” the good in every culture, and it can seek and “baptize” the good in modern psychology as well. In that spirit, I have drawn from psychology’s clinical experience and therapeutic techniques, but not from its vision of the nature of man and wellness, which do diverge significantly from a traditional, Christian understanding.

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Proper Love of Self

Presented by Fr. Paisius Altschul at the 8th Annual Ancient Christianity and African American Conference, Feb. 10, 2001 in Kansas City, Missouri

In the Gospel of St. Matthew, 22: 36-40 we read, “‘Master, which is the great commandment of the Law?’ Jesus said unto him, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul and all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. The second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law of the prophets.’”

When we hear the Lord Jesus teaching us about the greatest of the commandments, He explains to us the greatest, of course, is the commandment of love. “Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Many, many sermons have been preached on the subject of loving your neighbor as yourself. I want to focus upon a particular problem that I’ve found working in our particular area of ministry since 1984. Many simply don’t understand the proper place of loving your self with a view to loving your neighbor.

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By Fr. Paisius Altschul

“…If our dead ones who are dear to us have been vouchsafed the Kingdom of Heaven, they reply to prayer for them with an answering prayer for us….” - Fr. Michael Pomazansky

The children of Africa have kept a deep sense of honoring the ancestors since the earliest times. Appreciation for, respect, veneration, and seeing oneself at the end of a long line of all those that came before are principles that native cultures have shared in common throughout all of Africa. It is in keeping with the original revelation of God’s ways passed on to Noah. After the sin of Ham, in failing to honor his father Noah, (Gen. 9:20-24) his children have shown, on the contrary, the deepest respect for parents and ancestors. As the faith spread abroad and became more removed from the original teaching and ways, the honoring of ancestors led many to actually worship the ancestors as gods. For others they saw the ancestors as their protectors, guides and avengers of wrongs that needed to be regularly appeased through sacrifice and offerings. However, these traditions, as well as other tribal belief systems, all contain a fundamental human principle: the importance of honoring those that came before us. We are to see ourselves in lowliness, as recipients of all that have come before us, indebted to their goodness and maintaining respect for them.

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