St Basil on receiving spiritual gifts

Some wise words from St Basil the Great on receiving charisms or spiritual gifts:

it is necessary not to think that the gift of God is acquired with money or through any other device. (Ethics 58.1)

The import of what he says is easily overlooked because of his reference to money. Simony is a decidedly medieval sin – not something we expect to encounter today! But the sting in the tail is ‘or through any other device’. For ‘other device’ read technique, and we have an unmistakably contemporary warning.

It is perhaps not so obvious in Orthodoxy, but certainly in the wider Christian world there is a plethora of writing and teaching about spiritual techniques. The traditional spiritual techniques are re-presented as techniques. Among charismatic circles, there are techniques for receiving ‘the gift of tongues’. And so forth.

But any approach promising that you will become a better, stronger, more mature Christian if only you do X, Y, and Z is simply heretical. It is an invitation to achieve theosis by works rather than grace.

Basil reminds us that charisms are gifts. They are not something we can grasp by our own efforts. They are given by God that we may use them for the benefit of others. Our role is simply to accept them and use them with thanksgiving.

Global heating visualized

I recently came across #ShowYourStripes, a website that offers a variety of charts to help visualize the extent of global heating over the past 150 years. Here, for example, is a bar chart of global temperature change (relative to the average temperature for the period 1961–2010):

It really underlines the acceleration in global heating since the late 1970s.

One particularly nice feature of the site is that you can use it to generate charts of average temperature change for different regions, countries, and even cities around the world.

Photos: Paris 2019

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral,
Paris

I’ve just added a few more photos to my Flickr account. These were taken during a brief stay in Paris at the end of September 2019. We were there to celebrate the decision of the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe to re-establish relations with the Moscow Patriarchate. But it was also our first visit to Paris, and we discovered how very beautiful the city is.

More photographs

I have just added a few more photographs to my Flickr account – six shots of rapidly running water (two of the stream at Inversnaid and four of the Bracklin Falls near Callander) taken while I was spending a few days at Gartmore House last year. These were very much an early experiment in digital black and white processing and I suspect they could benefit from reprocessing using some of the techniques I have learned since then.

Feast of the Nativity

Exult, Adam and Eve, do not hide any longer as you once did in Paradise; for seeing you naked, the Lord has come to clothe you in the first garment. Christ is manifested to renew all of creation. (Troparion from Vespers for 2nd January)

A home for my photographs

Blogger is not a very convenient place to showcase a selection of my photographs, so I have been looking for an alternative home. Having examined various options, I have settled on Flickr. It seems straightforward to use; it has a useful free entry level with which to experiment; and it has created a community of photographers who comment on each other’s images. If you are interested, you can find my Flickr account at https://www.flickr.com/photos/lhosborn2/.

I have already posted an initial tranche of photos. These are the contents of the portfolio I prepared for the OU course ‘Digital photography: creating and sharing better images’. I plan to add further images on a regular basis (up to the limit of 1000 allowed by Flickr’s entry level) and will post an entry here whenever I do so.

Seeing with other eyes

if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is (Marcel Proust, The Captive, p.277)

And that is precisely what the great novelists, poets, musicians, artists, photographers, etc. enable us to do.