Joe

Not a robot. You are what you eat

[Gabriel J. Benton ☦️🇺🇸 @OrthodoxPole81]

When Christianity came to Europe: from the Britons and Anglo-Saxons of the British Isles to the Kievan Rus on the Black Sea, this was the baptism of Europe into Christ. She put on Christ and became a new creation. Every tribe in Europe, West and East, was united to Him and He is Who defined her and made her civilizations and peoples great. The rejection of Christ by Europe in favor of the Enlightenment and every modern and post-modern ideology that flowed from the Enlightenment was a rejection of Christ and her identity. Whether it was Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, forms of Progressive Enlightenment Liberalism, and more, these were all rejections of the Meta-Political order of the Kingdom of Heaven and of the Kingship of Christ Himself. To wit, when Europe rejected Christ, she died. And so we who are children of Europe, East and West, including in the New Worlds, are walking in the corpse of our mother.

[Luke Cadell @lukecadell]

Mothers who take iodine during pregnancy give birth to children with 10-20 higher IQ points.

The Japanese consume the most iodine and are notably intelligent.

People near coastlines are also smarter from breathing ocean iodine.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Iodine literally raises IQ.

[Gunnar🍊🌊 @FarvingCo]

Doctors prescribe GUM CHEWING to restart your gut after surgery.

Not a drug. Not a supplement.

GUM. 81 studies. 9,072 patients.

Chewing activates the vagus nerve — the longest nerve in your body, running from your brain to your gut.

It controls stomach acid, digestive enzymes, and movement through your gut. When it stops firing, your digestion slows down.

The human jaw was built to chew for hours a day. You chew for minutes. Your vagus nerve is barely firing.

Mastic gum.

A tree resin from the Greek island of Chios. Used for 2,500 years. The first time you chew it, your jaw will be sore in five minutes. That’s how you know it’s working.

And it doesn’t just activate the vagus nerve — it kills H. pylori, the bacteria behind most stomach ulcers, reduces gut inflammation, strengthens your jaw, and fights bad bacteria in your mouth.

Your digestion didn’t break because of what you eat. It broke because of what you stopped chewing.

I chew it every day. Non-negotiable.

[Orthodox Christian @orthodox_33ad]

It is necessary to repent for not sufficiently loving others and for not being sensitive enough to the misfortunes of others.

— Saint Seraphim of Vyritsa

[Siegfire @SiegfireDotcom]

St. Seraphim of Platina, pray for us! ☦️📿

[🏴‍☠️ @calvinfroedge]

You people are not prepared for the amount of finding out that's about to happen

[Patristic Nectar @PatristicNectar]

I'm in Belgrade at the St. Sava Cathedral and the most precious relic of the Mother of God - Her Belt - is visiting from the Holy Monastery of Vatopedi on Mt Athos. It hasn't been here for 600 years. This is day 12 and each day people in the tens of thousands line up for miles (literally) and wait 10 hrs in the sun to be able to venerate it - kids, parents, grandparents - extremely moving to see such devotion. What would an American spend 10hrs standing to see? Rock concerts? A NBA finals game? It is incredible.

[Gabriel J. Benton ☦️🇺🇸 @OrthodoxPole81]

"Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but this was new to me:

In reading Acts 9 just now, Paul is persecuting the Church just before he converts.

Light engulfs him as he hears Jesus speaking, and afterwards he loses his sight. And a thought occurred to me.

I always assumed it to be the case that God took his vision away. But, it just dawned on me as I was reading...could it be that Paul was blinded by seeing the Uncreated Light, which he had approached and was looking at "in an unworthy manner"? (to use his own words)

Because at the moment of exposure, he wasn't yet in a state of repentance/faith. So, the Uncreated Energies in the Holy Mysteries can actually have a negative effect on us, as the Orthodox do indeed teach (not being able to enter the holy of holies, Moses only being permitted to see God's glory pass by from the cleft of the rock, not receiving Holy Communion without first examining your conscience and confessing your sins, etc.)

This would mean that it wasn't Jesus *punishing* him with blindness, as I had previously viewed it, but rather that it was merely the natural cause/effect of Paul's own decisions that led him to that state.

He was *not* walking in the Light.
And since light has no part with darkness, the darkness within him drove the light from his eyes.

This seemingly minor detail is extremely significant. Because, once again, it engenders a radically different understanding of God's character.

The former is a spiteful, and arguably somewhat petty God who needs to retaliate to even the score, while the latter is entirely without malice or resentment, and it was merely His presence—being truly holy—that Paul's fallen senses reacted against, like dry leaves coming into contact with fire.

The Lord did not take his sight away and then restore it. Rather, the Lord restored Paul inwardly, and then He restored him again, physically.

First, Paul had to reckon with his encounter with the risen Christ whom he had rejected. This changed his mind.

He then ate and drank nothing for 3 full days (fasting is directly associated with a conscious deepening of one's repentance). This revealed a softening of his heart.

And then, by God's grace, the scales fell from his eyes.

Honestly, I just hadn't looked closely enough at this passage again until now since converting. And since the Protestant tradition places little to no emphasis on the teaching of "Uncreated Light" (I had never even heard of it from anyone before), it was just yet another one of those unknown unknowns.

This is just one of many reasons why we need the Church with Her historic witness and divinely guided preservation of the apostolic deposit of faith via Holy Tradition, in order to *fully* understand even the smallest details in biblical theology in their proper context.

Without the Church, you have blind spots that literally condition your view of God without you even knowing it."
-- Macarius Johnson

[Father Christopher @FChristopher77]

The Deadly Trap of Judgment: A Desert Father’s Terrifying Warning.

[𐙚⋆ @voidwithverses]

“An enemy will agree, but a friend will argue”

— Russian Proverb

[Orthodox Redneck☦️ @OrthoRedneck]

“Sometimes one’s zeal for ‘Orthodoxy’ can be so excessive that it produces a situation similar to that which caused an old Russian woman [babushka] to remark about an enthusiastic American convert: ‘Well, he’s certainly Orthodox, all right—but is he a Christian?’ To be ‘Orthodox’ but not ‘Christian’ is a state that has a particular name in Christian language: it means to be a pharisee, to be so bogged down in the letter of the Church’s laws that one loses the spirit that gives them life, the spirit of true Christianity.” ~ Fr. Seraphim Rose

[TheOrthodoxWay @_theorthodoxway]

“The greatest sin today is the lack of love.”
- St. Sofian Boghiu

[Миодраг 🇷🇸 @Miodrag_srb]

"Ако су вас оклеветали, на добро вам узвратили злом, не злопамтите. Опростите и радујте се јер сте захваљујући томе за неколико корака ближи Богу."

Преподобни Гаврило Грузијски

[Arcfunmi @Arcfunmi]

Smart self leveling invention

[Rory Johnston @Rory_Johnston]

Japanese crude oil inventory chart is one of the wildest through the Hormuz crisis thus far.

[Orthodoxy Above The Clouds @noetic_healing]

This is applicable to modern Orthodox today. We must get out of the intellectual thinking our arguments and debates are what make us Orthodox. That’s Ortho Protestantism.

“these Orthodox thinkers, Andreyev among them, have seldom been appreciated at their full value, and even those who have lived and studied in their midst have too seldom realized what treasures they could have mined from their wealth of Orthodox knowledge and experience. Their spiritual and intellectual maturity, their old-world refinement, their subtle art of understatement, the complexity yet wholeness of their Orthodox world-view, all this has largely gone over the heads of a younger generation (whether Russian, Greek, or convert) that too often seeks easy answers to over-simplified questions, that is so easily scandalized by slight flaws that it misses the whole point of a profoundly Orthodox life’s work, whose spiritual immaturity and lack of intellectual culture simply cannot follow the thought-processes of a mature Orthodox thinker, whose lack of artistic and literary sensitivity can lead to false spirituality, making one unaware of the elements of the lower part of “soul” which can usurp the higher place of the “spirit” if one is not trained to distinguish them, whose deficiency in Orthodox feeling renders it blind to the Orthodox giants in its midst. We all suffer from this. All the more, then, must we strive to understand these giants who have now all but departed, leaving all would-be defenders of Orthodoxy in a very precarious position against the increasingly subtle temptations of an anti-Christian age. Without a broadening and deepening of our Orthodox world-view, without absorbing at least something of the genuine Orthodox teaching of the great men who have handed down Orthodoxy to us, we will scarcely survive.”

-Russias Catecomb Saints-

[Orthodoxy Above The Clouds @noetic_healing]

There is a free movie about St Joseph the hesychast that is awesome.

[new name ☦️ @human4christ]

“One who has pride within himself is spiritually ill. He may appear outwardly strong, learned, or virtuous, but inwardly he is tormented, because grace does not dwell in him. God does not reveal Himself to the proud man, because pride is darkness. The proud man wants to understand everything with his mind, but the things of God are known through humility and purity of heart.

When a person acquires humility, then divine illumination comes naturally. He no longer struggles to prove himself right, to conquer others in arguments, or to force his opinions onto people. He has peace. The humble man even sees his own faults as greater than those of others, and because of this, he receives great mercy from God.

Today people are filled with anxiety because they have distanced themselves from the simple spiritual life. They rely only on logic, on worldly knowledge, on their ego. But peace is not found there. Peace comes when a person cuts off his own will, repents sincerely, prays with pain of heart, and entrusts himself to God.

We must struggle with good spiritual philotimo. Christ does not ask from us impossible things. He asks for humility, repentance, love, patience, and trust in Him. Even a small humble effort attracts divine Grace. But the ego blocks Grace, just as a wire covered in rust cannot conduct electricity.

Do not seek lofty spiritual states. Seek repentance. Repentance brings humility, humility brings Grace, and Grace brings God’s peace into the soul. Then a person becomes spiritually healthy and quietly radiates Christ to others without even speaking much.”

— Saint Paisios of Mount Athos

[Thaddeus Patrick ☦️ @thaddeusthought]

"One day old Paisios was visited in his remote hermitage by a group of five obnoxious young men, full of pride and arrogance. He patiently spent several hours showing them extra attention. But a theology teacher who was present became irritable and impatient. 'How could you tolerate them?' he asked him. And the elder replied, 'Have you ever wondered how God could tolerate you?'"