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<\/p>\nThis world has shown, in these past few months, what really governs it \u2014 and it is not wisdom or compassion, or science, or truth. It is fear. For many years now the world has been cultivating this as its basic principle of operation: with increasing zeal, it functioned by determining what man should be afraid of, and who, and when \u2014 and has made into a norm the concept that the driving force in human life is to be the reaction to such fear. And so we have seen the human race grow accustomed to living in fear of everything: of war; of enemies known and imagined; of the economy; of other people; of history; of the past, and above all of the future; of loneliness; of society; of poverty, and of wealth; of ignorance, as well as of knowledge. The list could go on forever. Man has grown accustomed to being afraid \u2014 of everything. And society considers it second-nature now to live according to this fear: states and governments announce what we are to be afraid of, alter our modes of life based on frightened responses to that fear; and as soon as one momentary fear ceases to grip us entirely, another is provided to replace it.<\/p>\n
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And it is grounded, ultimately, in the one fear that a society without God cannot overcome: the fear of death. The virulent fear that eats away at human hearts is fuelled by the secular inability, or outright refusal, to see beyond death. The secular mind cannot see death as anything other than \u2018the end\u2019, and thus a thing to flee from as the utmost evil. For this reason, the avoidance of death is seen as the highest aim, the highest good \u2014 even if the result of this is a so-called \u2018life\u2019 utterly overwhelmed with fear, sorrow and grief. But I tell you this: death will never be avoided by fearfully clinging to fragments of life \u2014 not in the face of sin, nor in the face of a disease. Society today is constantly provoked to base its every decision on the dichotomy between life and death. But death is not the the opposite of life: the opposite of life is fear.<\/p>\n
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For this reason I say to you: we are living now in a moment that demands faith in the True God: the Father Who sent His only Son into the world and Who bestows His Spirit upon the faithful.<\/p>\n
– \u2018Parish Life\u2019 of Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St John the Baptist<\/p>\n
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**We are pleased to include writings from modern American Monasteries from time to time as well as our traditional Elders**<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This world has shown, in these past few months, what really governs it \u2014 and it is not wisdom or compassion, or science, or truth. It is fear. For many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-modern-orthodox-elders","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9657"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9659,"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9657\/revisions\/9659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orthodoxinsight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}