New Skete Monasteries News

 by  Brother Christopher   Over many years of working in spiritual direction and speaking to guests and retreatants about their prayer life, a consistent issue that comes up repeatedly is how to deal with distracting thoughts and, more broadly, how to deal with what the tradition has described as “the passions of the soul.” These are what get in the way of resting in God’s presence during formal prayer, while at other times lead us into self-defeating patterns of behavior that seem to have a life of their own. We often feel captive to them, and become discouraged over our seeming inability to keep them from controlling us. Monastic tradition has had long experience learning to understand such passions, and Evagrius and Cassian in particular have written authoritatively about them, identifying pride, lust, anger, gluttony, avarice, sadness, envy, and acedia as what we are dealing with. They have offered sound guidance to keep them from enslaving us. That said, their wi...

  Part 1 of 2 By Brother Theophan   " I am seventy years of age, and the whole study of my life has been to find out what it is that is in myself; what is this thing we call life, and how does it operate? " - George Inness, 1894   Living around the Hudson has stimulated me to return to the Hudson River School of painting and enter more deeply into this 19 th -century American art movement. Exploring local art museums such as the Clark and the Albany Institute of History and Art, which houses a large collection of Hudson River paintings, along with a recent trip to Olana , has deepened this involvement. Several artists from this school have moved me, but George Inness, in particular, has had the greatest impact on me lately. The Clark Art Institute houses a large collection of his works, available for viewing. Many of the themes that have deeply resonated with me—such as the continuity between waking and dreaming consciousness, the visible and invisible, nature and...