elcome to the CrabTree, a little public journal of a tiny offshoot of the Crabtree family, sojourning in semi-rural Missouri. We use this website to help us chronicle our day-to-day spiritual journey, and perhaps offer up our collective experiences to those looking for another co-struggling Orthodox Christian family in the online community. It's a place for us to put memories, reflections, pictures, and quotations. A place to celebrate with gratitude the life that God has given us. Perhaps someday our children will be grateful that we took the time to do such a thing for them, for ourselves, for our family and friends, for the Lord.
How We are Loved!
Posted by Isaac | Mar 27, 2013
Found this photo on a blog and it really affected me. Sure, a "western icon" but look at that little fellow's love for Christ-- how he touches the Savior's suffering heart. Look at how the Savior suffered for His people, for us, even for me. It is a great consolation to remember how much God really does love us, and that it is precisely for this reason that He hates our sins. Would we not be enraged and concerned if we saw our children taking what we knew to be deadly poision? For me this helps. My repentance "satisfies God" not because God really is this terrible stickler who has to be appeased, but because He's not satisfied unless I'm safe in His arms, unless I'm walking toward Him and not away.
How to Understand the Canons according to Father Seraphim Rose
Posted by Isaac | Mar 08, 2013
This is gold from Fr. Seraphim (Rose), taken from Letters from Fr. Seraphim. It's really easy being a reader of spiritual literature to wander off into a book and come away with a total misunderstanding of the Christian life, either gleaning it from the author or from ones own misinterpretation of the author. This is easily done with books on the canons of the Church. Fr. Seraphim, perhaps the heavenly patron of Western converts, has forseen how easy it is to slip on the one side into a super-correctness, devoid of real spiritual life and full of judgment of others, or on the other side a liberal relativism that would hold all the canons to be outmoded, purely human products of long-forgotten circumstances with no relevance for today. In respnse to this, Fr. Seraphim gives us a canon by which we live and through which we can understand the Church's and our relationship to the canonical tradition.
Met. Kallistos Ware, St. Nikodemos, and Convergence of Traditions
Posted by Isaac | Feb 08, 2013
An excerpt of a larger article by Met. Kallistos (Ware), HERE.>
