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Themes of Vespers

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The church is primordially a worshipping community. The doctrines fall secondary to worship. It is in the corporate and communal experience of worship the church identifies its being and witness, as a realized eschatology and the extension of the love of the triune God. The uniqueness of Orthodox ecclesiology lies in its “coming together” rather than “going out.” [1] Liturgy forms the basis of worship. L iturgy serves as the visible expression of the unfathomable and mysterious realm of the divine. Liturgy at the same time is the doxological faith affirmation of the church. The common axiom should be brought into mind lex orandi lex credendi “as we pray so we believe.” The church urges the faithful to pray seven times a day alluding to the Psalmist orison - Ps 119: 164 “Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous ordinances.” May we attempt to succinctly explore the major theological themes discerned in the Ramsho [2] (Vespers) of the Syrian Orthodox Church. [3] 1.
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Wisdom of the Desert

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Desert is usually understood as a barren land but who in the wildest dream would have thought that this place could be rendered so fecund for spirituality other than the desert fathers and mothers. They saw life where others anticipated death; where one expects thorns and bushes the monks and ascetics unearthed the seeds of wisdom. Desert is the battlefield of uncertainties. One really does not know what to expect. It needs courage to refuse the security offered by walls and roof and embrace the loo wind of vulnerability. This courage finds its subsistence in faith. In an empirical world, faith usually becomes an idea of mockery. Our obsession with certainty has obstructed us to believe in the beauty of randomness. Our pursuit of attesting logical reasoning to every experience is most often at the expense of belittling the mysterious dimension of life . Faith is the audacity to grapple with the uncertainties of life with the implicit hope that it would eventually lead us to the cr
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Dare to be doors

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Christianity was born when a carpenter showed the nerve to challenge the then status quo by transcending the boundaries which hindered the human – human relations thereby human – God relation. He set forth with his chisel and hammer to shape the world which had been deformed by the sinfulness of the people. It was an attempt to make people encounter the truth which would eventually set them free and make their worship more profound. But then since the nature to be enslaved to someone or something was innate in us we crucified him and started venerating the cross. The beautiful Jesus movement lost its beauty and fragrance when it was relegated into a religion which brought along with it dogmas, doctrines, laws, structure, hierarchy and so on and so forth. Steve Weinberg claims, “There are only two kinds of people; good and bad. While without religion good people would do good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things.” We are all a
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Do not Un-disable the Disabled

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In a nation like India where anything could easily be relegated to taboos there even disability cannot evade the stereotypical apprehensions. We might sound accommodating when we resort to the use of euphemisms like ‘differently abled’, ‘special child’ etc. but that is not true. Nancy Eiesland, pioneer of the Theology of Disability opines; Euphemisms for persons with disabilities have abounded in recent years, including ‘differently abled’……These people maintain that Euphemisms deny the fact that disabilities do exist and reinforce the idea that disabilities must be camouflaged to make them acceptable for public.[i] Our tendency to sanitize disability through euphemisms itself is the clarion call that there is absolutely no space in this world for something which is not ‘normal’. The ‘abled’ are engaged in the imprudence of making the disabled feel accommodative reprimanding the fact that the disabled are already an integral part of the diversity of God’s creation. It is n
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