Blog Posts
A third lesson from Axia Women's first six months: Everybody is going through stuff. We need to show up for each other.
There are many women (and more than a few men) hungry for support and ways to channel their love for the Church.
My experience of working, living, and worshiping alongside women for these many years is that when you bring women together online and in person, and when you support them, listen to them, and advocate for them, great things happen. So that is what we will be doing. No one in the church should have to feel isolated or unappreciated.
That goes for men, too, by the way.
Axia Women hasn't been around all that long. In spite of that, we've learned a few things in our short time as an organization that I'd like to share over the coming weeks. The first has to do with diversity.
As a high school science teacher, one of the courses that I love to teach is Environmental Science and Field Biology. I also teach at a Christian high school and love the opportunity to challenge the students to think about what it means to really live as a Christian.
Predictably, by the end of the first semester, students begin to ask “This all can seem so overwhelming, what can we possibly do? Isn’t it too late to reverse the worst of climate change?”
My first answer is that despair (and its siblings cynicism and doubt) is exactly how the Evil One wants us to respond. Despair is easy, it absolves us of any requirement of true repentance. It’s too big, it’s too complex, there are so many other factors…
We are really excited to report that Axia Women has a new logo! If you have a few moments, we’d like to walk you through how the elements were chosen.
I have been exploring words, to discern their close meaning—“Holy” is the third in the series. The gift of words we have received from God, I have realized, is a very serious gift, if not the most important. It is through words that we name things, seek to understand them, and then communicate concepts to each other. By means of the “Word” God reveals himself to us. As “Word” Jesus came to us as both the Son of Man and Son of God. So now I would like to examine the word “Holy.”
As someone who was raised Protestant and came to Orthodoxy as an adult, I didn’t grow up with a relationship with the Mother of God. In fact, I avoided her for years. I’m a former academic, so perhaps it makes sense that I only really connected with her personally listening to the rather academically oriented sermons of Fr John McGuckin. At his parish, the St Gregory the Theology mission in NYC, he made a striking point on more than one occasion: that in all likelihood Jesus received his theological training from his mother. She is not only the source of his humanity, but also the one who raised him in his relationship to the faith.