Fr. Jacobse

Corruption Must Be Revealed in Order to Overcome the Darkness

Corruption Must Be Revealed in Order to Overcome the Darknessby Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
Be courageous. Don’t fear. Stand on the Rock.

We may be in the stages of a final reveal. Corruption must be revealed to overcome the power of darkness. The darkness is sustained when fear overcomes the heart and mind of man. He loses hope and the necessary constituents that give his life meaning move beyond the horizon. He becomes blind.

Men embrace ideology because they refuse to face the corruption in their own hearts. The ideology confers a false righteousness that avoids the honest appraisal of one’s own heart that is necessary for freedom, and replaces it with a lie. This lie reiterates the lie first whispered in Eden: “You will become like God.” That is how a man becomes blind. [Read more…]

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Fear, Anxiety, and God – Pastoral Advice During Coronavirus Crisis

Fr. Johannes Jacobse Fear, Anxiety, and God (Advice During Coronavirus Crisis)by Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
If we seek the Savior, if we conform our lives in obedience to Him, then peace and assurance can reign in our heart and we will get through this trial strengthened and changed.

I did a live stream this morning on how to handle the anxiety and fear that grips a lot of people during this pandemic. Here are my recommendations.

(1) Use the media sparingly. Don’t spend the day watching the news. The constant repetition of the same “facts” (in precious short supply until more concrete numbers come in) amplifies them; it gives them a greater authority than what they warrant.

Most news readers (real journalists are few) don’t know much. They simply don’t have the time to study what they report. Consequently, most draw from the same sources, and some of those sources are suspect. Maintaining a critical distance is prudent. [Read more…]

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When You Direct the Soul Towards Beauty, You Direct It Towards God

When You Direct the Soul Towards Beauty, You Direct It Towards Godby Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
Advice I give to people who can’t escape their thoughts, especially when the thoughts cause worry and even depression is to take a walk, open your eyes to the beauty around you, and practice gratitude.

Think of the things you can be thankful for and consciously express gratitude for them, and with deliberation and conscientiousness ponder the beauty of nature — look at trees, flowers, the sky, anything beautiful around you and really *see* them. Make sure your body is moving as you do this. A slow walk is fine.

What happens is that thoughts quiet down and the mind can find some rest. What happens on a deeper level is that the soul is renewed. [Read more…]

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Orthodox Liturgy Heals and Properly Orders the Human Soul

Orthodox Liturgy Heals and Properly Orders the Human Soulby Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
People say that the Liturgy is the Kingdom of God entering time and while this definition works I suppose, I have never really understood what it really means. Yes, I understand it abstractly, but abstraction has only a limited usefulness. So I’ve come up with another.

Worship is necessary because it creates the place where the soul can experience a measure of the necessary reordering that fosters healing. The soul has structure, and the healing of the soul, which is also the healing of the person, is one of the concrete, experiential constituents of salvation. Salvation is not metaphorical. It is real which means that it is experiential and affects concrete change and transformation measured as the healing of the person. [Read more…]

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Political Correctness, Progressivism, and Present Day Bolsheviks

Political Correctness, Progressivism, and Present Day BolsheviksExcerpts from multiple posts by Fr. Johannes Jacobse in the comments section of “It’s a Brand New Age” blog post. Some edits made to transform multiple individual comments by Fr. Jacobse into a cohesive stand-alone article. Special care was taken to preserve the original meaning of the author.

– Fr. Johannes Jacobse
Political correctness is the cultic aspect of Liberalism and Progressivism mostly because it attempts to control thought through language. It’s Orwell, but on a deeper level Dostoevsky and even Nietzsche. The markers are easy to spot especially the cruder terms — racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, white privilege — anything to shut down discussion and censure thought. Language is used promiscuously, laced with moral opprobrium and other self-justifying blather. It’s intimidation, like the Brownshirts or Bolsheviks.

The corruption of language is both a cause and effect of the moral inversion [Read more…]

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Priest vs. Priest on Homosexual Orientation

St George Slays Dragon by Editors –

In an online exchange on the popular Monomakhos Blog, the topic of discussion focused on the views on homosexuality expressed by Fr. Alexis Vinogradov a priest in the OCA, rector of St. Gregory the Theologian Church in Wappingers Falls, NY.

Fr. Hans Jacobse, a priest in the AOCA, rector of St. Peter Orthodox Mission in Naples, FL, challenged the presumptive opinions of Fr. Alexis and presented the truth from a proper Orthodox Christian understanding.

Fr. Alexis Vinogradov’s views were originally published in 2011 in an article titled New beginnings in community Gender issues and the Church on ocanews.org. Here’s the relevant excerpt that Fr. Hans responded to in the comments section of Monomakhos Blog:

“Homosexual persons did not decide to become homosexual. It was not the fruit of their supposed depravity or sin. That much we know today. There can only be a continuing conversation if we can cross that hurdle of blatant intransigence by those who refuse to acknowledge this fact. But homosexual persons, just as much as heterosexual ones, need to feel the warmth and love and nurture of other persons. God created them for that love, that love is the substance of our humanity; it is what constitutes all of us in bearing his image within us.” ~ Fr. Alexis Vinogradov

[Read more…]

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The Twelve Days of Christmas in the Orthodox Tradition

Twelve Days of Christmas in the Orthodox Traditionby Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse –
In the Christian tradition of both east and west, the twelve days of Christmas refer to the period from Christmas Day to Theophany. The days leading up to Christmas were for preparation; a practice affirmed in the Orthodox tradition by the Christmas fast that runs from November 15 to Christmas day. The celebration of Christmas did not begin until the first of the twelve days.

As our culture became more commercialized, the period of celebration shifted from Thanksgiving to Christmas Day. Christmas celebration increasingly conforms to the shopping cycle while the older tradition falls by the wayside. It’s an worrisome shift because as the tradition dims, the knowledge that the period of preparation imparted diminishes with it.

Our Orthodox traditions — from fasting cycles to worship –exist to teach us how to live in Christ. The traditions impart discipline. These disciplines are never an end in themselves but neither can life in Christ be sustained apart from them. [Read more…]

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The Republic is Finished, the America We Knew is Gone

Obamacare Destroys Liberty America by Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
With this morning’s decision that Obamacare will stand as the law of the land means that America — home of the brave, land of the free — is no more. This great country, the one to whom all great refugee movements of the world for over two centuries saw as the light to escape poverty, political bondage, and hopelessness now turns its back on that legacy of freedom for what will, in a very short time, amount a bowl of pottage.

The turn to tyranny won’t happen overnight and it won’t be recognized as tyranny — not at first anyway. But as freedom gets chipped away the straight jacked gets tighter and then hardens to envelop the mind like a steel casket. By the middle of the next generation those who gave away their freedom in the name of freedom will be cursed by their own children. The children will weep by the waters of Babylon, unearthing old movies and books of an America they never knew. “Why did you not shout out against the decline?” they will cry. [Read more…]

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Uncertain Times and Prayer

St Issac of Syria by Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
We live in very uncertain times. I don’t think I have ever seen such a widespread uncertainty in my lifetime. My parents saw it since they lived through WWII and the wrenching hardship that placed on them, but many of us only knew the prosperity of the post-war boom that lasted through most of our lifetime.

Some of this trouble is of our own making. We have left off God to a degree, thinking that the security and certainty we had was a kind of birthright instead of recognizing that progress and liberty is hard-won, and must be nurtured and preserved from generation to generation. We tend to forget that “every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of Lights…” as we say at the conclusion of the Divine Liturgy (a verse taken from James 1:17).

When we forget God, morality breaks down, and when morality breaks down then the society we build for ourselves begins to fray and may even unravel. [Read more…]

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Fr. Jacobse: Christianity and Same-Sex Attraction

Fr. Johannes Jacobse
Fr. Johannes Jacobse
by Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
This past Sunday (May 20, 2012), Ancient Faith Todayinterviewed Dr. Philip Mamalakis and Andrew Williams who specialize in counseling people with same-sex attraction. It was hands down one of the most illuminating and informed presentations I have heard on this complex and often contentious topic in quite a while.

Without going into particulars (you can listen to the interview below), their grounding in Orthodox anthropology enabled them to avoid the common misconception that the object of a person’s sexual desire forms what I call a “foundational characteristic of personhood.” In practical terms this means that we error when we see a person first and foremost as either “straight” or “gay” believing that “sexual orientation” sums up much of who and what he is.

This way of understanding the human person is taken at face value in the larger culture, but in Orthodox self-understanding it misses the mark completely. We are not to conform our understanding of the human person to whether he prefers men or women because we don’t define a person in terms of his sexual desire. [Read more…]

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