PHILOKALIA MINISTRIES

Holy Anonymity, Ego Death, and the Narrow Place Where God Remains There comes a point in the spiritual life when freedom and disappearance begin to feel strangely alike. The heart knows it is being loosened from old compulsions and false identities, yet the mind fears that what is being lost may be the self itself. This is not a contradiction. It is a threshold. The desert fathers knew this terrain well. They did not speak of it as self annihilation, but neither did they offe

Companion Reflection to "Not Knowing Up From Down" “I trusted, even when I said I am greatly afflicted.” There are moments in the spiritual life when the soul feels as though it is held together only by a single thread. Nothing feels stable. Nothing feels earned. Nothing feels clear. And yet in the midst of that frailty, a strange word rises from the depths of the psalmist’s heart in Psalm 116: “I love the Lord for he has heard the cry of my appeal.”  It is not triumph speaki