Worship With Incense

From The Orthodox Life blog.  I like this article because it shows precisely why we Orthodox Christians do everything we do: it’s Biblical! “Let my prayer arise … as incense” (Psalm 141:2) Throughout Scripture we see the inward and outward aspects of worship offered to God in unity with one another. For example, Scripture tells us to lift our hands and our hearts to God. The hands are outward, and the heart is inward. God is glorified by both, and He commands us  [Read more...]

Coming To Trust The Liturgy

From the author of  the First Lights Blog A couple of weeks ago I was having a conversation with an old friend about my spiritual journey. We had attended church together at a contemporary evangelical charismatic Protestant church as college students. At the time, I ardently defended contemporary worship. The songs stayed in my head for a great length of time, generally they reinforced the themes of what was being talked about in church, they were fun to listen to, and I could  [Read more...]

Incense and Orthodoxy

An Anti-Depressant Found In Every Orthodox Church by Kate Melville Biologists from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem have discovered that burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain that alleviate anxiety and depression, suggesting that an entirely new class of medicinal drugs might be right under our noses. Reporting their findings in The FASEB Journal, the researchers said that the active compound – incensole acetate – significantly affected areas in the brain  [Read more...]