Elder Ephraim and R. S. Thomas on Death

by Erin Doom

Feast of the Protomartyr and Equal of the Apostles Thekla

Anno Domini 2020, September 24

Last Judgment: The Balance of Justice - A.D. 1350 at Decani Monastery in Kosovo, Serbia

1. Bible & Fathers

Thursday: 2 Tim. 3:10-15. Lk. 5:12-16. Online here.

Friday: Eph. 1:7-17. Lk. 4:22-30. Online here.

Saturday – Falling Asleep of St John the Evangelist and Theologian: 1 Jn. 4:12-19. Jn. 19:25-27; 21:24-25. Online here.

A friend of mine is listening to a series of lectures on Judaism and he recently mentioned that the ancient Jews did not think about life beyond death. If any of you are scholars in the Old Testament or Judaism, please enlighten us. That comment set me to thinking about death, particularly a fairly recent publication—a massive tome at 1,111 pages published in 2017: The Departure of the Soul According to the Orthodox Church. Here’s the opening paragraphs from the epilogue by Elder Ephraim of Arizona:

After death, eternity follows. Every person at a certain moment will abandon his body on the earth and proceed with his soul to eternity, to the life that has no end. Man’s soul will remain without the body until the Second Coming of Christ, at which time the bodies of both the righteous and the unrighteous will be resurrected in order to be judged. It is a fact that after death, man’s soul is separated from the body and lives in a unique state.

For this reason, we should—and I first—seriously take into account this reality and regulate our life accordingly. Let us correct our lives in order to avoid eternal Hell and instead acquire (through God’s mercy and compassion) the Kingdom of Heaven. We must take a long, hard look at our salvation and realize that it is not a game; it is not something we can ignore; it is not a joke.

Let us stare our salvation straight in the eyes, no matter how alarming and disconcerting it is. Let us correct our life. Let us thank God from the depth of our heart, and let us offer Him praise and doxology because we are still alive and we can attend the matters related to our soul and prepare ourselves.

Read the entire piece here.

2. Books & Culture: “The Country Clergy” by R. S. Thomas

I’ve been reading through a collection of poems by R. S. Thomas and this poem seems fitting for today's content:

I see them working in old rectories

By the sun’s light, by candlelight,

Venerable men, their black cloth

A little dusty, a little green

With holy mildew. And yet their skulls,

Ripening over so many prayers,

Toppled into the same grave

With oafs and yokels. They left no books,

Memorial to their lonely thought

In grey parishes; rather they wrote

On men’s hearts and in the minds

Of young children sublime words

Too soon forgotten. God in his time

Or out of time will correct this.

3. Essays et al: “Where Do We Go From Here?” by R. S. Thomas

I’m also dipping in and out of R. S. Thomas’s prose. I read this piece earlier today, which ended up altogether shifting the theme for today’s content. Here’s two paragraphs from the middle of this short reflection, originally published in The Listener, 8 August 1974, pp. 177-178:

This is an age of searching and doubt, of confidence and hesitation. In the strangely shifting climate which is common to most of the world today, can there be a finer, more satisfying response than trust? The great hymn of the Christian Church, the Te Deum Laudamus, closes on the humble yet proud verse: “In Thee, O Lord, have I trusted, let me never be confounded.”

There is no God but God. The very use of the word answers all questions. The ability to create life automatically posits the ability to re-create it. We die utterly, completely. Our bones are consumed in the crematoria. Shall the Creator, who composed this solid, fertile earth out of incendiary gases, find more difficulty in forming a new life around the nucleus of a human soul? The question is rhetorical. It can be framed in a hundred different ways. It was a cardinal doctrine of Aquinas that God reveals Himself in accordance with the mind’s ability to receive Him. I have already scoffed at democracy. To one person, God may reveal Himself as a loving shepherd leading to green pastures; to another as a consuming fire. I must end this talk, surely, by telling you how He has revealed Himself to me, if that is the right way to describe the knowledge—half hope, half intuition—by which I live.

I’ll give you a hint: he appeals to William Blake, Francis Thompson, T. S. Eliot, William Wordsworth, and Jesus Christ. And it’s beautiful. Read the whole piece here.

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What Else is This, if it is Not God? Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 2

By Luke Taylor Gilstrap • July 31, 2026

"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.

One Thing to Speak, Another to Know : Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 1

By Luke Taylor Gilstrap • July 24, 2026

"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.

Elder Ephraim and R. S. Thomas on Death

by Erin Doom

Feast of the Protomartyr and Equal of the Apostles Thekla

Anno Domini 2020, September 24

What Else is This, if it is Not God? Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 2

One Thing to Speak, Another to Know : Stumbling Through St. John of Damascus, Part 1

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