Living the Sacred Time of Our Life

This book is addressed to contemporary Christians. They are under a continuous attack from many unbelieving scientists and from the so-called "free" thinkers. I think religion provides the spinal column of the ethics of a society and therefore it is necessary more now than in previous times. If we may paraphrase the historian of religions Mircea Eliade's terms, we might say that, for a person with faith in God, there are two kinds of time: sacred time and profane time. The sacred time is the time of God, of the Creator; it is chairos and it is eternal. The profane time is the historical time, the time of the creation, of man and of all living creatures; it is chronos, the quotidian time that flows unceasingly without repeating itself. Our soul is immortal and its time, since we were conceived, is eternal. Our body is perishable and its time is transitory. Therefore, a Christian is called to discover the ever-living time of his soul, and especially the sacred aspect of it. This book is a continuation of a previous volume, "Discovering the Sacred Time of Our Life," which pleaded for the necessity of realizing the profound eternity, proper to God and our soul, that hides like an invisible, long and uninterrupted shadow behind all our daily events. This second volume talks about the actual "living the sacred time of our life." It discusses the principles of a Christian life in relation to personal, family, and societal necessities. It refers to the Sunday and Feast readings in Church. The book invites to a higher receptivity to the miracles, the language of God, especially the little miracles which occur all the time around us, inspiring our souls and strengthening us in our daily trials. The book brings suggestions applied directly to the specificity of a Christian life in our American society and supplies less accessible information from the spiritual teachings of the Eastern European Fathers, including Romanian Elders. Romania is a country where Holy Apostle Andrew evangelized, martyrs suffered for their faith since the third century, and the monastic life reached a peak of outstanding hesychastic wisdom, becoming in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a center of Christian spirituality as strong as Mount Sinai was in the sixth century and Mount Athos was in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries.

About the author

The essayist, poet and novel writer Horia Ion Groza (born in Romania and established in USA in 1986), has a PhD in plant genetics and breeding and he worked 40 years in the latter domain of scientific research. He authored eleven books from which five are about Christian faith and tradition. For his Romanian publications he was awarded the LiterArt XXI Prize for journalism (1999) and for essays (2002).