• St. Ephrem – The Deformities Made Beautiful

    “Free will succeeded in making Adam’s beauty ugly, for he, a man, sought to become a god. Grace, however, made beautiful his deformities and God came to become a man. Divinity flew down to draw humanity up, for the Son had made beautiful the deformities of the servant and so he has become a god, Read more

  • St. John Chrysostom – “God Desired to Make Thee Immortal”

    St. John Chrysostom is commemorated on various days in different liturgical calendars. The Episcopal Church remembers St. John today, January 27. On January 27, 438 his holy relics were returned to Constantinople nearly thirty-ones years after his death in exile. The following passage is from one of his sermons: If God had not intended to Read more

  • The Last Anchorite

    In a previous post I mentioned Father Lazarus, a hermit on the mountain of St. Anthony. His life is one of detachment, silence, and solitude. Those things are not about absence but rather presence. They are practices and ways of life that open us to the very heart of God. They are interior conditions that Read more

  • Extreme Pilgrim – A Journey to St. Anthony’s Monastery

    The following video (about an hour) is a BBC production documenting the journey of Father Peter Owen-Jones, an Anglican priest, to the monastery of St. Anthony in the Egyptian desert. Father Peter is going to the desert where “there’s no escape, there’s no distraction” and we face and deal with our “issues.” He will live Read more

  • St. Maximus on Image and Likeness

    The first objective of God was for the human being to come to be “according to the image and likeness of God,” and what is “according to the image” is incorruption, immortality, invisibility, which image the divine: and he has bestowed these on the soul for it to possess, having bestowed along with them both Read more

  • “If You Consider Me Wise, Become As I Am”

    Today, January 17, is the Feast of St. Antony of Egypt. We remember with thanksgiving his life and seek his prayers and guidance for our own lives. His biography, The Life of Antony, was written by St. Athanasius. St. Antony’s desert journey began one Sunday morning in a small Egyptian village in the year 270 Read more

Fr. Mike

My name is Mike Marsh. I am a priest of the Episcopal Church. I retired from active parish ministry in 2025 after serving twenty-two years in The Episcopal Diocese of West Texas.

Spiritual Direction

I am available for spiritual direction online and in person. I have been doing spiritual direction for nearly twenty years. It is one of the aspects of my priesthood about which I am most passionate.

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© Michael K. Marsh and Interrupting the Silence, 2009-2025, all rights reserved. Please contact me for permission to use content from Interrupting the Silence.

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