In English

It has become a commonplace to hear someone say, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Most people have a general understanding of what is meant. I usually assume that the person holds to a number of ideas that are considered “spiritual” in our culture, but that they are not particularly interested in “organized religion.” I understand this, because organized religion can often be the bane of spiritual existence. I am an Orthodox Christian – which is not the same thing as saying that I have an interest in “organized religion.” There is much about organized religion that I dislike in the extreme, and I occasionally see its shadow seep into my experience within Orthodoxy. But I repeat unashamedly that I am an Orthodox ...

July 12, the Feast of Saint Païsios People weren’t made to stay where they are. They were made to become what they aren’t. Our majesty isn’t to be found in the present or the past, but in our future. Stagnation in the present, as immobility, is the equivalent of death. And any movement towards the past is motion towards the non-being from which we were called by the Creator’s command. It’s only movement towards the future that denotes vitality and the chance of prospering. The time of our life acquires meaning and content only when it unfolds as a movement towards the fulfilment of the purpose of our existence, the purpose for which we were created. And that purpose is for us ...

Cutting yourself off from your brothers and sisters isn’t a characteristic of people who are living in accordance with the commandment of love.

Archimandrite Zacharias Zacharou, Publisher: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist 2010 - ISBN: 1874679738. To the always impeccable series of publications from the Holy Monastery of Saint John the Baptist, in Essex, England, has been added another exceptional book, inspired by the late Elder Sophrony and written by his beloved spiritual child and the person who is continuing his work, Archimandrite Zacharias. This book sketches the three stages of the spiritual life, on the basis of the theology of Elder Sophrony. The introduction presents, in masterful fashion, the nature and evolutionary path of faith. Initial faith is not born of fear, but precedes fear and  then goes on to give birth to the beneficial fear of God which takes people’s hearts prisoner. Erroneous ...

It’s possible to be mercenary in a good way. We give a little in this present life, so as to be rich in the next one.

Byzantine and post-Byzantine Musical Manuscripts of Mount Athos and their Importance in Modern Research* The year is 1907 and the place is Mount Athos. A young man of not more then twenty-five years of age named Henry Julius Wetenhall Tillyard visits the Holy Mountain for the first time. The purpose and interest of his visit is the study of the musical manuscripts of Mt. Athos in his quest to decipher the earlier phases of Byzantine music1. With this visit of Tillyard to Mt. Athos the modem phase of musicological study of Byzantine music is born. To appreciate the significance of this event even more, let us mention that today, with our modem means of transportation, the tlip from the city of Thessalonike ...

5. According to the mystical interpreter Saint John of Damascus, in the human world the God-man, Christ, is "the only thing new under the sun."2 Indeed, this eternal news applies not only to His Theanthropic Presence but also to His Theanthropic Work and His Theanthropic Body, the Church. And man also is always new, eternally new, ("a new creation") in his theanthro­pic newness, in all his theanthropic experiences on the road to salvation, to sanctification, to transfiguration, to theosis, to becoming like the God-man. In this terrestrial world everything ages and everything dies. St. Justin Popovich (right) together with Elder Cleopa of Romania - Chelije Monastery, 1977 Only the person who has embodied himself in the God-man and is becoming like ...

The late Elder Ioakeim was a real Athonite. He loved the Mother of God, the Holy Mountain its history and the Athonite fathers. He was distinguished for his devotion to works, learning and virtue. He avoided care and verbosity. He was a forgotten, humble and good monk. His poverty gave him a rich heart. Fault was found with Elder Ioakeim, but he never found fault with anyone else. He was born Ioannis Balasis, in 1893, in the village of Dafni, in Kalavryta,  of devout parents who had many children. He was the oldest child of eight. As a child, his first words, in a weird and wonderful fashion, were “I’m going to be a monk”. After leaving school, he worked for ...

Despite this, we can’t ignore the value of medical science, which comes as a gift from God to comfort us in the sickness of our spiritual and bodily condition. Christ Himself came into the world as the doctor of our souls and bodies. His manifestation of the kingdom of God was marked by the cure of the sick. But the various cures which have been effected by saints in the world are recognized as being the result of God’s special grace. And typically these cures involve the completion of a bodily organ, as in the case of the man who was blind from birth and was healed by the Lord, but also the transplantation of a body part, such as ...

Although God is beyond description and approach in His essence, and could change everything with a single word, He came down to us and submitted Himself to the whole of the human condition: the humiliation, the suffering and death. He did all of this is order to come and meet us. He didn’t say: ‘Here I am. Come and meet me’. He came to us. What does this mean for our daily lives? That we should also get ourselves down to where our neighbours are, to meet them there and stop demanding that they should come and find us. We have to act as Christ did. He came and found us, not so that He would stay where we were, ...

A new situation arose after the capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The emperor in Asia Minor had an important advantage over his rival in Western Greece because he had the patriarch with him. Working in concert, emperor and patriarch established Nicaea as the political and ecclesiastical capital of a reconstituted East Roman empire. In 1261 Michael VIII Palaeologus retook Constantinople. His entry into the city was more of a religious than a military occasion as he made his way on foot to Hagia Sophia preceded by the icon of the Hodegetria. Eleven years later, he issued a jubilant chrysobull to mark the occasion of the ‘apokatastasis of the Romans’, restoring valuable properties to Hagia Sophia and bestowing gifts ...

Love for God is begotten from true faith, because people who genuinely love God would never consent to abandon this faith. Grass is better able to withstand fire than the devil can bear the flame of love. Love is a better defence than a wall and is more resilient than a diamond. Love isn’t human words and concepts, nor is it mere announcements and speeches, but rather it’s tangible care expressed through works.

In the first few centuries of the Christian era, medi­cine devel­oped more rapidly in the East than in the Latin West. The author of this paper presents the suggestion that, in great part, the differ­ence lies in the respective concepts of what actually constitutes the human person. While the Orthodox Christian Church was con­vinced of the unity of body and soul, which mutually comple­ment each other, the Latin West became influenced by the Gnostic  and Platonistic  concept of "dualism "— the idea of a radical dichotomy between body and soul in the human person. This Gnostic  idea tends to see an enmity between body and soul, indeed, between all matter and that which is said to be spiritual. It conveys the ...

Transplants have become part of everyday life in modern society. The positive and negative positions which have been expressed on them in ecclesiastical and theological circles have usually been of a fragmentary nature. The Orthodox Church has not yet taken a final decision on them. And any such position cannot be adopted by isolated individuals or committees attempting to base their views on its tradition, but will have to be at the behest of its universal conscience. The beginnings of transplants go back to ancient times. The ancient Egyptians already know how to make skin grafts. The first transplants of vital organs and human body tissue, however, took place in our own day. The first successful kidney transplant was completed in ...

Returning to the subject of the Elder’s sermons. It was indeed a great spiritual pleasure to see him preach in church. His face would be transformed in a wondrous way, since the whole of his soul was invested in the sermon. He would actually often make some kind of witticism or would mention some very simple, everyday examples, at which people would laugh. His ultimate objective, besides people’s spiritual benefit, was not to be admired at all. Such was his humility. I remember him regularly mentioning the following simple example, as a way for the uneducated peasant farmers to understand the reason behind Christ’s incarnation: he used to say that there was someone who noticed some ants down a stream-bed ...

Set your hope on God, Who stoops and sees from above. We do our part, which is the effort.

Rapid advances in modern medicine have opened up vast new vistas in an effort to prolong human life and erad­icate disease. Most dramatic of these breakthroughs is the transplantation of vital organs from one person to another. Organ transplants are such a new phenomenom that they raise unique and never before encountered theological and ethical questions for our Orthodox faithful: Can we violate the bodily integrity of one person, in order to help another? Can we allow the deliberate "dismemberment" of a lifeless body or the "mutilation" of one living person for the sake of another? Or shall we permit an otherwise healthy person to die when an organ transplant can restore him to a fairly normal and reasonably extended ...