In English

In the Holy Orthodox Church on the fifth week of Great Lent we read the life of St. Mary of Egypt: out loud, as part of compline. St. Mary is a repentant harlot who lived as a hermit for forty-seven years in the wilderness east of the Jordan River in the early sixth century. Near the end of her life, she is found by a certain monk from the monastery of St. John the Baptist, Fr. Zosimas, to whom she tells her story. In the normal course of the liturgical life of the Church, the Synaxarion (book of the lives of the Saints) is read every day at Matins. For Orthodox Christians the lives of the saints function not only as lesson ...

The same is true for the preeminent agents of heavenly paternity in the Church, that is the bishop, the priest and the spiritual father. God gave them and left in them in the world to be witnesses to His own eternal fatherhood and sonship, its bearers and transferrers, the instructors in the mystery of the life of God as criterion and measure for human life and our existence. The glory which God gave to His Son, His Only-Begotten Son, is also given to them (cf. Jn. 17, 22). Herein lies the mystery of sacred Tradition, which is the transmission, within the Church, of the eternal glory of God from father to son in the same way as this same glory is ...

Don’t restrict your children’s education and upbringing to secular wisdom, to the wisdom of this world. They should, at the same time, learn the wisdom that comes from above and the highest form of truth. They should learn the law of God and the commandments of Christ. They should learn all due reverence, the constant remembrance of God and the proper Christian path. Only then will your children not be lost in the ways of human wisdom, only then will they always hold Christian wisdom above all else, the knowledge of God. This is the way we should bring up our children.

The honor and respect of Christianity to women is demonstrated especially in the person of the Theotokos. She is the human closest to God; after Christ, she is the most beloved and honored person by men and God. She has a great place in worship and is most beloved to the Fathers who wrote extensively about her. St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite affirms that the whole world was created for the person of the Theotokos, and that she was created for Christ. In addition, God would have been pleased by the Theotokos alone, even if the whole of creation had become evil and rebelled against God. The Theotokos is she who: “divinized the human race and brought the earth to the ...

Jesus. Detail of mosaic in Aghia Sophia. (phot. by Nikos Loupakis) I am a Christian. I believe in God, the Creator from nothing of heaven and earth and of everything visible and invisible. This Creator-God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who is also identically the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. There was a man, born in Bethlehem of Judea, born of a virgin whose name was Mary, a virgin who did not know a man. This man's name was Jesus. He lived for about thirty years in a little town in Galilee, called Nazareth, with his mother and a man called Joseph who was espoused to his mother and who remained faithful to both of them, ...

Conveying the emotions of its thousands of members, the Board of Directors of the Association “Friends of Vatopaidi Monastery” would like to express – and why not indeed shout from the housetop – our joy over the justification of our hopes. The final triumph of the truth was festally occasioned by the recent and unanimous verdict of acquittal by the three-member Criminal Court of Appeals of Athens for all the defendants involved in the multi-faceted, supposed scandal of Vatopaidi Monastery, which was competently – judicially, that is – shown to be a spurious fabrication and a non-scandal. The charge for our Association was sparked spontaneously and instinctively, immediately following what we regarded as the uncalled-for imprisonment of the Monastery’s Abbot, Elder ...

Virtue doesn’t come with a bell so that you can’t hear it tinkling. The bell of virtue is endurance, forbearance and patience. These are the adornments of monastics and of all Christian people.

Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” is one of my favorites. It is a formally perfect composition, and its vision of death is chilling. The poem is bitter, dark, and thoroughly unsentimental in its view of death. This is the first of its five stanzas: I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. Larkin was not a believer (he considered religion a “moth-eaten” ...

Virgin of Vladimir The first thing we sense about an icon is its great seriousness. Compare an icon in your mind a great Western religious painting, one that moves you to deeper faith or even to tears. You’ll notice that there is a difference in the *way* it moves you, however. A Western painting—which is undeniably going to be more accomplished in terms of realism, perspective, lighting, anatomy, and so forth—moves us in our imaginations and our emotions. We engage with it like we do a movie or a story. An icon hits us in a different way, though. In comparison, it is very still. It is silent. We find ourselves coming to silence as we stand before it. An icon ...

Still, whether incompatible or not with the modern sense of the self and of identity, The Ladder of Divine Ascent remains what it has long been, a text that had a profound influence, lasting many centuries, in the monastic centers of the Greek-speaking world. As such it deserves at least a hearing, if only to ensure that the awareness of the Christian past is not impoverished…        Hardly anything is known of the author, and the most reliable information about him can be summarized in the statement that he lived in the second half of the sixth century, survived into the seventh, passed forty years of solitude at a place called Tholas; that he became abbot of the great monastery of ...

Let’s pay for our soul to acquire discernment with the coin of contempt for the transient things of life on earth. Let’s seek spiritual gifts, ‘the greater gifts’, and free ourselves, through constant struggle, of our corporeal outlook, which drags the soul into irrational urges and makes people completely dumb animals.

Our theme for the fifth week of our 40 Day Challenge is Humility and Living a Saintly Life. After all, as Christians we are called to become holy; “Be holy, for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16). Last week we wrote about the greatest virtue: love. A necessary ingredient, however, to cultivate authentic Christian love is humility. Just like bread without yeast will not rise, love without humility will remain only half-baked and not reach its full potential. Have you ever thought about the relationship between love and humility? Have you ever considered the correlation between these two virtues? Who had and showed the greatest love for humanity – towards the sick, the infirm, and those in need? It was the God-man Jesus ...

Patience over a long period of time engenders humility. Humility leads to the health of the soul. Health of the soul brings knowledge of God. Knowledge of God brings love of God. And, finally, love of God attracts God’s grace, which is the sweetest of all.

In today’s Epistle, Saint Paul calls hope ‘a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul’. A ship without an anchor runs the risk of being dashed against the rocks along a coast. When people without hope are faced with the adversities of life, they’ve got nothing to lean on. What an anchor is for a ship, or air for the lungs, hope is for our spiritual existence. Hope is the anchor of the ship of life. Hope becomes our support in times of sorrow and of trials, of pain and failure. Hope urges our tired footsteps forward, illumines the dark and uncertain path of life and expels confusion, stress and turbulence from our heart. Naturally everywhere we turn our gaze around us, ...

St. Gregory of Nyssa, in an extensive homily on 1 Co 15:28, written to challenge the heresy of Eunomius, explains the various meanings of the word ὑποταγή (submission) in Scripture. He clarifies that the word is used in the case of war to indicate subjugation to the victor, as well as the power of humans over nature and other living creatures. With regard to subjugation, he also mentions slavery where there is unavoidable necessity, and finally, the faithful who submit themselves to God for the purpose of salvation. His point is to differentiate these meanings from that of submission (ὑποταγή) of the Son to the Father. Interestingly enough, in the entire homily St. Gregory does not mention the case of ...

To Western eyes, the monk, increasingly, is a figure of yesterday, and the commonest images of him are of the kind to make easy the patronizing smile, the confidently dismissive gesture, or that special tolerance extended to the dotty and the eccentric. Around Friar Tuck, with his cheerful obesity, and Brother Francis, harming no-one as he talks to birds and animals, vaguer ghosts manage to cluster, gaunt, cowled, faintly sinister, eyes averted or looking heaven-wards, a skull clutched in a wasted hand, with gloom arising, and laughter dead. Somewhere in the background there are bells and hymns, and psalms chanted well after midnight; and, as if to confirm that these are only the leftovers of a past surely and mercifully gone, ...

In Great Lent, the Orthodox Church, through its long, penitential services, seeks the mystical experience and approach of the Passion and the Resurrection. With this in mind, the hymns of this period are of an appropriate content, and present the events of our salvation to us the faithful. The joyful sorrow of Great Lent is introduced into the liturgical cycle of services by Penitential Vespers which is celebrated every Sunday evening. At this service the Great Prokeimenon is sung: ‘Do not turn away your face from your servant, for I am afflicted. Hear me speedily; attend to my soul and deliver it’. (Ps. 68, 18). Sung here, in tone plagial 4, by the late master of the art of church chant, Matthaios ...