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Propaganda Poster Recently I began what I hope will become a dialogue with a fundamentalist.  That is, I asked on-line for a free copy of the Quran, and in due time it arrived in the mail.  After a decent delay, the people who kindly supplied it to me emailed me to ask what I thought of it.  It was, of course, not so much an interested query as an attempt at conversion, but that was fair enough, and politely asked, and completely expected. In a similar spirit of brotherly conversation between two men of good will, I replied that I had read the Quran in its entirety, and had a couple of questions.  One was how in the surah “The Story” ...

Learn to suffer courageously the trials the Lord may allow to visit you. Don’t seek comfort from people in your sorrows, but take your comfort from God.

As I was growing up, I was living in a world that neither my mother nor father had a complete understanding or control of, particularly my mother who was an immigrant. Of course, my parents allowed me to participate in many of the same “American” luxuries that the other children in my school took pleasure in, such as skiing and camping. They let me sleep over friends' houses and have sleep overs. But every weekend, I was asked to leave my “American” world behind and enter into the world of my extended family and Romanian Orthodox community. Every Sunday, while my friends were often enjoying hiking excursions or visits to amusement parks, I was expected to attend church school and ...

I would like to briefly express what the Orthodox Church means to me, as one who has entered into it later in life. This of course, is impossible to articulate with words, because it is a mystery, but I will speak, like a child in awe. I am in awe at the Orthodox Church. It’s beauty, its grace. The mystical silence and stillness, which abides here. I am in awe at the purity of the Church’s teachings. The Lives of the Saints and Martyrs, the prayers and hymns of the Church, the Protection of the Panagia. The humility and sanctity of the Holy Mountain. The Icons and writings of the Fathers of the Church. The mercy of the Sacraments, the Christ-like ...

The purer and more powerful are the means that unite us to God, that is prayer and repentance, the more cunning and destructive the actions of the evil one become against these means.

The earliest title of the main Sunday service of the Christian Church is “the Eucharist”, from the Greek word eucharisteo, meaning, “to give thanks.” As early as about the middle of the second century, Justin the Philosopher (later known as “Justin Martyr”) wrote that the bread and wine which the Christians received sacramentally was “called among us ‘the Eucharist’, of which no one is allowed to partake but the ones who believe that the things which we teach are true” (Apology, chapter 66). The ritual service would also later be called “the Divine Liturgy,” and “the Mass.” The Lord Jesus commanded His disciples to perform this ritual on the night on which He was betrayed. Before noon the next day, He would ...

This preparation incorporates a series of supplications and a prayer by the priest which concludes with the words: ‘And count us worthy, Master, with boldness and without condemnation, to dare to call upon you, the God of heaven, as Father, and say’: ‘Our Father Who are in heaven…’ In this prayer, there are three wishes, which were expressed in an older form of English in the optative mood: ‘Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done’, meaning ‘May your will be hallowed, may your kingdom come and may your will be done on earth as in heaven’. Then we have the imperative; we tell God what to do. ‘Give us today our daily bread’. Now, it must be ...

Vainglory is the thief of spiritual riches. It doesn’t only destroy good works but also becomes a guide for evil ones. It undermines the foundations of the greater virtues. It’s the moth that eats away at everything we have with pleasure, which coats the poison of its deception with honey, thus filling people’s minds from this disastrous chalice.

Whoever wants to become a Christian, must first become a poet. — Saint Porphyrios When I was young, they brought me to Babylon And the night hung over my head The smoke came into my dreams In the valley of dry bones It was under the skies of Babylon Where my soul fell in love with God My eyes were seared and my blood was bruised But I was hidden within a song All around were the sounds of Babylon But all I heard, were the hymns of heaven It was under the skies of Babylon Where my soul fell in love with her I was barely coming clean and she had already seen A war on her innocence I spoke of the Christ underneath the clouds And woke her from the sleep ...

115. It happened that a great Elder was with his disciples in a place where there were all kinds of cypresses, large and small. He said to one of his disciples: ‘Pull up that little cypress plant’. It was very small and the monk had no difficulty in pulling it up with one hand. Then the Elder indicated another, bigger than the first, and said ‘Pull that one up as well’. After giving it a shake, the monk used both hands to uproot it. He then pointed to another, even bigger, and the monk uprooted that, too, though with more effort. The Elder then pointed to another one, even bigger. The monk shook it hard and expended much effort and ...

I’ve told you in different ways how people fall into bad habits. We don’t call people volatile if they lose their tempers just once. They’re not libertines if they succumb once. If they’ve given alms once, that doesn’t make them charitable. It’s the constant practice of virtue or wickedness that makes it an unbreakable habit in the soul, and it’s this which torments it or brings it solace. We’ve already said, in a variety of ways, how this happens. Virtue’s natural and innate to the soul, since the seeds of virtue can’t be eradicated. As I’ve said, the more we practice virtue, the more we become identified with it. In other words, we find our true nature again, we find ...

We make it very hard for God to appear to us when we’re like a broken mirror on the shards of which even spiritual matters are reflected and reduplicated in a hundred different ways. Christ came into the world to make this mirror of ours complete, so that we can receive His image within us.

There is a point of stillness within us, though we rarely recognize it. We inhabit the world of our thoughts and feelings and rarely find them to be quiet. Almost nothing challenges the “normalcy” of this noisy world – almost everything we encounter is aimed towards it and markets itself with this reality in mind. Not so the gospel. Christ consistently and persistently speaks past the noise in a person’s head. He addresses the point of stillness. The noise of our thoughts and feelings is described by the fathers as “the passions.” They are the products of our inner distortions. We do not actually “choose” most things, that is, what we acquire is not in fact a product of the will. Rather, what we experience ...

In Greece, our knowledge of Hollywood stars is restricted almost exclusively to watching them at the cinema or on television. Jonathan Jackson, however, has broken this pattern. He came to Greece, the cradle of Orthodoxy, in order to speak and to describe his own journey into Orthodoxy. This is of great symbolic and substantive importance for us Greeks. It’s also of great value- symbolic and substantive- for the USA. A young man, successful in the world of entertainment, a member of a globalized, consumer society, received the call of God where it found him, in his profession as an actor, and he responded to it. He opened his heart to the truth and allowed Light to fill it. He had ...

Zeal is the dog which guards the law of God, which is virtue. Like a fiery furnace, zealous people heat up, like the Cherubim and are on the lookout at every moment for the traps and attacks of the evil spirits. Zeal wanes when people don’t believe in divine providence and forget God. There is a cooling of zeal when the desire for virtue lessens, when we trust in ourselves and stop fearing the demons.

17 December 1989 In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Ten lepers came to the Lord; ten men who were ritually unclean and therefore, ritually rejected by their community, unable to attend the common worship of the Temple, unable to come near the habitations of men; and unclean also in the eyes of men because their sickness could be transmitted to others: others could become impure, others could be sick unto death. They came to Christ and stood afar off because they knew that they had no right to come near, to touch Him as had the woman who had an issue of blood and who had been healed. From afar they cried for mercy, and the Lord ...

Some time ago, I was approached by a new parishioner, after Liturgy, with a question, “How do I become closer to the people at church?”  Shocked and saddened that she even had to ask that question (such implications!), I hurriedly mumbled something about her volunteering.  And then I thought, and thought, and thought, through the night, the next day, weeks passed.  How does one make friends, true friends?  Sometimes life is so superficial.  We kiss and say, “Hello.  How are you?”  But we don’t mean it.  Or maybe we even do, but only on the surface.  How do you break through that barrier and truly get someone to care about you?  Well, you need to do several things. First, pray.  God ...

When I first went to Elder Iosif, he began his supervision and his cure from the very first day. He was very strict with me, always chastising me and berating me. He tired me out, because I was spiritually weak.

When I was in the coenobium, the Abbot, with the consent of the Elders, made me guest-master. I was, at the time, recovering from a serious illness. Strangers came and I stayed up with them; camel-drivers arrived and I looked after them. And there were lots of times when I was just about to go to sleep after all this when something would crop up and they’d rouse me again. Then it would be time for the vigil and, before I’d had time to get to sleep, the canonarch would come to wake me. Then, whether it was from tiredness or illness- because I still had a slight fever- I’d feel so completely exhausted that I had trouble knowing where ...

So we must be prepared to defend and to witness.