Protopresbyter Georgios Dorbarakis An acquaintance of Saint Païsios once asked him to pray for a girl who’d become involved with the occult. The saint said: ‘I have to feel her pain’. The man didn’t understand and thought the saint meant that he’d cause her pain, but was told: ‘Tell me something about her so that I can feel her pain and pray for her with pain in my soul’. All believing Christians know the value
Fr. Andreas Agathokleous It’s not easy to look at the world. You have to step back a bit, as you would with a painting. Not too far, though, because then you lose the relationship, you don’t hear the messages, the words of its silence. The world’s characterized by noise, bustle, cares and not insignificant problems. You can’t see everything. It’s impossible to know everything. You can just guess at it, looking through your own microscope.
By Metropolitan of Pisidia Sotirios † 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
[Desert Father] Evagrius helped lead another student into liberating insight into the nature of her very active mind, especially the connection between her anger and her fear. While she was less revealing of the details of her struggles, she was grappling with the fallout and follow-through of an intervention initiated by concerned friends. She admits it needed to be done but she still struggles with feelings of betrayal and more. She wrote: Evagrius seems to
Published by Pemptousia Partnership on May 27, 2021 Metropolitan Meletios of Nikopolis † For people who have any understanding of God and his kingdom, nothing’s a misfortune. Saint John suffered one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall anyone. He was taken prisoner of war. By the Turks. At the age of twenty. What could have been worse? Yet this misfortune proved to be his greatest good fortune. Not only did he gain the kingdom of God, the
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, May 28, 2017 at St. Mary Orthodox Church The Lord seems grounded and focused as he prays this long discourse-like prayer on the eve of his passion. When you might expect that fear and anxiety would distract him and overwhelm him, they don’t. He seems to be utterly non-resistant to the fear he must have been feeling and to the fate that waited for him. That doesn’t
Published by Pemptousia Partnership on October 17, 2021 Fr. Andreas Agathokleous The ‘forgive me’ which comes from a heart in pain over a mistake breaks down the hard wall of remoteness, of animosity, and unites that which was divided. This is why it’s neither easy nor painless. Because the easy and painless ‘forgive me’, expressed as a formula for restoring relations on a superficial level, isn’t capable of breaking down walls. There’s ‘forgive me’ to God and to
Published by Pemptousia Partnership on January 20, 2022 Fr. Andreas Agathokleous No one has gone through life without ever being worried, hurt, or driven to tears. As children of Adam, all of us, young and old, have to live with the consequences of the fall of our forefather, precisely because that forefather is each one of us. There’s no need to find support for this view of the human condition, since life itself is evidence of the difficulty,
By Fr John Breck, October 2, 2008 In the preceding column I raised questions about the terribly difficult issue of euthanasia, and specifically, whether in an Orthodox Christian perspective there could ever be a morally acceptable way to hasten the death of a dying person, when that person is consumed by uncontrollable pain and suffering. Fortunately, such cases today are rare. Palliative care and medications for pain management have been developed to the point that
Published by Pemptousia Partnership, November 29, 2017 Dr. Nikolaos Koios, Content Coach of Pemptousia It’s a profound conviction of the Orthodox Church that every epoch has its own saints and there’s not a single age without them. In every era, the saints are proof and demonstration of the grace of Christ, the love of the Father and the communion of the Holy Spirit, in place and time, among us. When saints leave this earth for their
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