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The Second Thursday of Great Lent. Great Lent: An Empirical Journey into the Depths of Our Being

~ By Elder Patapios Kavsokalyvitis, Superintendent of the Skete of the Holy Trinity, Mount Athos By fasting, we learn to say ‘No’ to our desire for food and also learn to say ‘No’ to our often self-destructive will. We also learn to say ‘Yes’ to God, which is always redemptive. We’ve begun the Triodio, this blessed period of the liturgical year, with repentance, because we’ve felt deeply, existentially, within us the need to return from

The Second Tuesday of Great Lent. And Not to Judge my Brother

~By Protopresbyter Georgios Dorbarakis It’s a constant exhortation on the part of the Church, all the year round, but particularly during Lent. Indeed, the prayer of Saint Efraim the Syrian is a powerful reminder which we repeat on a daily basis: ‘And not to judge my brother’. And how could it be otherwise, when Jesus Christ himself, the head of the faith, gave us the commandment which expresses the existence or absence of love towards

The Second Monday of Great Lent. The Sunday of Orthodoxy

~ By Metropolitan Athanasios of Lemessos On the first Sunday of Lent [yesterday, Sunday], we celebrate[d] the Sunday of Orthodoxy, that is to say the feast of the restitution of the holy icons, as the Church once again, by the grace of God, vanquished the heresy of the iconoclasts and preserved with exactitude the faith and the tradition of the Holy Fathers of the Church, as it has been preserved throughout the ages. This faith

The First Friday of Great Lent. 1st Salutations

Protopresbyter Georgios Dorbarakis ‘I shall open my mouth and it will be filled with praise and I shall pour out words to the Queen and Mother; I shall be seen radiantly keeping the festival and shall joyfully sing her wonders’ (irmos, ode 1, Akathistos Hymn). As the voice of the Church and of us, also, the holy hymnographer tells us that he’ll sing, he’ll shout, about Our Lady, who is the Queen and Mother. This

Forgiveness Sunday – Do We Know What We’re Doing?

~By Fr Stephen Freeman, March 13, 2016 This is a meditation I shared with my parish this week as the Sunday of Forgiveness approaches: Perhaps the most generous words spoken by Christ are those we hear from the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Taken at face value, the words make little sense. Surely, those who crucified Christ knew that they were killing a man. Surely they were

From Darkness to Light

~By Archimandrite Varnavas Lambropoulos On the eve of our entry into Great Lent, everything in church speaks to us of repentance. The wonderful hymns ‘robe’ the message of repentance in a poetic manner; the Gospel reading gives us the keys to open the gates of repentance; and the Epistle reminds us of one of Saint Paul’s most pressing admonitions: to call us to repentance. In essence the leading apostle repeats, in his own, graphic manner,

Who Loves Perfectly?

~By Fr. Andreas Agathokleous I don’t know if, in other eras, people experienced confusion regarding words, that is, that they said one thing and meant another. Despite the great achievements of scientific progress, technological development, the shrinking of distances, and tremendous communications, I think that, in our own age there’s the following particular contradiction: although we’re always waxing lyrical about love (in songs, poetry and prose), in reality we don’t know what it is, because,

Distress and Delight

Fr. Andreas Agathokleous How is it that you want to be friends with someone, but yet you don’t make any effort to get in touch with them, particularly when there’s no reluctance on their part? How is it that you want to feel God’s joy within you, to feel the sweetness of his presence, but yet you don’t pray? How is it that you say you love God, but yet you don’t observe his commandments?

How Does the Holy Trinity Create a Person?

Dr. Nikolaos Koios, Content Coach of Pemptousia It’s been noted by theological scholarship on more than one occasion that, in Orthodoxy, dogma and ethos, theory and practice, faith and life are indissolubly bound together. Every invitation to spiritual struggle has a powerful dogmatic foundation and vice versa: the spiritual life of the Church of love and humility is what produces, in a sense, the dogmatic conscience of each member individually and of the Church as

Pentecost Saturday for Souls

Published by Pemptousia Partnership on June 19, 2021 Petros Panayiotopoulos, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Theology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Our holy Church offers us another opportunity to remember and honor our dead people, our beloved persons who passed away, and all her members by whom we are in communion through God’ s love and the grace from the sacraments, beyond this sense of time. To say it in other words, by this care we confirm the unity of