St. Gregory of Sinai Monastery - Articles

Sermon for the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, 2008

www.gsinai.com — 2008-02-23T22:55:08-08:00

Last weeks sermon by His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Beloved Brothers and Sisters in Christ, on this Sunday we are still in the midst of the Feast of the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple that took place forty days after the birth of the God-Man. In the temple we encounter with Saint Simeon the manifestation of the greatest and most extraordinary paradox since time began.

As it says in the hymns of the Church, ‘The Ancient of Days is carried as a small Babe in the arms of His Virgin Mother into the Temple in the fulfillment of His own law.’

These words boggle the mind.

When we confront this reality, it is eminently obvious to us that there is no faith like our faith and there is a great distinction between the God of Israel and the many gods of the nations and their mythologies. The mind of man could not conceive that the Beginningless God Who created all things from nothing would become a small babe in order to fulfill a law that He gave to His creatures in order to show his love for us and in order to show us the way. Our unproud God has shown us the way to salvation through taking this path of humility.

I have read many and various tracks wherein people attempt to outline the similarities between Buddhism and Christianity or many and various other religions and Christianity and to be sure, there is no teaching or doctrine in any other religion that comes even remotely close to this.

And so now, in today’s Parable of the Prodigal and the Pharisee, our Savior, the God-Man reiterates this principle of humility, for He said

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.

As you know, the Pharisees were strict keepers of the law and looked upon as righteous. The Publicans on the other hand we those that collaborated with the hated Roman authority to collect taxes. Furthermore, they made their fortune by overcharging the taxes and keeping the surplus, and thus they were looked upon as illegitimate members of the house of Israel.

The Pharisee stood and prayed, “O God I thank Thee.”

Thus far he made an excellent beginning, in fact, this is how spiritual men have advised that we begin all of our prayers. Then he added those foolish and infamous words:

“…that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess."

And so this Pharisee looks around and judges this other man that is found in the Temple, rather than facing God alone in the Temple. When we enter the church we should understand that this is a place of judgment and we should stand to face God and speak to Him. If we spend our time in Church looking around or idly chatting we rob ourselves of spiritual profit and, perhaps, never come to an experience of real prayer. I know parents with children need to keep an eye on them, but there are times, during prayers of repentance, that, even in group prayer we need to perceive ourselves in the community of believers, yet alone before God. If we exercise the awareness that there will be that day of final judgment wherein each of us will stand alone before God and have to make a reckoning, we will not be distracted with the affairs of others and will be more intense in our efforts during these opportunities to reconcile ourselves with God.

Instead of thanking God for His grace the Pharisee compared himself with men who are under the sway of sin. Instead of comparing himself to the virtuous in order to see what was lacking in his own life, the Pharisee abandoned self-examination in order to ridicule his brother. To make things worse, he also begins to congratulate himself in his virtues.

Is it spiritually wise to count our seeming virtues and congratulate ourselves? To answer this we need only remember the words of Solomon, “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble” (Prov 3:34).

The wise Saint Paul gave us a model for intelligent spiritual reflection, when he said,

“Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil 3: 13-14).

Saint Anthony the Great explained a bit more for us concerning the correct attitude we all need to embrace regarding virtue and our progress therein, exhorting his disciples,

“Progress in virtue is not measured by time, but by fervor and fixity of purpose.”

In other words, in the life of virtue what is done is past and will not secure us for the future. Our past deeds can illumine our minds and help us for the future, but vigilance is required. If we do not keep our fervor to fix our will to remain obedient to God, we can become complacent and negligent and loose all of our former labors. There are the many examples from past and present of men that began well and practiced virtue and confessed the faith, only later to lose sight of their purpose and become compromised and a mere shell of their former selves.

Saint John Climacus explains for us the three ways the devil tries to subvert our efforts in the virtues. First, the devil tries to prevent us from doing any virtuous deed at all. Then if he doesn’t succeed at that, he attempts to lead us astray and make sure that whatever we do, it is not done according to God. [For example; when some seeming spiritual deed is actually done not for Christ and His Church, but for a personal agenda]. And if the devil fails in all of the above, he then tries to deceive us and puff us up with vainglory for our accomplishments. This vainglory can give birth to Luciferic pride which separates one from God.

Whenever any teaching concerning the virtues arises, the words of Saint Mark the Ascetic should always be included in the lesson. In his treatise On Those Who Think That They Are Made Righteous By Works, Saint Mark the Ascetic explains why it is spiritual deception to count up our virtues:

“Every good work which we perform through our own natural powers causes us to refrain from the corresponding sin; but without grace it cannot contribute to our sanctification.. The self controlled refrain from gluttony; those who have renounced possessions, from greed; the tranquil, from loquacity; the pure, from self-indulgence; the modest, from unchastely; the self-dependant, from avarice; the gentle, from agitation; the humble, from self-esteem; the obedient, from quarrelling; the self-critical, from hypocrisy. Similarly, those who pray are protected from despair; the poor, from having many possessions; confessors of the faith, from its denial; martyrs, from idolatry. Do you see how every virtue that is performed even to the point of death is nothing other that refraining from sin? Now to refrain from sin is a work within our own natural powers, but not something that buys the kingdom” (Philokalia Vol I, p. 127, Saint Mark the Ascetic).

Works are necessary, but no matter what we accomplish, we are saved by the grace and mercy of God.

The saints of God are never overly confident, but rather even after much progress and labor they are filled with humility. Saint Moses the Ethiopian was once asked to come to a gathering of the fathers and to make a judgment on a brother who was convicted of sin. At first he refused to go, but then he consented to attend. As he went put a basket filled with sand on his shoulder. This basket had a hole in it and the sand trailed behind him. When he entered the assembly, some of the brethren asked him what this meant and he said for all to hear, ‘I am come to judge a brother for his sins and the sands of my own sins which I do not see run out behind me.’

And so, the saints teach us to hate sin and never despise the sinner. A young monk in Scete once asked one of the older monks, “What does it mean to hate sin?” The more experienced monk replied, “to hate sin is to condemn sin in ourselves, but to justify our neighbor.”

We need to hate all sins because they separate us from God, but we need to hate and fear pride all the more. We need only remember the words of Solomon, “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble” (Prov 3:34).

Next in the parable, our Savior describes the example of the Publican:

“And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto Heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be gracious to me a sinner.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”

Whenever we approach prayer, whenever we come to Church, we need to remind ourselves that we are here to accomplish something. If we do not come with pain in our heart, then the experience can be empty and our exercise unfruitful. No matter what station we have in life, no matter what progress we have made spiritually, it is the Prayer of the Publican, the prayer of a broken hearted, humble man that we all need to use as our model for prayer. We are all tempted in many and various ways and we offend God in ways that we do not understand, but our God is merciful. If we approach God with genuine pain of heart and abasement, our offering is accepted. “—A heart that is broken and humble, God will not despise.”

We do not praise the Publican for his deeds, but for his unshakable faith in our Merciful Master and his spiritual discretion in knowing how to approach God. Saint Gregory Palamas unpacks for us one aspect of the Publican’s discretion and the depths of his pain of heart:

…Sometimes we humble ourselves when we pray and may we imagine that we will be rewarded with the same justification as the Publican. But it is not so. We must consider the fact that the Publican was despised by the Pharisee to his face, even after he had abandoned sin, and he condemned himself with contempt, not only not contradicting the Pharisee, but joining in with his accusation against him.

When you abandon evil doing, do not contradict those who despise or reproach you because of it. Join them in condemning yourself for what you are like and, though contrite in prayer, take refuge in the forgiveness of God alone, realizing that you are a rescued publican. Many have called themselves sinners, and so do we, but dishonor tests the heart…

[Homilies of Saint Gregory Palamas, Translated by Christopher Veniamin, Vol. 1 p 18-19]

Saint Gregory makes a very important point. To call to mind one’s sins and to sigh for a moment is not repentance. We only repent when we take ownership for what we have done wrong and are ready to endure what it takes to be healed. The phenomena of a supposed repentance on one’s own terms that avoids the detection of Church authority is pride and spiritual deception, from which may the Lord deliver us all.

In our endeavor to encounter our Lord through prayer let us remember the following words of Saint James the Brother of the Lord:

“Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you Cleanse your hands, ye sinner; and purify your hearts, ye double-minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He shall lift you up” (James 4: 7-10).

When we come to Church, let us remember this parable and that the temple of God is a place of judgment wherein we each make answer for ourselves alone. If we do this we can imitate the Publican and entreat God with soul cleansing pain of heart and find reconciliation with God. Our God loves us and wishes to justify us, to purify us and make us His sons and daughters.

May God bless your efforts for this season of spiritual struggle and labor at virtue, and may you acquire spiritual wisdom. Amen.

On the Nativity of Christ

www.gsinai.com — 2008-01-08T15:27:12-08:00

Glory to Your coming that restored humankind to life.
Glory to that One Who came to us by His First-born.
Glory to that Silent One Who spoke by means of His Voice.
Glory to that Sublime One Who was seen by means of His Voice.
Glory to that Sublime One Who was seen by means of His Dawn.
Glory to the Spiritual One Who was well-pleased
that His Child should become a body so that through Him His power might be felt
and the bodies of His kindred might live again.
Glory to that Hidden One Whose Child was revealed.
Glory to that Living One Whose Son became a mortal.
Glory to that Great One Whose Son descended and became small.
Glory to that Great One Who fashioned Him,
the Image of His greatness and Form for His hiddenness.
With the eye and the mind–with both of them we saw Him.
Glory to that Hidden One Who even to the mind
is utterly imperceptible to those who investigate Him.
But by His grace through His humanity
a nature never before fathomed is now perceived.

St. Ephrem the Syrian (4th C), "Hymns On the Nativity"
Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns, pages 83-84
Classics of Western Spirituality
Paulist Press

A Word about Prayer from the "Apocalypse"

www.gsinai.com — 2007-12-23T18:17:12-08:00

And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer. And much incense was given unto him to give with the prayers of the saints at the golden altar before the throne. And the smoke of the incense with the prayers of the saints went up before God out of the hand of the angel. (Revelation 8:3-4)

Commentary
He calls the altar a censer, as being receptive of incense. When Christ appears, the prayers of the saints, like some first-fruit and honored, primal offering, are brought to Him by our guardian angels, prayers which are naturally sweet-smelling, but which become sweeter-smelling with the cooperation of the holy angels. That is why it is said, much incense was given unto him; it was clearly God's gift to the angels to protect human beings and to make their prayers acceptable.

Oecumenius (6th C), Commentary on the Apocalypse, page 83
Fathers of the Church, Vol. 112
Catholic University of America

St. Gregory of Sinai

www.gsinai.com — 2007-12-10T14:43:12-08:00

Saint Gregory of Sinai was born around 1265, and reposed on November 27/December 10, 1346. He was thus an older contemporary of Saint Gregory Palamas, who was born in 1296 and reposed in 1359. This year the monastery celebrated its altar feast with the help of visiting Protopsaltis John Presson from the Portland Cathedral, whose mastery of Byzantine chant enriched the community's offering of prayer and worship on this high feast. We were moved by and grateful for the presence of quite a number of pilgrims this year whose presence multiplied our joy.

The writings of Saint Gregory of Sinai have not received the intense academic interest enjoyed by his younger monastic contemporary, Saint Gregory Palamas, but his basic writings are available in volume 4 of Faber's Philokalia (212-286) with a brief introductory note (207-211). Kallistos Ware (titular Metropolitan of Diokleia, Ecumenical Patriarchate) wrote a short essay The Jesus Prayer is St Gregory of Sinai, and another British academic, David Balfour, presented Saint Gregory's Discourse on the Transfiguration in an edited version with English translation, in successive issues of Theologia, printed as a single book by Borgo Press in 1989. A recent (2004) book in modern Greek by Aggeliki Delikari studies the slavonic translation of Saint Gregory's works (Agios Grigorios o Sinaitis: I Drasi kai i Symvoli Tou sti Diadosi tou Isichasmou sta Valkania). Among the questions that interest modern academics is whether or not the two great hesychasts, Gregory of Sinai and Gregory Palamas, were in contact with one another.

All those who feel jarred and distracted by the confusions of the 21st century will be consoled by the life of Saint Gregory of Sinai. Born and raised in early youth near Klazomenai, in Asia Minor, he was captured by marauding Moslem pirates with his family and other Greek townsmen and held for ransom. While in detention he was noted for his ability as a chanter by the Christian worshippers living under Moslem rule. Once ransomed he seems to have left his family - although still young - and to have gone to Cyprus, where he became a rassoforos monk (the first grade of monastic profession) and then moved on to Sinai where he was tonsured as a fully-professed monk (hence his title, of Sinai, although he spent comparatively little time in Sinai). There is today a small kelli (one-room monastic cabin) at some distance from the great monastery of Saint Katherine dedicated to Saint Gregory, and the contemporary local view is that he moved to this small hermitage and spent some time there. Whatever the case, for those who love the Saint it is a very moving experience indeed to stand in the wonderful katholikon of Saint Katherine's on Sinai and consider that he stood in the same building seeing the same great ikonographic program that impresses itself on worshippers today, centering on the great mosaic of the Saviour's Transfiguration filling the eastern apse of the temple.

He moved on to Crete where a monk Arsenios taught him (evidently for the first time) about the guarding of the nous, true watchfulness and pure prayer as his biographer and disciple, the Holy Patriarch Kallistos I of Constantinople wrote in his biography of his beloved Elder.

From Crete Saint Gregory moved on to Mount Athos, probably around 1300, when he would have been about 35. He did not enroll in one of the great ruling monasteries, but in a remote skete, named Magoula, the ruins of which can still be seen about a half-hour's walk eastward from the modern ruling monastery, Philotheou. Not much is left of Magoula, but again the ruins bear powerfully upon any who are devoted to Saint Gregory.

Saint Gregory was to live for about a quarter of a century in this place until, around 1325-1328 Moslem piratic incursions became so intrusive and distracting that those seeking solitude and its peace and silence opted to move away from the Holy Mountain (rather than into one of the strongly-fortified ruling monasteries). He attempted a return at some point in the 1330's but soon abandoned the idea of living on Athos altogether.

Saint Gregory ended his life beyond the borders of the Empire of the New Rome, in a place called Paroria in the Strandzha Mountains overlooking the Black Sea, safely within the borders of the Bulgarian Empire whose Emperor, John Alexander, was devoted to monasticism and its practitioners. Emperor John Alexander provided not only a monastic facility, but dedicated a number of villages to Saint Gregory's community - the basis of monastic economic life in that era - and provided, in addition, a military guard sufficient to ward off Moslem intrusions. One must note that Moslems were not Saint Gregory's only problem: monks in the Strandzha Mountains were moved to jealousy by the imperial patronage given to Saint Gregory's monastery, as also by the high esteem in which the Saint was held by numbers of Christians from far and near, and these envious neighbours stirred up no end of hardships for Saint Gregory and his community. Time, however, was on the side of the Parorian community, and by the time of Saint Gregory's death, his community counted large numbers of Greek- and Slav-speaking monks, some of whom were to play high and prominent roles in the life of the Church both in Constantinople and in the Slavic areas of the Balkans, and who were to constitute the core of what has been called the 'hesychast international'.

Saint Gregory seems to have played no role at all in the polemics of the era, in which Saint Gregory Palamas defended the practice of hesychast prayer and spiritual life against attacks both by Barlaam of Calabria (acting as a representative of western theological principles) and by a number of Orthodox Christian theologians equally uncomfortable with the assertions of articulate hesychasts, who were emboldened by an experience that was personal and clearly overwhelming, although the Greek-speaking opponents had somewhat different presuppositions at work in their polemical opposition to hesychasm than did Barlaam (and subsequent western critics).

However absent Saint Gregory of Sinai was from the extant polemics of the age, his writings agree entirely with the theological point of view defended by Saint Gregory Palamas.

After many hours of liturgical worship, our community gathered in a very different age and on a mountainside far removed from Athos and the Strandzha range feeling powerfully encompassed by the intercessions of its heavenly patron, noting one and all that for all the contributions of academic monographs to our understanding of the hesychasts of the 14th century - its golden age - nothing compares with a few hours of liturgical Vigil and Liturgy for accessing the heart of the matter. And to that, Amen.

+Sergios of Loch Lomond, Igoumenos
November 27/December 10, 2007

Seventy Years

www.gsinai.com — 2007-11-28T13:22:54-08:00

On November 15/28, as we celebrate the Feast of St. Paissios Velichkovsky whose life and work is crucial for the renewal of hesychast spirituality in the Church, and the beginning of the fast for the Nativity of our Saviour, we are also marking the 70th anniversary of the repose of the New Martyr, Catherine Routis of Mandra, in Attica, Greece.

Her Troparion (printed in The Struggle Against Ecumenism, p. 305) sums up her significance in the life of the Church:

The crown of martyrdom didst thou receive, O Catherine, by struggling steadfastly for the tradition of our Fathers; and thou didst surrender thy soul to Jesus the Bridegroom, when, on the festival of the Archangels at Mandra of Megaris, thou didst sincerely proclaim the dogmas of the Faith of the Scriptures.

New Martyr Catherine was born in 1900 in the village of Mandra in the region of Megara, between Athens and Corinth. When the western calendar was forcibly imposed on the Christians of Greece in 1924, large numbers of Greek Christians spontaneously rejected both the new order of things and the Hierarchs responsible for enforcing that new order.

The forcible (and violent) imposition of the western calendar was the result of a sinister combination of secularizing political policies, inaugurated by the government of Emanuel Venizelos, coupled with the reformist-ecumenist ideas associated with syncretist freemasonry and an infatuation with the West, which had been quietly emerging within a circle of Hierarchs of the Ecumenical Patriarch (and elsewhere) from the 19th century forward. These ideas would become the stated policy of that Patriarchate under the guidance of the freemason and ecclesiastical adventurer, Patriarch Meletios IV Metaxakis.

New Martyr Catherine and her husband joined the widespread populist and spontaneous rejection of the government's Synod of Bishops and their policies, and continued to worship with clergy and laity according to the traditional calendar. While much is written in our times concerning the futility and the wrong-headedness of making an issue of the 13 day difference between the western and the traditional calendar, the fact is that neither the 13 days nor even the calendar itself is the primary issue, any more than boiled wheat (kollyva, in Greek) was the issue during the kollyvades dispute; any more than painted pictures were the issue during the age of ikonoclasm. The question raised by the heresy of ikonoclasm was a fundamental christological issue; the issue raised by the kollyvades Fathers concerned the liturgical reflection of fundamental Christian faith and practice, and the issue raised by the "old-calendar" movement is the issue of the basic definition of the Church herself, as that definition is manifested in the decrees of Councils and the writings of acknowledged Fathers.

The defense spontaneously organized by humble laymen and clergy in Greece from 1924 on was only in the first instance the defense of a given calendar, because contained within that defense was the instinctive defense of the integrity of the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church" as such.

On the feast of the Archangels, November 8th (November 21st on the western calendar), 1927, Catherine was part of a large congregation of confessing Christians in her native village. During the Vigil for the feast (presided over by the Presbyter Christopher Psallidas) a detachment of police, ordered out by the Ministry of the Interior acting in response to a demand issued by the head of the government Synod, Archbishop Chrysostomos Papadopoulos, surrounded the village church. After an all-night Vigil, as the Liturgy for the feast began, the police began to batter down the doors of the church with their rifle butts. Windows were smashed. The apparent goal of the police forces was the arrest of Father Christopher (and the consequent termination of the liturgical assembly). But the efforts of the police were not met with success and they called for reinforcements. Meanwhile, inside the temple, most of the congregation received Holy Communion, and were preparing to leave the church and rest after the all-night service.

As the communicants began to leave, and as it became evident that the police were intent on arresting Father Christopher, a group of pious women surrounded him to form a protective wall, under the impression that the police would not physically attack women. Catherine Routis had left the church after Communion and made sure that her husband and 2 children were safely home, and then she had returned to the church to join the congregation's non-violent efforts to protect its Presbyter.

The police fired their guns into the air to scare off the lay defenders of their Priest, but to no avail. One woman, Angeliki Katsarellis, still inside the church, was hit in the forehead by one of the stray bullets. Women raised their voices against the violent police attack, and when a policeman raised his rifle to strike Father Christopher down, Catherine stepped between the Priest and the attacker and received the hard blow from the rifle butt on the back of her head. Falling to the floor of the church, her last words were Most holy Mother of God.

She was transferred by some of the women to Annunciation Hospital in Athens, along with the injured Angeliki Katsarellis. For 7 days New Martyr Catherine suffered in the hospital. At 4 am on November 15 (November 28 on the western calendar), the first day of the Nativity Fast, Catherine Routis died. She has been commemorated among the Church's New Martyrs ever since.

It is interesting to note that there is a widespread belief amongst the ecumenists that the old calendarists constitute a violent movement. There has been violence aplenty, in fact, both in Greece and in Romania and elsewhere, directed against the confessing, traditional Christians by the ecumenists, but actual violence directed by the confessing members of the Church against the ecumenists has yet to be documented.

Sadly the pristine early years of steadfast resistance to the ecumenist innovations were followed by our own era, characterized by disturbances from within, as confessing but undisciplined and irresponsible Hierarchs, much-given to employing the tactics of verbal abuse and to the violent denunciation of fellow confessing Hierarchs, ad hominem for the most part, have become the familiar face of traditionalism in the public square. This undisciplined and unworthy behaviour defines the confessing Church of our times in the eyes of many, and it does the confessing Church a terrible disservice.

While theological debate and the defense of truth is necessary, the tone in which that defense is undertaken can determine the actual impact of Christian apologetics. It is not possible to view with any satisfaction the increasing failure of a style of apologetics that clearly has alienated many from within the ranks of the so-called "old calendar" movement, and kept many traditionalists within the ecumenist communities from abandoning their ecumenist Hierarchs and affiliating with confessing Orthodox Hierarchs.

Clearly, this is not the way to speak for the Church, because clearly, the actual interests of the Church are not served. One can disagree, without being disagreeable, and one can effectively defend the Church without ad hominem attacks. When the confessing Hierarchs of our own time understand this, the confessing Church will once again become the real option for serious and honest seekers for the truth both from the ranks of the ecumenist Synods, and from the ranks of those who have no connection with either "world" or with "confessing" Orthodoxy.

New Martyr Catherine of Mandra, pray to God for us and for the steadying and clearing of the Church's voice in our confused and contentious times.

+Bishop Sergios of Loch Lomond, November 28, 2007

Gospel for the Second Sunday of Saint Luke

www.gsinai.com — 2007-10-18T19:14:30-07:00

By His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses

The Lord said, As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. For if ye love them that love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them that do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same. And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be sons of the Most High: for He is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore compassionate, as your Father also is compassionate (Luke 6:31-36).

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we have just heard a Gospel reading that begins with a passage that is quoted in part by many in a slightly revised way, “Do unto others as you would like them to do unto you.” This is saying is called the golden rule by many and, for many, this is the definition of basic common human decency. We all can appreciate that we should treat people as we would like to be treated. There are watered down, popularized versions of this verse, such as, “if you scratch my back, I will scratch yours” or we can get alone and negotiate for a “win-win or no deal” as they say in management circles.

But our Savior is saying much more than this, so it is the rest of this passage that we need to pay careful heed to.

If ye love them that love you, what thank have ye, for sinners also love them that love them. And if ye do good to them that do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same,

that is, fallen man is capable of this.

And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again.

Here our Savior is not limiting us to simply doing to others that which we want to be done to ourselves, He is calling us to a completely transformed life.

It is written in the Old Testament that man is made in the image and likeness of God, the image because of reason and free will and the likeness because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Adam and Eve sinned and from that time, the Holy Spirit departed from them and death reigned and sin was a major component in the life of all men. The goal of life became self-preservation and self-indulgence, that is, men lived self-centered existence.

Now through Baptism and the Eucharist we once again receive the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. If, after Holy Baptism, we begin a new way of life we become a new creation and these great things our Savior speaks about in today’s Gospel passage become possible. Fallen man can work out deals of win-win, fallen man can say, if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, but it is only with the help of the Holy Spirit can we attain to the things our Savior is describing.

With His next words, our Savior raises the bar very high and calls us to achieve something that is extremely difficult:

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be sons of the Most High: for He is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore compassionate, as your Father also is compassionate.

From these words of our Savior we can see that our struggle is not simply to fulfill an external set of rules. Christianity is not just a moral code. The Christian life is lived in the heart and it is only through trying to manifest this new creation in our own hearts in our attempts to cooperate with grace that we can even come close to attaining to anything of what our Savior talks about in today’s gospel. How can we find it within ourselves to forgive our enemies? It is almost natural for fallen man to be vindictive and remember wrongs. How can we find it within ourselves to be compassionate as our Heavenly Father is compassionate? We cannot live according to the old man and achieve this. God became man in order to make a new creation of man. Our calling as Christians is to struggle to manifest eternity and the triumph over death and sin in our own hearts. If we fail in this virtue, we fail as Christians, if we succeed in this virtue we have hope of eternal salvation for eternity is manifested in our hearts.

It is a great struggle to transform the heart, and the only way we can overcome tendencies towards self-preservation and self-indulgence, is to experience the higher good. Saint Isaac the Syrian wrote, that ‘unless a soul is intoxicated with faith, that person cannot be healed of the malady of the senses and overcome attachment to material things.’ In other words, unless we are truly familiar with the things of God, the scripture of God, unless we have an active prayer life, unless we fight that struggle in our hearts and weep and entreat God until we find the consolation of the grace of the Holy Spirit to strengthen us, there is no way in the world we can fulfill these commands.

On this day also we celebrate the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God. This feast commemorates the vision of Saint Andrew the fool for Christ and Ephiphanius his disciple in the church of Blachernae in Constantinople. The saints saw a vision of the Mother of God spreading out her veil to cover the faithful with the grace that was given her by God. This spiritual reality is set before us in the depiction of the holy icon of the Protection of the Mother of God. In the icon the Mother of God spreads her hands over the congregation and she is encompassed by an array of many saints and intercedes in our behalf. This feast is a great encouragement for us all. We have the Mother of God and all of the saints for spiritual allies. There are times when it seems impossible and beyond human nature to overcome the raging of our hearts. We have the Mother of God who can root out evil from our hearts and protect us even from the negative inclinations found within.

So on this day let us resolve to look to our Savior and become familiar with the things of God, so that being intoxicated with faith we can lift our hearts and minds on high, even when we have to forgive our enemies, even when we are called upon to be compassionate even as our Heavenly Father is compassionate. Amen.

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www.gsinai.com — 2007-09-24T13:16:03-07:00

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St. John Chrysostom

www.gsinai.com — 2007-04-14T17:38:45-07:00

Food for thought from Saint John Chrysostom on how to carry the grace of renewal week throughout the rest of our lives. +Metropolitan Moses

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Saint John Chrysostom

GOSPEL OF SAINT MATTHEW CHAPTER 12, VERSES 38, 39.

HOMILY XLIII.

Let us show forth then a new kind of life. Let us make earth a heaven; let us hereby show the heathen, of how great blessings they are deprived. For when they behold in us good conversation, they will look upon the very face of the kingdom of Heaven. Yea, when they see us gentle, pure from wrath, from evil desire, from envy, from covetousness, rightly fulfilling all our other duties, they will say, "If the Christians are become angels here, what will they be after their departure hence? if where they are strangers they shine so bright, how great will they become when they shall have won their native land!" Thus they too will be reformed, and the word of godliness "will have free course, not less than in the apostles' times.

For if they, being twelve, converted entire cities and countries; were we all to become teachers by our careful conduct, imagine how high our cause will be exalted. For not even a dead man raised so powerfully attracts the heathen, as a person practicing self-denial. At that indeed he will be amazed, but by this he will be profited. That is done, and is past away; but this abides, and is constant culture to his soul.

Let us take heed therefore to ourselves, that we may gain them also. I say nothing burdensome. I say not, do not marry. I say not, forsake cities, and withdraw yourself from public affairs; but being engaged in them, show virtue. Yea, and such as are busy in the midst of cities, I would prefer to have more approved than such as have occupied the mountains. Why? Because great is the profit arising from that fact. "For no man lighteth a candle, and sets it under the bushel." Therefore I desire that all the candles were set upon the candlestick, that the light might wax great.

Let us kindle then His fire; let us cause them that are sitting in darkness to be delivered from their error. And tell me not, "I have a wife, and children belonging to me, and am master of a household, and cannot duly practice all this." For if you had none of these [responsibilities], yet if you are careless, all is lost; if you are surrounded by all these, yet if you are earnest, you shall attain unto virtue. For there is only one thing that is required, the preparation of a generous mind; and neither age, nor poverty, nor wealth, nor reverse of fortune, nor anything else, will be able to impede you. Since in fact both old and young, and men having wives, and bringing up children, and working at crafts, and serving as soldiers, have duly performed all that is enjoined. For so Daniel was young, and Joseph a slave, and Aquila wrought at a craft, and the woman who sold purple was over a workshop, and another was the keeper of a prison, and another a centurion, as Cornelius; and another in ill health, as Timothy; and another a runaway, as Onesimus; but nothing proved an hindrance to any of these, but all were approved, both men and women, both young and old, both slaves and free, both soldiers and people.

Let us not then make vain pretexts, but let us provide a thoroughly good mind, and whatsoever we may be, we shall surely attain to virtue, and arrive at the good things to come; by the grace and love towards man of our Lord Jesus Christ, with whom be unto the Father, together with the Holy Spirit; glory, might, honor, now and ever, and world without end. Amen.

Words of St. Antony the Great Regarding the Cross

www.gsinai.com — 2006-03-26T08:11:51-08:00

From the Life of Saint Antony the Great, by Saint Athanasius of Alexandria:

After this again certain others came; and these were men who were deemed wise among the Greeks, and they asked him [Saint Antony] a reason for our faith in Christ. But when they attempted to dispute concerning the preaching of the divine Cross and meant to mock, Antony stopped for a little, and first pitying their ignorance, said, through an interpreter, who could skillfully interpret his words,

'Which is more beautiful, to confess the Cross or to attribute to those whom you call gods adultery and the seduction of boys? For that which is chosen by us is a sign of courage and a sure token of the contempt of death, while yours are the passions of licentiousness. Next, which is better, to say that the Word of God was not changed, but, being the same, He took a human body for the salvation and well-being of man, that having shared in human birth He might make man partake in the divine and spiritual nature; or to liken the divine to senseless animals and consequently to worship four-footed beasts, creeping things and the likenesses of men? For these things, are the objects of reverence of you wise men. But how do you dare to mock us, who say that Christ has appeared as man, seeing that you, bringing the soul from heaven, assert that it has strayed and fallen from the vault of the sky into body? And would that you had said that it had fallen into human body alone, and not asserted that it passes and changes into four-footed beasts and creeping things. For our faith declares that the coming of Christ was for the salvation of men…
…But concerning the Cross, which would you say to be the better, to bear it, when a plot is brought about by wicked men, nor to be in fear of death brought about under any form whatever; or to prate about the wanderings of Osiris and Isis, the plots of Typhon, the flight of Cronos, his eating his children and the slaughter of his father. For this is your wisdom. But how, if you mock the Cross, do you not marvel at the resurrection? For the same men who told us of the latter wrote the former, Or why when you make mention of the Cross are you silent about the dead who were raised, the blind who received their sight, the paralytics who were healed, the lepers who were cleansed, the walking upon the sea, and the rest of the signs and wonders, which show that Christ is no longer a man but God? To me you seem to do yourselves much injustice and not to have carefully read our Scriptures. But read and see that the deeds of Christ prove Him to be God come upon earth for the salvation of men…

…Tell us therefore where your oracles are now? Where are the charms of the Egyptians? Where the delusions of the magicians? When did all these things cease and grow weak except when the Cross of Christ arose? Is It then a fit subject for mockery, and not rather the things brought to naught by it, and convicted of weakness? For this is a marvelous thing, that your religion was never persecuted, but even was honored by men in every city, while the followers of Christ are persecuted, and still our side flourishes and multiplies over yours. What is yours, though praised and honored, perishes, while the faith and teaching of Christ, though mocked by you and often persecuted by kings, has filled the world…

…For when has the knowledge of God so shone forth? or when has self-control and the excellence of virginity appeared as now? or when has death been so despised except when the Cross of Christ has appeared? And this no one doubts when he sees the martyr despising death for the sake of Christ, when he sees for Christ's sake the virgins of the Church keeping themselves pure and undefiled…

…And these signs are sufficient to prove that the faith of Christ alone is the true religion.

*Icon of Saint Antony the Great by the Monastery Icon Workshop, 2002.

The Conversion of St. Constantine

www.gsinai.com — 2006-09-27T08:05:28-07:00

From Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History (c. A.D. 260-340)

CHAPTER XXVII.

That after reflecting on the Dawn fall of those who had worshiped Idols, he [Saint Constantine] made Choice of Christianity.

Being convinced, however, that he needed some more powerful aid than his military forces could afford him, on account of the wicked and magical enchantments which were so diligently practiced by the tyrant, he sought Divine assistance, deeming the possession of arms and a numerous soldiery of secondary importance, but believing the co-operating power of Deity invincible and not to be shaken. He considered, therefore, on what God he might rely for protection and assistance. While engaged in this enquiry, the thought occurred to him, that, of the many emperors who had preceded him, those who had rested their hopes in a multitude of gods, and served them with sacrifices and offerings, had in the first place been deceived by flattering predictions, and oracles which promised them all prosperity, and at last had met with an unhappy end, while not one of their gods had stood by to warn them of the impending wrath of heaven; while one alone who had pursued an entirely opposite course, who had condemned their error, and honored the one Supreme God during his whole life, had formal I him to be the Saviour and Protector of his empire, and the Giver of every good thing. Reflecting on this, and well weighing the fact that they who had trusted in many gods had also fallen by manifold forms of death, without leaving behind them either family or offspring, stock, name, or memorial among men: while the God of his father had given to him, on the other hand, manifestations of his power and very many tokens: and considering farther that those who had already taken arms against the tyrant, and had marched to the battle-field under the protection of a multitude of gods, had met with a dishonorable end (for one of them had shamefully retreated from the contest without a blow, and the other, being slain in the midst of his own troops, became, as it were, the mere sport of death ); reviewing, I say, all these considerations, he judged it to be folly indeed to join in the idle worship of those who were no gods, and, after such convincing evidence, to err from the truth; and therefore felt it incumbent on him to honor his father's God alone.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

How, while he was praying, God sent him a Vision of a Cross of Light in the Heavens at Mid-day, with an Inscription admonishing him to conquer by that.

ACCORDINGLY he called on him with earnest prayer and supplications that he would reveal to him who he was, and stretch forth his right hand to help him in his present difficulties. And while he was thus praying with fervent entreaty, a most marvelous sign appeared to him from heaven, the account of which it might have been hard to believe had it been related by any other person. But since the victorious emperor himself long afterwards declared it to the writer of this history, when he was honored with his acquaintance and society, and confirmed his statement by an oath, who could hesitate to accredit the relation, especially since the testimony of after-time has established its truth? He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, CONQUER BY THIS. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also, which followed him on this expedition, and witnessed the miracle.

CHAPTER XXIX.

How the Christ of God appeared to him in his Sleep, and commanded him to use in his Wars a Standard made in the Form of the Cross.

He said, moreover, that he doubted within himself what the import of this apparition could be. And while he continued to ponder and reason on its meaning, night suddenly came on ; then in his sleep the Christ of God appeared to him with the same sign which he had seen in the heavens, and commanded him to make a likeness of that sign which he had seen in the heavens, and to use it as a safeguard in all engagements with his enemies.

CHAPTER XXX.

The Making of the Standard of the Cross.

AT dawn of day he arose, and communicated the marvel to his friends: and then, calling together the workers in gold and precious stones, he sat in the midst of them, and described to them the figure of the sign he had seen, bidding them represent it in gold and precious stones. And this representation I myself have had an opportunity of seeing.

CHAPTER XXXI.

A Description of the Standard of the Cross, which the Romans now call the Labarum.

Now it was made in the following manner. A long spear, overlaid with gold, formed the figure of the cross by means of a transverse bar laid over it. On the top of the whole was fixed a wreath of gold and precious stones; and within this, the symbol of the Saviour's name, two letters indicating the name of Christ by means of its initial characters, the letter P being intersected by X in its centre: and these letters the emperor was in the habit of wearing on his helmet at a later period. From the cross-bar of the spear was suspended a cloth, a royal piece, covered with a profuse embroidery of most brilliant precious stones; and which, being also richly interlaced with gold, presented an indescribable degree of beauty to the beholder. This banner was of a square form, and the upright staff, whose lower section was of great length, bore a golden half-length portrait of the pious emperor and his children on its upper part, beneath the trophy of the cross, and immediately above the embroidered banner.

The emperor constantly made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile power, and commanded that others similar to it should be carried at the head of all his armies.

CHAPTER XXXII.

How Constantine received Instruction, and read the Sacred Scriptures.

These things were done shortly afterwards. But at the time above specified, being struck with amazement at the extraordinary vision, and resolving to worship no other God save Him who had appeared to him, he sent for those who were acquainted with the mysteries of His doctrines, and enquired who that God was, and what was intended by the sign of the vision he had seen. They affirmed that He was God, the only begotten Son of the one and only God: that the sign which had appeared was the symbol of immortality, and the trophy of that victory over death which He had gained in time past when sojourning on earth. They taught him also the causes of His advent, and explained to him the true account of His incarnation. Thus he was instructed in these matters, and was impressed with wonder at the divine manifestation which had been presented to his sight. Comparing, therefore, the heavenly vision with the interpretation given, he found his judgment confirmed; and, in the persuasion that the knowledge of these things had been imparted to him by Divine teaching, he determined thenceforth to devote himself to the reading of the Inspired writings.

Moreover, he made the priests of God his counselors, and deemed it incumbent on him to honor the God who had appeared to him with all devotion. And after this, being fortified by well-grounded hopes in Him, he hastened to quench the threatening fire of tyranny.

Words of solace and a call to vigilance, St. Cyprian of Carthage

www.gsinai.com — 2007-05-02T07:30:26-07:00

Words of solace and a call to vigilance concerning the fact that we all need discretion and humility and that anyone can fall away, by Saint Cyprian of Carthage, found in his treatise, “The Unity of the Catholic Church":

Chapter 20

Let no one marvel, most beloved brethren, that even certain of the confessors proceed to these lengths, that some also sin so wickedly and so grievously. For neither does confession (of Christ) make one immune from the snares of the devil, nor does it defend him who is still placed in the world, with a perpetual security against worldly temptations and dangers and onsets and attacks; otherwise never might we have seen afterwards among the confessors the deceptions and debaucheries and adulteries which now with groaning and sorrow we see among some. Whoever that confessor is, he is not greater or better or dearer to God than Solomon, who, however, as long as he walked in the ways of the Lord, so long retained the grace which he had received from the Lord; after he had abandoned the way of the Lord, he lost also the grace of the Lord. And so it is written: 'Hold what you have, lest another receive thy crown.' Surely the Lord would not make this threat, that the crown of righteousness can be taken away, unless, when righteousness departs, the crown also must depart.

Chapter 21

Confession is the beginning of glory, not already the merit of the crown; nor does it achieve praise, but it initiates dignity, and, since it is written; 'He that shall persevere to end, he shall be saved,' whatever has taken place before the end is a step by which the ascent is made to the summit of salvation, not the end by which the topmost point is held secure. He is a confessor, but after the confession the danger is greater, because the adversary is the more provoked. He is a confessor; for this reason he ought to stand with the Gospel of the Lord, for by the Gospel he has obtained glory from the Lord. 'To whom much is given, of him much is required'; and to whom the more dignity is allotted, from him the more service is demanded. Let no one perish through the example of a confessor, let no one learn injustice, no one insolence, no one perfidy from the habits of a confessor. He is a confessor; let him be humble and quiet, in his actions let him be modest with discipline, so that he who is called a confessor of Christ may imitate the Christ whom he confesses. For since he says: 'Everyone that exalts himself shall be humbled, and everyone that humbles himself shall be exalted,' and since he himself has been exalted by the Father, because He, the Word and the Power and the Wisdom of God the Father humbled Himself on earth, how can He love pride who even by His law enjoined humility upon us and Himself received from the Father the highest name as the reward of humility? He is a confessor of Christ, but only if afterwards the majesty and dignity of Christ be not blasphemed by him. Let not the tongue which has confessed Christ be abusive nor boisterous; let it not be heard resounding with insults and contentions; let it not after words of praise shoot forth a serpent's poisons against the brethren and priests of God. But if he later become blameworthy and abominable, if he dissipates his confession by evil conversation, if he pollutes his life with unseemly foulness, if, finally, abandoning the Church where he became a confessor and breaking the concord of its unity, he change his first faith for a later faithlessness, he cannot flatter himself by reason of his confession as if elected to the reward of glory, when by this very fact the merits of punishment have grown the more.

Mid-Pentecost, 2007

www.gsinai.com — 2007-05-02T07:44:24-07:00

By His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses

At Mid Feast give Thou my thirsty soul to drink of the waters of piety, for Thou O Savior didst cry unto all, whosoever is thirsty let him come to Me and drink. Wherefore O Well-Spring of Life, Christ our God, glory be to Thee.
- Dismissal Hymn for Mid-Pentecost

Beloved Christians,

Christ is risen!

We keep the feast of Mid-Pentecost, wherein we bask in the grace of Pascha and look to the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. In the dismissal for this feast we hear the voice of our Savior, as it is recorded in the Gospel, crying unto all, “Whosoever is thirsty let him come to Me and drink.” Our Savior calls, but it is for us to come unto Him. Our Savior Himself explains how this is accomplished:

If any man would do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of Myself. He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory: but He that seeketh the glory of Him that sent Him is true, and no unrighteousness is in Him. (John 7: 17-18)

And thus is explained the workings of grace. By responding to our Savior’s call through doing His will, we gain the capacity to know of the doctrine of God. Our Savior warns us that there will be those that speak of themselves and seek their own glory, but they are not of God. Seekers of grace and truth need great vigilance and discernment and we are called to “Judge not according to appearance, but judge righteous judgment” (John 7: 24).

Righteous judgment acknowledges that doctrine is essential to our salvation. When He offered the Cup of Salvation, our Savior Himself said, “Drink ye all from it, this is the Blood of the New Testament.” To be united to our Christ, we must acknowledge that the Testament or saving doctrine is inextricably intertwined with Eucharist and the Eucharist is the Blood of self-sacrificing love, shed by the God-Man.

It is through the priesthood that we partake of the grace of Holy Baptism and the Sacred Eucharist. For this reason the saints taught that God’s greatest gift to mankind is the priesthood. The priesthood is an awesome ministry that is accomplished by fallible men. The human element at times intrudes into the sacred and our faithfulness is tested. We see in the history of God that many were allowed to endure much at the hands of vain men. Today we live in an age of confusion wherein churchmen act arbitrarily and Holy Tradition and Canonical order are trivialized. People lose heart and some begin to say that they “don’t believe in organized religion, etc.” Let no one be confused by this. The Church is not “a religion,” or a human construct. The Church is a mystical union with the God-Man Christ. Where there is the genuine Eucharist and self-sacrificing love, there is Christ. The exalted can fall away and the humble sinner can be lifted up. We cannot confuse the sacred ministry of the priesthood with the failings of the individual.

Our Savior Himself foretold that there would be scandal and false teachers. One can gain solace by reading the history of the people of God in Old Testament and the lives of the saints in the New Testament. At times these stories rival or surpass the scandals found in fiction. But the thread that is woven throughout is God’s call to repentance and return to His will.

Let us return unto God by our works, hearkening to the words of Saint Peter:
Be diligent to add faith to virtue and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things be in you and abound, … ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Peter 1:5-8)

In Christ,
+Metropolitan Moses

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Words of solace and a call to vigilance, by Saint Cyprian of Carthage...

Encyclical for Great Lent, 2007

www.gsinai.com — 2007-02-15T13:44:34-08:00

By His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses

We have very recently celebrated the great mystery of the Epiphany or appearance of the God-Man, Jesus Christ. The revelation of the Holy Trinity was made manifest, and now, because we celebrate an early Pascha this year, we are already at the portals of Great Lent and from afar we espy the Feast of feasts, the mystery of the death and resurrection of God Incarnate. How do we, men and women of the 21st century approach this mystery?

We live in a country that is confused with certain notions about what it is to be a Christian and how Christians live the spiritual life. The dominate religion in America, modernist Protestantism, carries with it the idea that the Church is personality based and entertainment oriented. The witness of Church history demonstrates that Orthodox Christianity is neither. We cannot allow ourselves to be influenced by these later day false notions, but we must nurture our souls from the wellsprings of authentic Holy Tradition in both doctrine and way of life.

One cannot separate the Christian life and spirituality from what the Russians call podvig (which means spiritual labor). There is a passage in the writings of Saint Isaac the Syrian that illustrates this point wherein he says, “Prayer without bodily labor is a miscarriage.”

We all understand the concept of physical therapy. We should all understand that, for the sake of our own spiritual therapy, it is essential for us to struggle according to our own capacity throughout our life and especially during this time of Great Lent.

I am reminded of the words of a commentator on the life of Saint Athanasius the Great, “It was not as a theologian, but as a believing soul in need of a Saviour, that Athanasius approached the mystery of Christ.” – That is, as a soul in need of saving therapy in Christ. The writer of this quote made a wise observation concerning Saint Athanasius, but what was lost on him is that this is precisely how all true theologians throughout the history of the Church approached the mystery of Christ. Neither theology or the spiritual life are exercises in abstract speculation. One must come to spiritual health in order to attain to knowledge of God.

Great Lent is a time of great opportunity. We should see the fast as a time Christians set aside for spiritual cleansing, a time to “come to ourselves” and return to the knowledge of God. We simplify our lives in order to prepare for Holy Week, so that we come to a deeper understanding of the voluntary death and resurrection of the God-Man, Jesus Christ.

Which brings us to the theme of the Second Sunday of the Triodion, the parable of the Prodigal Son. In this parable we have depicted for us the path of error and separation from God and again the path of knowledge and return unto God.

We are shown a young man who was led astray by his own wayward desires and the suggestions of the evil one, which lead him to separation from his father’s house. Because of this separation, from wealth he fell into poverty through seeking fulfillment in riotous living. This poverty was so profound that it left him completely empty spiritually. The husks of his coarse life could not fill his belly, that is, dissipation could not satisfy the inner man. Yet -- the pain of this emptiness had a positive effect on this young man and at long last he “came to himself.” When he saw how far he had fallen he did not remain there but he determined within himself to change.

His first act of change was to humble himself and begin the first four steps of repentance that are found in the Beatitudes. He became poor in spirit, he mourned, he became meek and he hungered and thirsted to once again be in his Fathers house. Through this spiritual activity he found some comfort and hope for his journey. Next, he rose up and took the long and arduous labor of the return to his Father’s house.

Along the way he rehearsed to himself exactly what he would say to his Father. “I am not worthy to be called your son. Receive me as one of your hired servants.”

Metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky comments on this gospel passage in his book on Confession, giving us an insight into the process of genuine repentance. Metropolitan Antony exhorts the priest confessor:

It will be useful to remind the penitent of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and ask him: "Why was the father of the lost youth so convinced of his amendment that he prepared a feast with singing, dancing and, of course, wine, without being afraid that it would start his son on another binge after his involuntary hunger and sobriety?"

"Because," you must answer, "in the first place, the Prodigal Son punished himself: he sentenced himself to the position of a hired servant, expressed his intention to become a slave instead of a master. Secondly, in order to fulfill this good resolution, he had undertaken the podvig of a long and difficult journey and the podvig of abasing himself and supplicating his father, although previously he had found it burdensome to live with his father in plenty and kindness, as he had a self-willed and unsubmissive soul.

In exactly the same way, if the Lord expressed Himself so confidently about Zaccheus — "Now is salvation come unto this house" — it was precisely because Zaccheus of his own accord, and without waiting for any demands to be made, sentenced himself to a complete mortification of his passion. He promised to perform a feat very difficult for a lover of possessions — to give away half his property and repay fourfold those he had defrauded.

Metropolitan Antony was a physician of souls and he understood the human condition quite well. Self centeredness and self-love are a barriers to repentance. Self justification and laziness springs from this destructive form of self love. How easy it is for us to simply say, “I have repented” and do nothing of any real significance towards our own spiritual healing. How easy it is to deceive ourselves into thinking we are repenting when that is not the case at all.

Repentance is not a noun, it is a verb. Repentance requires action. We can measure our repentance if we compare our actions to the actions of this repentant prodigal or Zaccheus.

The young man in the parable recognized that he misused his inheritance and the authority that came with it through dissipation and that the only way to return unto his Father was to do violence to himself and humble himself and as Metropolitan Antony put it, “become a slave instead of a master.” To put it another way, genuine repentance is demonstrated only when we recognize wherein we have sinned, take ownership for the sin and responsibility for the effects of sin and resolve to do something about it that is directly contrary to the sin. Anything less is not repentance.

But this young man did indeed repent and as it is written, “… But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”

It is written in the scriptures that ‘a man is entangled in the chords of his own sins.’ If we seek healing from sin, we must begin by cutting the chords of our former actions by humbling ourselves and forcing ourselves to an opposite virtuous action with the sure hope that our heavenly Father will be there to receive us.

And what came next? As Metropolitan Antony pointed out, the erring son made himself a slave instead of a master and said, “Father, I have sinned against Heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”

And through this, the son was fully restored, as it is written in the Gospel, “But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the first robe, and put it on him (signifying the restoration of the baptismal robe); and put a ring on his hand (signifying the gift of Holy Spirit), and sandals on his feet, (to enable him to tread upon the evil one): and bring hither the fatted calf, and slay it; and let us eat, and be merry, (signifying the Mystical Banquet of Holy Communion): for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.

We all have gone astray and wandered from God to one degree or another. Now is the time, during the Great Lent to “come to ourselves” and set our mental gaze upon the Fathers house.

It is only by entering this house that we partake of the mystery of the God-Man, Jesus Christ. Nothing is more important than this! Let us begin our return through humbling ourselves. Let us prepare for that Holiest of weeks wherein we encounter our Savior’s voluntary Passion and Death for us. Let us prepare to stand at the foot of the Cross, awestruck at the mystery of our Savior’s self-sacrificing, co-suffering love for us. Let us prepare to encounter Resurrection and Life springing forth from the tomb.

May God grant you all spiritual increase and may you all have a soul profiting Great Lent and a radiant Pascha, through the grace and love for man of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ and of the Father and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Enyclical for the Nativity of Christ, 2006

www.gsinai.com — 2007-01-07T15:29:55-08:00

By His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses

Thy Nativity, O Christ our God, hath shined the light of knowledge upon the world: for thereby they that worshipped the stars were instructed by a star to worship Thee, the Sun of Righteousness, and to know Thee, the Dayspring from on high. O Lord, glory be to Thee.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Beloved Orthodox Christians,

Angels proclaim God’s great wonders and the humble shepherds rich in faith seek out the new born Savior, Christ the Lord. And as we hear in the gospel appointed for liturgy things new and old are revealed, for the star leads the wise men to Jerusalem and they proclaimed the marvel to the King and his court

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is He that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen His star in the east, and are come to worship Him. When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. (Matt 2:1-3)

All things are made new at these glad tidings. Truth Incarnate appeared and the promise of the ages was fulfilled and the light of God-knowledge shined upon the world, yet Herod the king was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. Perhaps it is understandable that the king would be troubled concerning a star and a prophecy that declared a new king promised from of old, but how was it that all Jerusalem, that is, those for whom the promise was made of old were troubled and perplexed? Was there no one that showed a pious interest and followed the wise men? The humble shepherds sought out the new born Christ and in contrast to this, the spiritual leaders of Jerusalem, the chief priests and scribes showed no interest and failed to follow the wise men. This, even after they proclaimed the prophesies from of old:

And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born. And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the Prophet, And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, art not the least among the princes of Judah: for out of thee shall come a Ruler, who shall shepherd My people Israel. (Matt 2: 4-6)

If one was a believer in the prophecy, one would also believe that the God of Israel Himself was setting in motion deliverance for the people of Israel. Yet, if one had one’s own comfort and status as one’s his highest priority, then this could have been bad news indeed.

How is it that the very priests were so deceived? Our Savior Himself gives us insight into why when he addressed the multitude, “How can ye believe, which receive glory one of another, and seek not the glory that cometh from the only God?” (John 5: 44)

The Lord is God and has appeared unto us and His manifestation separates lovers of God from lovers of this world. Perhaps there were those in Jerusalem that considered themselves believers or gave lip service to some form of belief, yet there was something in their lives that became a higher priority than remaining faithful to the Covenant with God or His prophesies. All we have to do is to look around us at many of the Orthodox leaders today and their betrayal of Orthodox ecclesiology to understand that there are many variations on this theme. Alas, people are confronted with the light of God-knowledge and the teachings of the Holy Fathers on the Church, and they turn their eyes away.

Lest we imitate them we must, in our own day, consider what is best for Israel, the people of God, the Church. Our Savior came not for those who are wise in their own conceits, not for those who are full. If we are to be saved we must seek God on His terms, not ours. Christianity is not convenient. In order to be saved during these last times, each and every one of us, young men and elders must imitate Saint Paul when he was confronted by our Savior outside of the walls of Damascus and likewise say, “Lord, what will Thou have me to do?” (Acts 9:6)

There are times when a stand for truth can bring temptations. When we are tempted to backslide or compromise in times of temptations let us look to the Babe in the manger Who, shortly after His birth, became a refugee to flee the wrath of the tyrant. Our Savior’s life is example enough for us, if we desire to be faithful to Him.

We Orthodox are few indeed, but we should always rejoice and remain steadfast. If we suffer temptations from the world, let us not be confused. As Ignatius of Antioch wrote in his epistle to Saint Polycarp of Smyrna:

Let not those who seem worthy of credit, but teach strange doctrines, fill thee with apprehension. Stand firm, as does an anvil which is beaten. It is the part of a noble athlete to be wounded, and yet to conquer. And especially, we ought to bear all things for the sake of God, that He also may bear with us. Be ever becoming more zealous than what thou art. Weigh carefully the times. Look for Him who is above all time, eternal and invisible, yet who became visible for our sakes; impalpable and impassible, yet who became passible on our account; and who in every kind of way suffered for our sakes.

--Epistle of Saint Ignatius of Antioch to Saint Polycarp of Smyrna Chapter 3

During these days of rejoicing let us give thanks to our God Who, being above all time, entered time for our sakes. Our Christ became Incarnate so that we may commune with Him. Let us weigh carefully the times by striving to receive the light of God-knowledge through our careful sifting of the writings of the Holy Fathers, that by so doing we may walk in the light of His Truth and may partake of His Body and Blood. Amen.

Sunday of the Forefathers, 2006

www.gsinai.com — 2006-12-24T11:46:35-08:00

A Sermon of His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On this Sunday we commemorate the Forefathers according to the flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ. We remember especially the Patriarch Abraham, to whom the promise was first given, when God said to him, “In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Gen 22:18). This promise was given two thousand years before the birth of our Savior Christ.

For the Dismissal Hymn of the feast, we chant:

By faith didst Thou justify the Forefathers, when through them Thou didst betroth Thyself aforetime to the Church from among the nations. The Saints boast in glory that from their seed there is a glorious fruit, even she that bare Thee seedlessly. By their prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.

The Gospel for this feast is the parable of the Great Banquet, which is a type of the gathering of the faithful, as it is found in the Gospel of Saint Luke. One can easily contemporize today’s parable:

‘They all at once began to make excuse. The first said unto him, real estate is more important: I pray thee have me excused. And another said, I have an investment in livestock, business, machinery, electronic equipment, etc., I pray thee have me excused. And another said, because of my family affairs or ethnic or community pressures, I pray thee have me excused.’

Before we squander the limited time of our life, we need to spiritually reflect upon the significance of our Savior’s words. Our Heavenly Father has called us to the Great Banquet and given us the guiding light of His unchanging Truth. We have come from diverse backgrounds, we have had various experiences on our way and had to confront different errors, yet, as Orthodox Christians, our common journey is to this Banquet, to be united with the Holy Trinity. What is it that we partake of at this banquet? Saint Isaac the Syrian explains in one of his homilies that the nourishment we partake of is love. This love is attained through union with God. As our Savior prayed unto the Father:

That they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us: that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me. And the glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them; that they may be one, even as We are one: I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one. (John 17:21-23)

The oneness of the Father and the Son is by nature, our oneness with them and each other is by an effort of our free will and grace. This banquet is singular and is to be found only in the Father’s house, that is, the Church. The Evil Ones’ goal is to sow the seeds of confusion and false notions (heresies) and through them, divide and break this union of love. The Holy and God-Bearing Fathers have taught us how to cast down the might of the Evil One, and we can find life and union with the Holy Trinity as long as we do not allow anyone to separate us from their teachings.

We partake of the banquet both here and in the age to come. When we gather as a Eucharistic community in the Church, we partake of the banquet of love. Thus, the Church is not simply an administrative body, but rather it is a mystical union. The Church is not some abstract idea. We are united to one another in our local Eucharistic community, made into one body, the Body of Christ, through Baptism and the Sacred Eucharist in the bond of love.

On the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit overshadowed the Holy Apostles and granted them the charism to baptize and to consecrate Holy Communion. They were also given the grace to appoint successors, i.e., bishops, in each land. Through the grace given to him, from the beginning, the bishop of each local church manifested this mystical unity in the bond of love. Saint Ignatius the God-Bearer, a disciple of Saint John the Theologian, explains some facets of this mystery of union with the Holy Trinity through the Eucharist his Epistle to the Philadelphians:

Take ye heed, then, to have but one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to [show forth] the unity of His blood; one altar; as there is one bishop, along with the presbytery and deacons, my fellow-servants: that so, whatsoever ye do, ye may do it according to [the will of] God.

I have confidence of you in the Lord, that ye will be of no other mind. Wherefore I write boldly to your love, which is worthy of God, and exhort you to have but one faith, and one [kind of] preaching, and one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ; and His blood which was shed for us is one; one loaf also is broken to all [the communicants], and one cup is distributed among them all: there is but one altar for the whole Church, and one bishop, with the presbytery and deacons, my fellow-servants.

-- Epistle of Saint Ignatius of Antioch to the Philadelphians

Thus in the Great Banquet of love, oneness is manifested in the Eucharist through the one bishop in the local Church. The local bishop ordained presbyters (this word means elders in Greek) and deacons to help minister to the rational flock of Christ. In the early Church the bishop, presbyters and deacons concelebrated at one single altar in any given city. Later, when the Church grew in size, certain elders (presbyters) were commissioned by the bishop to act, with his blessing, as his personal representatives and to serve the liturgy consecrate the Holy Eucharist in his name in separate parishes throughout the territory of his diocese. This concept of the spiritual reality of one altar for each local Church was expounded by Saint Ignatius the God-Bearer throughout his many epistles:

Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it.

-- Epistle of Saint Ignatius of Antioch to the Smyrneans

Up until the 8th Century in some locations in the Orthodox west, the local bishop would take out from the Eucharist that he consecrated, a portion called the Fermentum. Deacons would carry the Fermentum to every altar in the diocese for it to be placed in the chalice at each liturgy with the Eucharist consecrated by the presbyter. This demonstrated how much they desired to have before them the Apostolic principle of Eucharistic unity in one bishop.[1]

To this day, in every part of the world at every service throughout the Orthodox Church, in the local parishes, chapels or monasteries, the serving presbyter or deacon commemorates his own ruling diocesan bishop. In addition, during key parts of the liturgy, the deacon addresses the presbyter as “Holy Master” and not as “Holy Father” as he does at all of the other services, in order to emphasize the fact that the presbyter is representing the one bishop in whom there is found Eucharistic unity.

As is obvious from what has been quoted, in the Orthodox Church, the relationship of a bishop to his flock is outside of the categories found in secular organizations. From ancient times, a ruling bishop was said to be “wedded” to his see and when a ruling bishop died and the local see was vacant, the diocese was declared to be "widowed." When a see is “widowed” the Christian flock assembles, in canonical order, to find a new bishop. In times of trouble when an entire local Patriarchate falls into heresy, as has happened in the past and as has happened recently in the case of the great contemporary heresy of ecumenism, a presbyter may commemorate, "the episcopate that rightly divides the word of truth," at the local liturgy, but as soon as there is peace and order is restored, it is required that he place himself back within the hiearchical structure of the Church by acknowledging the canonical authority of a right-believing, right-teaching bishop. Without the bishop, the canonical order of the Church is absent. As Saint Cyprian of Carthage wrote in his 66th Epistle, “The bishop is in the Church and the Church in the bishop.” As the saying goes, “One hundred presbyters cannot make one bishop, but one bishop can ordain one hundred presbyters.”

Oneness of mind are hallmarks of this unity in the Eucharist in the bishop of the local Church, as Saint Ignatius the God-Bearer so eloquently wrote in his Epistle to the Ephesians:

Wherefore it is fitting that ye should run together in accordance with the will of your bishop, which thing also ye do. For your justly renowned presbytery, worthy of God, is fitted as exactly to the bishop as the strings are to the harp. Therefore in your concord and harmonious love, Jesus Christ is sung. And do ye, man by man, become a choir, that being harmonious in love, and taking up the song of God in unison, ye may with one voice sing to the Father through Jesus Christ, so that He may both hear you, and perceive by your works that ye are indeed the members of His Son. It is profitable, therefore, that you should live in an unblameable unity, that thus ye may always enjoy communion with God.

-- Epistle of Saint Ignatius of Antioch to the Ephesians

In this very early teaching by one of the truly great Fathers of the Church, there is already an emphasis on the unity of the body of the Church here on earth through the local bishop, in order to establish oneness with God Himself. Anything that would disturb, undermine or violate this unity found in a local Church through the Eucharist and the ruling bishop is repugnant to the Holy Church and the Canons. Saint Ignatius of Antioch uses even stronger language:

Moreover it is in accordance with reason that we should return to soberness [of conduct], and, while yet we have opportunity, exercise repentance towards God. It is well to reverence both God and the bishop. He who honours the bishop has been honoured by God; he who does anything without the knowledge of the bishop, does [in reality] serve the devil.

-- Epistle of Saint Ignatius to the Smyrneans

In times of confusion or turmoil, it is the responsibility for every individual Orthodox Christian, according to the best of their ability, to make sure proper measures are met in order to safeguard the Canonical order of the Church.

During these days when we prepare for the feast of the Incarnation and Birth of the God-Man Jesus Christ, let us take the time to spiritually reflect on these truths and know that the only way we can complete the journey to the Banquet of Love is to labor for that unity found in the local Church through the Eucharist and bishop.

“And the glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them; that they may be one, even as We are one: I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one.”

Amen.

[1] See John D. Zizoulas, “Eucharist, Bishop, Church,” p 220, Holy Cross Orthodox Press

Entry into the Temple and Progress of the Most Holy Theotokos

www.gsinai.com — 2006-12-04T16:41:55-08:00

A Sermon of His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On this day we celebrate the Entry into the Temple of the Most Holy Theotokos at the tender age of three years old and her progress in her mystical union with the Most High God. Today a new genesis unfolds before all. In the first Genesis our Creator and God created the heaven and the earth and all that in them is, and when all was ready he took virgin earth and made man, breathing His Spirit into him. But alas, through our first parent’s disobedience God’s original plan was frustrated and the race of man became subject to death (and this was so that sin might not be made immortal, as the Fathers teach). Adam and his offspring made from earth, were doomed to return to the earth, yet they were given a promise of redemption.

Now, when the fullness of time came, we see the Virgin, born of a promise from God proclaimed by the archangel Gabriel to barren Joachim and Anna, born as an answer to prayer and fasting. From the race of men God formed a new marvel that far surpasses that of old. She who, though of the same nature as us and made of the earth like unto us, through her entry into the Holy of Holies is prepared to become a new creation. The Virgin enters in and the whole world is made new. Though a tender child of three, the Virgin begins an unprecedented life of mystical converse with the Most High. She who by the unceasing direction of her will towards the Sun of Righteousness, has become a vessel of the Holy Spirit and in an extraordinary way, the heavenly Tabernacle. And God’s Angels hymn her with songs of praise, as it says in the Kontakion for the feast.

We celebrate the great acts of God and the co-operation and synergy of the Most Holy Theotokos with the Divine Will for our salvation. Through her entrance and progress into the Holy of Holies, we enter into the Holy of Holies, that is, the mystery of our salvation begins: the Incarnation and dispensation of her Son and our God culminating in a new life wherein we participate in the life of the Holy Trinity. God made this new heaven and she walks the earth and enters the Temple that we might be lifted up from the earth and become temples of God and inheritors of His everlasting habitations in the heavens.

In the service for the Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple Zacharias is referred to as the Great High Priest, when he was not the High Priest of Israel. Why is this so? This is a spiritual interpretation, in that he ministered to the Heavenly Tabernacle that dwelt in secret in the Holy of Holies.

As Moses grew up in the midst of the household of Pharaoh and the Egyptians did not understand that he would one day lead Israel from bondage. So also, this little child in the midst of the Temple was almost invisible to the many thousands that frequented the environs of the Temple and they could not conceive the fact that the Most Holy Theotokos would be the source of our liberation from the bondage of sin.

When did this all happen and where? We can avoid the many arguments concerning dates and say that we approximate and fix the year that the Most Holy Theotokos made her entry into the Temple in either 11 or 12 B.C.. And who built the Temple? We know that it was Herod, who is called “the Great” by historians, lived from 73 B.C. to 4 A.D. He was an Idumean, the son of a military man named Antipater who, with the help of the Romans, ruled from “behind the throne” of the legitimate ruler from the Hasemonian dynasty, Hyrcanus. After the death of his father, Herod married the daughter of Hyrcanus, in an attempt to legitimatize his link to the ruling house of the Jews, but he was always ready to kill whomsoever he perceived to be a threat to his rule and control of what became a Jewish vassal kingdom of the Romans. Without Roman rule, Herod would not have a place in the Jewish kingdom. At a time when it seemed his rule was threatened he killed his father-in-law Hyrcanus. Later he arranged that his brother-in-law Aristobulus be made High Priest. Aristobulus was from the Hasemonian dynasty and a legitimate choice for high priest. For this reason he was extremely popular with the Jews and fearing his popularity, the tyrant Herod had him drowned in an “accident.” From this point on, the high priests were not of the legitimate lineage and were put in place by the tyrant Herod, i.e., not according to the proper order.

Shapiro, A modern Rabbi comments, “As a result of Herod's interference and the ever-spreading Hellenistic influences among the Jewish upper classes, the Temple hierarchy became very corrupt. The Sadduccees, a religious group of the wealthy, who collaborated with the Romans in order to keep their power base, now controlled the Temple, much to the chagrin of the mainstream Jewish majority, the Pharasees, and of the extreme religious minority, the Zealots.”

This was the state of things “in the fullness of time” when our Creator fulfilled His promises. These events were prophesied to take place when ‘a ruler failed from the house and lineage of Judah.’

Just as today, there were faithful adherents to Holy Tradition on one hand, and those that were “Hellenize-Secularized” and being lead astray on the other. There was a tyrant then, there are tyrants now. At that time there were priests who were faithful to all aspects of Holy Tradition the proper order concerning the things of Israel and priests who compromised themselves for the sake of the tyrant, just as we see today.

When we look at the historical setting for this feast, we are confronted with cooperation and synergy with the Divine Will on one hand and egoism and arbitrary disregard for Holy Tradition on the other. And as we face the problems of today we see that every generation is confronted with the same choice. Let the tyrants of the world conspire, let them violate the order of things Divine, there will be a day of reckoning for all. Our life may be hidden and we may be seen as insignificant in the eyes of the world, but if we imitate our Lady, the Most Holy Theotokos and live a life of mystical converse through prayer and direct our will to the Will of God, we also can become vessels of the Holy Spirit.

May we ever be faithful to the Divine Will and let us rejoice and set our gaze on high praising and blessing the Theotokos. To her, then, with a great voice let us cry aloud: Rejoice, O thou fulfillment of the Creator’s dispensation. Amen.

A Sower Went Forth To Sow

www.gsinai.com — 2006-10-29T16:29:07-08:00

Gospel For The Fourth Sunday of Saint Luke
A Sermon of His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses

A Sower went forth to sow.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Not an angel or an ambassador, but the Lord of Glory Himself came to redeem us.

A Sower went forth to sow.

The Timeless One clothed Himself in humility, and took the form of a servant, and entered time for us the lowly. He trod upon the pathways of men that He might draw nigh to us and save us.

A Sower went forth to sow, but He constrains no one. We of our own free will can receive the seed of the message of salvation, or we of our own free will reject this seed and not bring forth fruit unto salvation.

A Sower went forth to sow, and the seed fell in to a variety of types of earth. This earth and the locations described in today’s parable signifies our hearts and the condition or state we are in and our attitude towards the Sower.

As it is written, “And when He was asked by the Pharisees, when the Kingdom of God should come, He answered them and said, The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.” Lk 17:20-21

Parables have a twofold purpose. To the stiff-necked the message is kept in a shadowy form, yet for the believer great mysteries are portrayed in a few words. There are many facets to a parable. One word can signify many things.

Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. Those by the way side are they that hear; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved.

What is this wayside? It is the realm of heresy, the realm of false notions that have nothing to do with the “Faith once delivered to the saints” that the Apostle Jude proclaims in his epistle. These are the teachings concerning faith and morality that are outside the boundaries of the Fathers of the Church and Holy Tradition. —Through deceit and false notions demons and their helpers take away the word of salvation. In this realm the heart is trodden down and compacted, made hard and the word of Truth Incarnate does not penetrate.

Many call themselves Christian and trample down the teaching of our Savior. Alas, they do not understand that this trampling is what destroys their capacity to understand and be illumined and saved.

One can safely say that Ecumenism is the way side, the heresy that justifies all heresy and claims that the truth and the true Church has not yet been found. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, we make the choice daily either for the way side or the Way of Truth. Do we familiarize ourselves with the teachings of the Holy Fathers and try to gain an understanding of the mind of the Church, or do we choose to read only secular or questionable material? When we read the things of God, we partake of a transforming grace. Let us seek our own profit and the grace of salvation.

They on the rock are they, which, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and these have no root, which for a time believe, and in time of temptation fall away.

How can we prepare ourselves in order to avoid falling away? The soil is conditioned by our will. Broken up through patient endurance of the various hardships that inevitably come. It remains as rock when we avoid the podvig or struggle that is essential in the spiritual life.

“…We glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us. “(Romans 5:3-5)

“It is not possible with out temptations for a man to grow wise in spiritual warfare, to know his Provider and perceive his God, and to be secretly confirmed in his faith, save by virtue of the experience he has gained.” (P. 355 Saint Isaac the Syrian)

Without prayerful struggle there is no experience gained in spiritual perception and in time of tribulation one is only scandalized or confused and falls away.

The Ascetics of old had the saying, “Give blood and receive Spirit.” This is similar to Saint James the Brother of the Lord’s saying, “Faith without works is dead.” Christianity is not an abstract philosophy, it is a way of life.

As Vladika Anthony said, “the essence of Christianity id the renunciation of life’s pleasures; it is to be found in striving for purity; in the readiness to suffer for the Truth; in the acquisition of the feeling of constant love for God and men, and in the forgiveness of the offences of enemies.”

How can we prepare for the tribulation of the last days? Only by living the Christian life. Only by striving to become partakers of the grace of the Holy Spirit through keeping the commandments and through patience in the tribulations of day to day living.

And that which fell among thorns are they, which, when they have heard, go forth, and are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection.

The thorns choke! This is about time and what occupies our time. Our time is choked with cares, choked with acquiring riches, choked with self indulgence with the pleasures of this life. And finally there is no time left and we have not brought forth any fruit and are bound hand and foot and cast into outer darkness. The seed of the Word of God, the call to the wedding banquet of the Son of The King, has been choked, that is crowded out. --I had other things to do! What a tragedy!

The greatest temptation of our age, the age of information—is that much of it is misinformation and distraction. We all want to manage our money well, but we don’t seem to understand that for the sake of our eternal well being we have to intelligently manage our time and energy. The Elder Ieronymous used to say, “the day you don’t find the Savior in prayer, that day is lost unto eternity.” We have only so much time to spend. Daily let us ask ourselves am I investing my time wisely?

But that on the good ground are they, which in a good and upright heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience. And when He had said these things, He cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

Our Savior constrains no one, He spake to the multitude, “he that has ears, let him hear.” In other words, “Let him respond to My call.” Do we take this seed up into our hearts and carefully preserve it? Do we bring to mind the significance of the message of the word? That we are called to be sons and daughters of the Most High in a completely extraordinary way. That through our membership in the Body of Christ we are participants in the life of the incomprehensible Trinity.

In order to nurture this seed that it bring forth fruit, we must walk with great sobriety. These are the days of the spirit of Anti-Christ wherein error and confusion abounds. We see that over the last fifty years, heresy and false understandings of ecclesiology have made inroads even into Orthodox Churches to an alarming degree. One must remember that Judas was one of the twelve disciples and Nicholas, one of the original seven deacons became a leader of a heretical sect. We are the rational flock of Christ and not an irrational herd. Each and every one of us is responsible for soberly discerning error and guarding the word of truth and ordering our life aright.

As Saint Paul, the Apostle to the nations wrote to the Ephesians:

"I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; Endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ… And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ: That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ." Eph 4:1-7,11-15

Let us hearken to the words of Saint Paul and reject the various forms of error and preserve the word of Truth. Amen.

Exaltation of the Cross

www.gsinai.com — 2006-09-27T18:39:34-07:00

A Sermon of His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses

Today we celebrate the Universal Exaltation of the Cross. The origin of this feast goes back to the time of the discovery of the true Cross by Saint Helen, the mother of Saint Constantine.

But it was Saint Constantine who first encountered the mystery of the Cross the day before the famous battle at the Milvian Bridge. Saint Constantine was opposite the city of Rome, on the other side of the bank of the Tiber river, considering his prospects for the battle the next day and saw a vision of the Cross. He then also saw a dream that night wherein Christ appeared unto him. Afterwards he asked Christian clergy in his entourage what this vision might mean, they affirmed “...They affirmed that He was God, the only begotten Son of the one and only God: that the sign which had appeared was the symbol of immortality, and the trophy of that victory over death which He had gained in time past when sojourning on earth.” As we all know, Saint Constantine became a worshiper of Christ and won the battle the next day and freed Rome from the tyrant Maxentius.

Later, after peace was afforded to the Roman Empire through the efforts of Saint Constantine, Saint Helen was inspired to make pilgrimage to the land sanctified by the footsteps of our Savior. Saint Helen sought out the Cross of our Savior, When the proper cite was located, as the story goes, she would throw pieces of gold down to where they were digging in order to inspire them. Their efforts were not fruitless, but they discovered not one but three crosses. How to identify the Cross of Christ? The crosses were placed one by one upon a woman that was nigh unto death and when the True Cross touched her she was completely healed. It is also said that the touch of the Cross raised a dead man.

The Patriarch of Jerusalem at that time, Saint Makarios, solemnly took the Cross in his hands and the enthusiastic crowd called out that they could not see the great object of their desire, The Cross, because of the multitude. Then Saint Makarios lifted the Cross on high and blessed the multitude.

On this day, we also celebrate the appearance of the Cross in 1925 in the area of Mount Hymettos, outside of Athens. The Traditionalist Orthodox who refused to accept the Papal calendar that was imposed on the State Church of Greece were being persecuted for their faith. For the feast of the Exaltation in 1925, many of the faithful planned to attend the service at a small chapel outside of the city, in order to be left alone. The police heard of the plan to hold services there, but by the time they arrived there were so many people present they dared not attempt to break up the service. Late into the night an enormous Cross was seen in the sky, not just two intersecting lines, but a three bar Cross. The Cross was lifted up and exalted for all to see for a long time. All traditionalists refer to this miraculous Exaltation of the Cross in the sky on the very feast day of the Exaltation of the Cross as a Divine confirmation of our sacred calendar.

The Cross which is lifted up on high today is a spiritual ladder which leads to heaven just as that ladder the Patriarch Jacob saw. How, it may be asked, is it that in some commentaries of the Fathers the ladder which Jacob saw is interpreted as a symbol of the Theotokos? Clearly it is both. Our Savior, moved by love for lowly man, clothed Himself in humility and took on our lowly nature, being born of the Holy Theotokos, thus putting on our flesh. By this singular and unique deed the Most Holy Theotokos became the ladder by which our Savior came down. He took on all that pertains to our nature, save sin, toiled and sweated for our sake, and at the last, mounted the Cross and was slain, Thus leading us up unto the heavens. We ascend by no other way, except the Cross. The Cross is the source of all good things. Without the Cross, there is no resurrection.

Today we celebrate the great mystery of the Cross, the essence of Christianity. The tree of disobedience that slew Adam is nullified by the Cross. Wood is healed by wood, the wood of obedience, the wood of humility, the wood of co-suffering love. As Metropolitan Anthony once wrote:

“The essence of Christianity is the renunciation of life’s pleasures; it is to be found in striving for purity; in the readiness to suffer for the Truth; in the acquisition of the feeling of constant love for God and men, and in the forgiveness of the offenses of enemies.”

It is necessary to deny ourselves in a heroic spirit. We are to be crucified through the cutting off of our will in obedience to the rules of the Church, in our efforts of self-sacrificing love, in patience and long-suffering. It is easy for a man to be deceived into making what appears to be a sacrifice, but as it turns out, is in reality for vainglory or an investment for some kind of return. True self-sacrificing love looks only to God and is ready to give up something for His sake.

In our “post-Christian era” there are many concepts proffered in the market place of ideas, quasi religious writers express their ideas on the power of myth and that religion is a consequence of a human need and that all religion is essentially the same, etc., etc.

Long ago, Saint Justin demonstrated that Christianity is unique and not similar to pagan myth. At best, mythologies borrow bits and pieces from the truth and make parodies of spiritual reality. As Saint Justin proclaimed in his Apology to the pagans in defense of Christianity, the one thing the pagans do not have is the mystery of the Cross.

And rightly so, what mortal man or sinful demon could ever fathom the depth of the love of God! The idea that our omnipotent God Who dwells in Unapproachable light would take on the form of a servant and not only that, but also tread the path of humility and death is beyond what any man could conceive of. A stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks, but unto them that believe, the mystery of Co-suffering, self-sacrificing love. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have life everlasting.”

Let us exalt the Cross in our love for the truth and the love that we have, one for another. Amen.

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From Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History (c. A.D. 260-340)...

The Beheading of the Forerunner

www.gsinai.com — 2006-09-11T13:36:45-07:00

A Sermon of His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses

On this day we commemorate the Beheading of the Forerunner and Baptist John. The Church holds Saint John in exceedingly high regard, calling him a celestial man, an earthly angel, the culmination of the Prophets and Apostle to the Apostles. What is more amazing is that our Savior Himself called him the greatest born of woman, yet, despite all of this, God allowed that he die such a seemingly tragic death.

When we look into the matter we see that, although Saint John is considered a martyr and witness for the truth, he was not correcting Herod for a false teaching on a point of doctrine or desecrating the worship of the Most High God. Saint John was simply pointing out to Herod that he had violated the moral law of God.

It is important to note that theoretically Saint John could have compromised, he could have said that ‘Herod is not teaching the Israelites to worship idols’ or ‘this is a moral issue and not a point of doctrine and therefore I could ignore the whole matter and not risk the wrath of the king,’ but he did not. Out of love he desired to offer a spiritual remedy for the sin in the king’s life and for this he was beheaded. From this we learn that violation of the moral law of God is no trivial thing.

Much has been written about Herodias and her daughter, but I think that it is timely to focus on the man who gave the order for the beheading of Saint John the Baptist. Herod the tetrarch, a man who knew somewhat of the law given by God to His people. It is written in the Gospel of Saint Mark that Herod 'heard John gladly and did many things.' This indicates much. Herod conversed with Saint John and it is no stretch to assume that there was a time, before Herod took his brother’s widow to wife, when there was a good relationship between Herod and Saint John. More than likely, he listened gladly concerning doctrine. Furthermore, if, as the Gospel relates, he heard and did what Saint John told him, Herod could have very well been an almsgiver and shown mercy and outward virtue in various ways. Yet, it was plain for all to see that when Saint John admonished Herod for the sake of his own salvation to do the right thing on this one point, the man who formerly had a good relationship with Saint John turned against him, imprisoned him and then beheaded him.

Upon hearing such deeds, we become indignant at the lawless outrage committed against the minister and saint of God, but of course we know that God takes all things into account. Saint John suffered indignities and outrage for a short season and he abides in the glory of God for eternity.

And when we consider Herod, it is evident that he is the ultimate victim of Satan because, despite his other virtues, he chose to follow his own will and not the moral law of God and this lead to the greater sin of killing not just an innocent man, but the greatest man born of woman. In his gospel commentary on this passage, Saint John Chrysostom points out that if Herod had hearkened to the call to repentance from Saint John the Baptist, and done the right thing, few indeed were the people who would have heard of Herod’s sin. But the pride of arrogance and abuse of authority lead to further tragedies and now, even after…

so great a time has passed, and yet the memory of that which was done hath not faded away, but alike Persians and Indians, Scythians and Thracians, and Sarmatians, and the race of the Moors, and they that dwell in the British Islands, spread abroad that which was done secretly in a house by a woman that had been a harlot.

-Saint John Chrysostom, Commentary on Gospel of Matthew, 80th Homily

Alas, the man who heard Saint John gladly and did many acts of virtue is known throughout history for his infamous deeds and not his former virtue, all because he refused to do the right thing.

We see this story repeated throughout Church history, how men in positions of power who begin with a greater or lesser degree of virtue, reject God’s will, fall into sin and violate the moral law of God. And what is worse, when a minister of God admonishes them, because of their pride of power, they attack the messenger of God who is attempting to get them to do the right thing for the sake of their own salvation.

One example from Church history that comes to mind is from the life of Saint Niphon, Patriarch of Constantinople. Saint Niphon was born in Greece and was tonsured a monk at an early age. He spent his early years of monasticism on Mount Athos, mostly at the monastery of Dionysiou. It is interesting to note that the main church of that monastery is dedicated to the holy Forerunner and Saint Niphon had a special veneration for him. Because of his renowned reputation for meekness and spiritual wisdom the holy Niphon was chosen to become Bishop of Thessalonica. After two years of serving the Church in Thessalonica, he was elected to the vacant see of Patriarch of Constantinople. The saint held his post in Constantinople for a few years and subsequently, because of intrigue, the Sultan banished him from Constantinople to live in exile in Jedrene. The Wallachian (Romanian) Prince Radul heard of the wisdom of Saint Niphon and ransomed him from the Turks, convincing the saint to oversee the Church in Wallachia (present day Romania).

At first Radul was very solicitous towards the saint and helped him in his spiritual endeavors. Some time passed and Radul abandoned his wife and began living with another woman of noble rank. Eventually Radul found some unscrupulous bishops and clergyman to justify his deed and, although there were no grounds for divorce according to the canons, they granted him a divorce and married him to the paramour. Saint Niphon reproached Radul for this and Radul threw off his mask of piety and threatened the former Patriarch. Saint Niphon could have said that, it is just a case of morality, not heresy or part of Church order and it is better to compromise, but he did not. He stood his ground lest there be many other imitators of Radul. The tyrant’s working assumption was that because of his high position, the law of God did not apply to him. There is an old saying, “one does not tell the King, ‘you transgressed the law.’” There are many examples in history of men who embraced this ideal and were corrupted by their misuse of power to their own perdition. Better for men in positions of authority to meditate in their hearts the words of our Savior, “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom they have committed much, of him they will ask the more. (Luke 12:48)

At length, Radul exiled the saint from his former residence and told his lackeys that they should offer Saint Niphon no assistance and that anyone who helped the saint would lose his life. With God’s help, Saint Niphon found safe conduct out of Wallachia, but also predicted a bitter end for Radul and many tribulations for the people of Wallachia. As prophesized, Radul, who had brought a curse upon himself, died a miserable death and the local state and Church of Wallachia underwent many woes because the leaders were complicit in his sin. Saint Niphon returned to the monastery of Dionysiou on Mount Athos and reposed in peace. After many afflictions, order was restored in Wallachia and the saint’s disciple Neagoe Basarab became ruler of that land.

Let us bow before God’s inscrutable providence, which at times allows insult and outrages against His ministers. Let us not be confused if the tyrants of this age attack the men of God with assassination or exile. God is the ultimate judge of all things. It is for us to follow in the footsteps of the saints.

We do not know what lies ahead for us in an increasingly anti-Christian culture. Contemporary society trivializes and mocks the idea of Christian morality, and seeks to influence our children. There are elements in society that speak from positions of authority and seek to groom our youth for their eventual acceptance and participation in unchristian behavior. We must be vigilant and walk wisely and according to knowledge. We cannot live like unto those who know not God.

It is wise and fitting to seek the blessing of God for every aspect of our lives and we gain a blessing by following His moral law. We are the work of His hands and He knows what is best for us as individuals and as families and as a Church. If we are admonished for our own correction, let us not imitate the ways of the proud, but the ways of the meek. As we see from many examples and common sense, anger and repentance cannot both dwell in a man.[1] Let us remember the words of the Lord, recorded by the Prophet Esaias, “"But to this man will I look: even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembles at My word.”(Esaias 66:2) A true sign of repentance is contrition. In the later years of his life, whenever the Apostle Peter heard a cock crow, he remembered his sin of denial and wept. Let Saint Peter be for us an example to imitate in our own repentance.

On this day wherein we commemorate the beheading of the Forerunner, let us pay heed to the importance that the men of God have attached to the moral law of God and let us not become confused if we see someone suffering some indignity for this truth. The saints fought for this principle to preserve order in the Church for their own and future generations.

May God preserve us all in unity amongst ourselves and with such saints as Saint John the Forerunner and Saint Niphon, by whose intercessions may we increase in spiritual knowledge unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ Jesus. (Eph 4:13)

Amen.

Sermon for the Ninth Sunday After Pentecost

www.gsinai.com — 2006-08-13T15:30:58-07:00

A Sermon of His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses
On the Gospel of St. Matthew 14:22-34

Today’s gospel passage contains one of the most encouraging and hopeful messages for us all.

Our Saviour just completed feeding the five thousand and sent both the disciples and the multitudes away. He then went up onto a mountain to pray in solitude, not because he needed to separate Himself from the multitude to converse with the Father, since He is everywhere present and fills all things, but so as to show Himself as an example and a pattern for us all.

The disciples were in the ship rowing until the fourth watch of the night and the wind was contrary. They were discouraged and anxious and our Saviour passed by, walking on the water. Upon seeing him, they thought He was a spirit. Our Saviour called out to them to them saying, “Fear not, it is I.” Saint Peter in his ardour and zeal said, “If it is Thou, bid me come on the water.” And our Saviour bade him to come. So Saint Peter undertook to approach our Saviour, and seeing the wind boisterous and the waves of the sea, thoughts began to enter his mind. He reasoned also concerning the great depth of the sea, which as a fisherman he knew so well. These things filled his mind and he became distracted even in the presence of our Saviour. His faith began to fail him and he started to sink, yet even in his failings he knew Who to turn to, and cried out, “Lord save me!”

Our Saviour replied, “O ye of little faith, why didst thou doubt?” Clearly warning us that lack of faith is an obstacle to any of the works of virtue and the grace of God.

It is good to reflect at this point on the character of Saint Peter. Saint Peter was a good man with many virtues. He demonstrated his humility when our Saviour worked the miracle of the great catch of fish and in astonishment Saint Peter humbly said, “Lord depart from me for I am a sinful man.” Saint Peter had zeal and love—but his faith was not always as it should have been. Time went on, St Peter saw miracles, healed the sick and even experienced the Transfiguration. Then he endured another more grievous tempest than before—our Saviour’s voluntary Passion.

At the Mystical Supper our Saviour warned Saint Peter that, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou hast turned again, strengthen thy brethren.” (Luke 22:31-32) St John of Kronstadt explains that by the term “sifting” our Saviour meant that Satan was going to distract Saint Peters mind and make him forgetful and cause him to fall.

The chief priests and the officers appeared at the Garden of Gethsemane to take our Saviour and in his ardour Saint Peter pulled out his sword and cut off the ear of the servant of the high priest. Our Saviour commanded him to put away his sword. Consternation and confusion set in, yet, when our Saviour was taken away, Saint Peter followed him out of love and devotion. Saint Peter was threatened and he was distracted and faltered in his forgetfulness. He was accused that he was a disciple of Jesus by one of the maids and he denied. Again he was accused and again he denied. Then, according to our Savior’s prediction, the cock crowed and Saint Peter had to confront his sin. He had become distracted and that lead to confusion, which tempted his faith, which lead to denial. Yet he knew where to turn to and did not despair —but wept bitterly before God. His faith failed him, but he did not lose faith in God’s mercy. These things are recorded for us that we keep the remembrance of this faith in God’s mercy for time of need. Saint Peter demonstrated what the Holy Fathers call “praiseworthy audacity.” We should always trust in God’s mercy and even be audacious in our pursuit of it. Yet, we have to act in order to find mercy. We have to find a way to repent.

How do we know that Saint Peter repented? There is a tradition that whenever Saint Peter heard a rooster crow, he remembered his denial and wept. That is an important lesson for us. If we fall into a sin and try and convince ourselves that we have repented, the only way to be sure is by the measure of our contrition and regret. It is easy for us to be lazy and complacent and not really repent. One indication that we have not repented is if someone were to bring the sin up and we become angry or try and justify ourselves, or trivialize our sin. Such an attitude is self-deception and not repentance.

Saint Peter had failings, but he loved God. The elder Ambrose of Optina once stated, “You know, personalities are only significant in human judgement, and that is why they are praised or scorned. But in God’s judgement, personalities, like natural tendencies, are not approved or disapproved. The Lord looks at good intentions and struggle for the good, and values opposition to the passions…”

Yea, our God looks to the sincere disposition of the heart and struggle and effort. Saint Peter failed, yet because he loved and was sincere and did not justify or trivialize his actions, grace supported him even in his fall and eventually restored him.

This image of Saint Peter in the wind tossed depths of the sea is a powerful one. It reminds one of the many perils that the saints endured, and yet in the midst of perils they kept their eyes on Christ.

As Saint Paul described his spiritual journey of contending with the billows of life, “…in scourgings above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths often. From the Jews five times received I forty scourges save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep, in journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils from countrymen, in perils from heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in vigils often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Beside external matters, the tumult against me daily, the care of all the Churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? who is scandalized, and I am not inflamed?” (1Cor. 11)

Such is the Apostolic life. It is precisely because they were steadfast in similar perils that the saints were glorified. Saint John Chrysostom lived during the golden age of Christianity. Yet, his life was filled with tumult from the time he became Archbishop of Constantinople. The Patriarch of Alexandria Theophilus did not want him as a candidate and continually intrigued against him after he was elected. The local clergy resented him because they thought he was too strict in some matters. He raised the ire of the Empress because he complained about immodest dress (including hers) and stood up to her when she took some land that had been part of a poor family’s estate for generations. Whisperings and intrigues were continually used against him. These storms intrigue were against the “Golden Mouth,” the greatest preacher in the history of the Church. The empress and the patriarch of Alexandria conspired against him and he ended his life in exile ever looking to our Saviour and saying, “Glory to God for all things."

Saint Herman of Alaska was part of that band of heroic men that came to Alaska to preach the world of God to the local natives. After Saint Juvenal was slain by a certain group of natives, Saint Herman and the others found willing converts to the word of God, but it was a corrupt leader of the Russian America Company that undermined all of their efforts. As it is written in the life, the others became demoralized, yet Saint Herman simply withdrew from the corrupt leader and redoubled his prayers, finding another location and way to help the Christian converts. Things were not as he wished, but he prayerfully kept the mind of his eye on Christ and made it through the storm.

These things are recorded in the lives of the saints in order to instruct us how we can set our gaze on Christ in the midst of storms in our own lives.

Today there is much confusion in the world. There may be a time when to do the right thing for yourselves and your families will be very unpopular with society and with those you interact with on a daily basis. When a Christian stands for what is right that person is many times vilified in the press and abandoned by fair weather friends.

It is precisely during these times we must remember the image of Saint Peter and the examples of the saints and more earnestly direct our gaze towards our Lord Jesus. Without our Christ we are nothing, with Him we can rise above the storms of life. In Christ we can find forgiveness of sins, if we truly repent. Let us "seek the face of God at all times and be strengthened" (Psalm 104) in the storms of life and find consolation both here and in the age to come, in Christ Jesus, to Whom be all glory honour and worship with His Unoriginate Father and all Holy and Good and Life Creating Spirit. Amen.

Sunday of Saint Gregory Palamas, 2006

www.gsinai.com — 2006-03-19T19:08:34-08:00

A Sermon of His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses of Seattle

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Holy Fast is an archetype of the life of spiritual progress.

We crossed over into the arena of fasting by seeking mutual forgiveness, the first Sunday of the fast, we celebrated the triumph of Orthodoxy, true glory, true worship and the conciliar Tradition of the Church and the principle of the consensus of the Holy God-Bearing Fathers that enlightens our path to salvation. Without the true faith, our labors are in vain.

In fitting manner we progress to this Sunday wherein we celebrate the feast of our Holy Father among the saints, Gregory Palamas, who expounded the workings of Grace more than any other Church Father. Saint Gregory was a great man of prayer and was made manifest as a wonder-worker while still in his late twenties. This great saint of our Church was given a special grace to articulate his mystical experiences.

From the life of Saint Gregory:
"Another time, in a state of noetic prayer, Gregory fell into a light sleep. It appeared to him that in his hands was there was a vessel of pure milk, so full that it was flowing over the brim. Then this milk took the form of wine, which flowed over the brim of the vessel onto his hands and clothes, spreading abroad a wonderful fragrance. As soon as Gregory perceived it, he was filled with holy joy.
There appeared to him a radiant youth who said, “Why do you not pass on this wonderful drink, left by you without due attention. This is the ever-inexhaustible gift from God.”
“To whom should I pass on this drink when there is no on in need of it?” asked saint Gregory.
“Even if at the present moment there is no one actually thirsting for the drink,” answered the youth, “yet, nevertheless, you should do your duty and not neglect this gift of God. With the proper use of which, you will have to answer before God.” With these words the wondrous vision came to an end.
Saint Gregory interpreted it in this way: The milk meant the ordinary gift of the word, understandable to very simple hearts looking for spiritual instruction The turning of milk in to wine meant that when the time comes, the Supreme-Will will ask him for deeper instructions of the sublime Christian Faith."

Thus, things that are beyond the mind of man, beyond the grasp of philosophical inquiry are imparted to us not by speculation, but by men of spiritual experience. Saint Gregory defended the Orthodox doctrine on how we participate in God, how we become partakers of God’s uncreated energies, i.e., the holy truths of our Church regarding Theosis, or deification.

In the days of Saint Gregory one Barlaam of Calabria arrived in the parts of the east and spread his false teaching that God Himself does not unite with man or enter into man’s heart, but that God creates a grace that He imparts to man. This is because in the parts of the west they were immersed more in the Greek philosophers than the Gospel. They tried to force Christian revelation into Pagan Greek philosophical constructs.

Consistent with the God bearing Fathers, Saint Gregory explained for us that only nonbeing is without operation. All creatures have operation and activity. If one were to say that the operation or energy of the Holy Trinity was created then the logical conclusion is that the Holy Trinity is created (which is blasphemy). Uncreated nature has an uncreated energy.

Thus, Essence is cause and Energy is effect. This revealed Spiritual Truth, affects our world-view and gives us a precise perspective on spiritual reality. God is completely distinct from His creation, there is no similarity. We partake of life, He is the Source of life. He brought all things into being from nothing and is Beyond Being. The Church teaches that God is completely transcendent and unapproachable in His essence, but we partake of His energies. The correct understanding of the distinction between the essence of God and His uncreated energies, given unto us by the God-bearing Fathers, is one of the greatest gifts of Orthodox theology. This spiritual insight is the only way to properly understand the words of Saint Peter when he says that we are called upon to, “be partakers of the Divine Nature.” The Church has its own vocabulary and understanding, without which it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the Holy Scriptures.

When we read in scripture of the glory of God, His illumination, a Divine light, etc. this refers to the uncreated grace of God that we are called to participate in. As our Savior said, “For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when He shall come in His own glory, and in His Father's, and of the holy angels” (Luke 9: 26). This glory is the uncreated Energy of God (Divine Grace) that emanates from the Holy Trinity, which both angels and men partake.

Saint Basil the Great expressed this quest to acquire the Grace of God thus, “The contest for virtue is the struggle for one to become God and a son by the illumination of the most pure light of that day which is uninterrupted by darkness. He that shines forth with the true light has made virtue as another sun, which having once shined upon us no longer hides itself in the west; but having clothed all things with its illuminating power, it grants an unceasing and perpetual light unto the worthy and makes into other suns those who partake of that light.”

Saint Gregory also taught that we participate in the uncreated grace of God in both soul and body, thus overturning all of the spiritual error of the dualists, both ancient and modern.[1] The Church teaches that when God made man He made “all things very good.” It is sin, man’s misuse of free will that is the cause of everything wrong in creation. Thus Christ became the New Adam that we might be made new and become temples of the Holy Spirit. What is the significance of this spiritual truth?

Your body belongs to God.

The only variation on this is in Christian marriage, when the two become one flesh. The husband’s body belongs to the wife and the wife’s body belongs to the husband. For a man, every woman in the world is his sister, unless he gets married, then he has one wife. For a woman, every man in the world is a brother, unless she gets married, then she has one husband. God Himself has implanted the law of attraction and He has ordained that marriage has certain consolations that are to be reserved for marriage. This is the definition of chastity.

The Church is a spiritual hospital and has always offered the therapy of repentance to those who have fallen into sin. Our contemporary problem is that there are many who, with malicious intent, wish to change the law of God. They trivialize the body and the Christian concept of purity and want to remove sex from the proper context. For this reason we need to repeat to our youth again and again that popular culture has it all wrong. We are called to become temples of the living God and these things matter. The custom of “sowing wild oats” is a great spiritual error. Chastity is bodily purity and godliness. One who lives in chastity has good hopes to become a temple of the Living God, in Christ Jesus.

As Saint Peter so wisely put it in his introduction to his Second Catholic (universal) Epistle:

Grace and peace be multiplied unto you in the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord, according as His divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him Who hath called us by glory and virtue; by which are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, so that through these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. And for this cause, by applying all diligence, add virtue to your faith, and to virtue, knowledge, and to knowledge, continence, and to continence, patience, and to patience, godliness, and to godliness, brotherly affection, and to brother affection, love. For if these things be in you, and abound, they render you neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Peter 1:2-8)

May we pay heed to these words and come to the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ by participation in His Grace, to Whom be all glory, honor and worship, with His Unoriginate Father and All Holy Life Creating Spirit. So be it. Amen.

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[1] Dualist doctrine claims that only the soul is good and worthy and the body is evil and that upon death the soul is liberated from the body and only then enters its true existence.

Sunday of The Cross, 2006

www.gsinai.com — 2006-03-26T19:01:54-08:00

A Sermon of His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We continue our journey to the Pascha of Christ. On the first Sunday of Great Lent we began with the Truth when we celebrated the triumph of Orthodoxy. On the Sunday of Saint Gregory Palamas we encountered the Life, i.e., we learned of the workings of grace, that our salvation consists of participating in God, both in body and soul. On the third Sunday of Great Lent, the Sunday of the Cross, we learn of the Way.

In the Cross we encounter the superabundance of God’s love, how He freely chose to save us by the Cross, though there was no necessity to compel Him to do this. In the Cross we stand face to face with the mystery of self-sacrificing, co-suffering love.

The Lord said, Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. (Mark 8:34-35)

Our Savior Himself first took up His Cross and was crucified for our love that we might be moved, that we might come to understand how to throw off the yoke of sin and domination by the passions, that is, by self-sacrificing love.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? (Mark 8:36-37)

In other words, what shall it profit a man to ceaselessly indulge himself, even if he were to “gain the whole world” and be able to fulfill all of his earthly desires these earthly delights and dissipations would not satisfy his soul and in the end would be the cause of his eternal separation from God.

Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when He cometh in the glory of His Father with the holy Angels. (Mark 8:38)

One aspect of carrying the Cross, is to confess our Savior “in spirit and in truth.” In our day, the Christians who desire to stand fast and hold the traditions which we have been taught from the Apostles (2 Thess 2:14) are marginalized and ridiculed. Mainstream “orthodoxy” has entered into an adulterous relationship with the god of ecumenism, they are ashamed to proclaim the singleness of truth that Orthodoxy stands for. As difficult as it is sometimes, we are called to stand at the Cross with our Savior, Who was rejected by His people.

On this Sunday of the Cross, let us remember that at the bear minimum in our lives, in our choice of action, we are called upon to do the right thing. It is amazing how human nature can find a way to use the most self-indulgent justifications for not doing the right thing. We all are tempted in this to one degree or another. Young healthy people are careless in keeping the fast. Through laziness one does not attend Saturday night vespers, or arrives very late on Sunday. A person chooses to ignore his responsibility to support the Church. A couple moves in together without the benefit of marriage. One can produce a long list, but the guiding principle is self-indulgence wins out over self-sacrificing love. Life is a balance, not everyone is called to great heroism, but all are called to heroism in at least the small things in life, otherwise we are not carrying the Cross.

May we all follow our Christ and find the Way, the Truth and the Life. Amen.

*Repousse icon of the Cross by Leonid Ouspensky, 20th C.

++++++++++

Words of Saint Antony the Great regarding the Cross...

The Second Feast of the Monastery

www.gsinai.com — 2005-08-21T14:50:00-07:00

Our patron, Saint Gregory of Sinai, has, as we say, three feasts and no services. He is celebrated on April 6 (and on some calendars, April 7), today, August 8/21, and on the day of his repose in 1346, November 27/December 10, the day we keep as our main feast.

The three dates all occur within periods of fasting in most years, appropriately enough for a monastic. The absence of a service is curious. Saint Gregory is a major figure within the world of hesychast spiritual life, and one would expect that a liturgical composer would have been found early-on, drawn from the same circles that composed the service for his younger (and better-known) contemporary, Saint Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessaloniki. But no liturgical text is extant for Saint Gregory of Sinai.

Saint Gregory was born in the 1260's (traditionally 1265) in a family which we may see as rural gentry, in a village at the southern end of the bay of Smyrna (currrently Turkish Izmir). He comes to public attention when he, with his family, falls victim to a Moslem raiding party looking for prominent captives who will be ransomed, and humbler captives for the slave markets. The captives were taken to Syrian Laodikeia where they were indeed ransomed, as expected. But during their captivity Saint Gregory comes to the attention of the local community when his chanting in a local church is unusually accomplished, and his physical beauty is remarked. We do not know the fate of the rest of his family after their release, but an apparently teen-aged Gregory goes off to Cyprus, the first stage of a life-long pilgrimage in search of a deeper union with God. On Cyprus he is clothed in the first stage of the monastic life (the stage called rassoforos, from the wide-sleeved robe donned by the beginner) by a hermit. Gregory moves, after a short time, to Mount Sinai, where he is fully-tonsured into the ranks of the monastics at Saint Katherine's Monastery. Looking at the buildings, the interior walls and ikons, and at the magnificent mosaic of the Transfiguration in the conch of the basilica's apse today, we see what Saint Gregory saw during his stay at Sinai. Here he became adept at the ascetic disciplines designed to deconstruct the worldly man, and to reconstruct the heart in Christ. Strictness in keeping the fasts, lengthy vigils (in the church's liturgical cycles and in the individual kelli, the cell), prolonged standing during prayer, all-night chanting of psalms and other severe feats tamed and disciplined the flesh rendered unruly and self-absorbed as a result of the mortality programed into the human condition as a result of the ancestral sin in Eden. The goals included a growing self-mastery, a purification of individual will, and a capacity to detect, and deflect the assault of the daemonic, working through the passions to which all flesh falls heir.

Our knowledge of this phase of Saint Gregory's life and spiritual growth comes from a companion of those early years, one Father Gerasimos, whose verbal account was heard and written down by one of Saint Gregory's late disciples, Kallistos, who later served as Oecumenical Patriarch (twice, in fact: 1350-1353 and 1355-1363). Patriarch Kallistos' life is our one source for the life and teaching of Saint Gregory of Sinai. Kallistos lived in obedience to Saint Gregory for a number of years.

Confronted with the envy of other brothers in the Sinai monastery, Saint Gregory quietly quit the place, taking Gerasimos with him, and landing on Crete during a storm, the two took the landfall as a sign that they were to settle in a quiet, obscure place. Finding a cave, they took up residence and lived on a spare diet of bread and water, while looking for an older monk to mentor their struggle. The Holy Spirit inspired an elderly holy monk, Arsenios, to find them and it was from Arsenios, on Crete, that Saint Gregory learned of the practice of hesychasm, which we call by various names today - contemplative prayer, inner prayer, prayer of the heart. Arsenios told Saint Gregory that the following of a regimen of interior spiritual discipline and prayer could result in the hesychast's becoming wholly light (olos fotoeidis). He explained that Gregory's efforts until now fell under the heading called 'praxis' (bodily ascetic practices), but his advice would be to move inward to 'theoria' (interiorized ascetic disciplning of the mind and of the heart).

The establishment of this connection between Saint Gregory and the monk Arsenios would be, as one of Saint Gregory's recent biographers notes, "a milestone in the great Hesychast Movement which swept through the monastic world, triumphed in the mid-fourteenth century . . . and launched among the Slavonic and other non-Greek Churches dependent on it a broad and beneficial wave of spirituality and reform, of which the effects lasted for centuries and can even be felt today". (David Balfour, "Discourse on the Transfiguration", p. 65).

Immediately, Saint Gregory left Crete and landed on Mount Athos, where he searched wide and far for hesychasts who could continue and further the education of his mind and heart. Significantly, he found almost no one - none at all residing in the great ruling coenobitic monasteries - and finally settled a half-hour walk to the right of the main gate of Philotheou, in a small skete called Magoula, where three monks (Isaiah, Kornelios and Makarios) followed a way of life attending to both the familiar 'praxis' and to 'theoria' as well.

Here Saint Gregory constructed cells for his own disciples, and at some distance, a kelli for himself. Here, concentrated within himself, and using the Jesus Prayer (Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me), he began to undergo a 'good and strange transformation' as the energy of the Holy Spirit transformed the inner man. And, just as had been predicted by the monk Arsenios, his kelli was filled with 'light, the effulgence of Grace' while Gregory himself overflowed with joy, weeping tears, filled with divine love. His desire for God was overwhelming, and he himself - as well as his kelli - was filled with light.

Now Gregory's attractiveness - physical, when noted in his teen years by the Christians who came into contact with him during his captivity - becomes spiritual and monks of all kind flock to his side 'like bees to honey'. Some are already adepts, and well-known. Others - like the Bulgarian Kliment - are simple - Kliment was a humble shepherd. The mixing of ethnicities and languages at this early stage will continue as Saint Gregory lays the foundation for what a 20th century Romanian Byzantinist will call 'the hesychast international'.

One is reminded of the late Father Alexander Schmemann's remark that the history of the West is a history of 'radical discontinuities' while the history of the East is one of 'radical continuities' - much of the material in Patriarch Kallistos' biography of his Elder is practically identical to material found in the early and classic reflections of the Christian spiritual life as practised by the monastic community, such as Saint John Klimakos' 'Ladder of Divine Ascent'. This is not merely the repetition of cliches, but the manifestation of a continuum of effect in the God-man relationship. And again, turning to Father Alexander's gift for summarizing distinctions memorably - 'While secularized Christians in the West always want to hear Christ saying, "Behold, I make all new things", the fact is that Christ said, "Behold, I make all things new", and that fundamental truth informs the amazing continuity one finds within the Church.'

Patriarch Kallistos notes in his biography that the gifts found in Saint Gregory's life as he went from glory to glory could not 'safely be described to uninitiated persons . . . who believe the grace and gift of the Spirit is a mere creature' - he is referring to the westernized opponents who spoke out vehemently against hesychasm, and who were confronted by the writings in defense of the hesychasts penned by Saint Gregory Palamas (+1359). The Latin West held that grace is created; the Church knew grace as uncreated. The fierce polemics between Saint Gregory Palamas and the hesychasts, on the one side, and the partisans (who included some Byzantines) of a westernized understanding of grace and the spiritual life, racked Constantinople and what was left of the empire of the New Rome for years, and while the final vindication of the hesychast position came within Saint Gregory Palamas' lifetime, that victory was by no means assured during the heat of an intensely-fought battle. Saint Gregory of Sinai, however, seems (as far as the extant documentation indicates) to have stood apart from the polemics of the age, preferring the unhindered, undistracted pursuit of the joys of the heschast life to their public defense under the most trying conditions.

At times even the mild tasks of mentoring like-minded hesychasts under his direction proved overly-distracting and Saint Gregory would leave Magoula for a time, for remoter, uninhabited regions, where he had built cells for the purpose. However, a more serious intrusion came in the form of Moslem raiding parties which afflicted Athos during this period of the final break-down of the security of the civil life of the eastern Roman Empire.

Saint Gregory evidently decided to return to Sinai, and, taking a number of disciples (including the future Oecumenical Patriarchs Isidore and Kallistos - his biographer) with him, he journeyed to Thessaloniki, then on to Chios (intending to go on to Jerusalem, a plan abandoned when they met a monk from there who warned them against the idea) and Lesvos and Constantinople. But the idea of going on to Sinai was evidently abandoned, and the party returned to Athos, where Gregory was well-received at the Great Lavra, and was given a hermitage (hesychastirion) nearby. Moslem raids, however, only increased and finally Saint Gregory and his brothers found themselves in the Strandzha Mountains on the then-border between the Empire and the Bulgarian Kingdom. Near Paroria, above the Black Sea coast, the final monastic settlement was established, not without terrible trials, including some from envious local monks jealous of Saint Gregory's reputation and success in recruiting disciples. But Gregory was much-aided by the timely attention of the Bulgarian King, John Alexander (reigned 1331-1371), a man of piety who loved the monastic life, who provided both material resources and a force to police and secure the area, ensuring the undistracted and unhindered pursuit of the hesychast life as far as was possible in an age of upheaval and violence.

Here recruits from Slav- and Greek-speaking communities included some of the most famous spiritual leaders of the next generation, Saint Theodosios of Trnovo and Saint Romylos among them.

Many days before his repose, Saint Gregory was forewarned of his impending departure from this life. He went to an isolated cell taking with him a disciple. Here his final days on earth saw a horde of daemons descend on him, seeking to destroy him. Saint Gregory was not frightened by this daemonic invasion, although the daemons continued to attack. For three days he neither ate nor slept, and he encouraged his single companion to join him in the "hard wrestling" by "clinging to prayer and psalmody". Then, a deep spiritual composure settled on the Saint and filled him with consolation. He noticed this change and gave thanks to God saying "Thy right hand, O Lord, hath crushed our enemies, the daemons, and destroyed them utterly . . . . " He called his disciple who came and found him joyful and tender, smiling, and telling him that "some divine force has come down and driven away the evil spirits and freed us from their temptation." (Balfour, 90-91 for the full account).

And today's Gospel is the appearance on the water of our Saviour, Who invites the bold Apostle Peter to join Him in the miracle, and Peter does. And then, Peter notices the storm, and sinks.

How often does our Saviour come to us in the context of a storm, of a situation that threatens us and terrifies us. And at its heart, stands the Saviour Who is the Lord of storms at sea and of storms in our family life, our professional life, our community, our inner life. The Saviour calls to us from the eye of the storm, calling us to be with Him in the context of what is an unbelievable miracle, a miracle that turns what we know inside-out, that inverts and re-orients all our certainties.

We would prefer a Savioiur of easy days and quiet afternoons, of sunny weather, of gentle breezes, a Saviour Who allows us to apprehend Him when all is calm, within and without. But that is not always going to be the case. How well the life of Saint Gregory of Sinai illustrates this. His life is time and again torn apart, all the routine gestures of routine daily affairs broken down, and he is left like Peter, all exposed.

Christ, or the storm. How often those are the alternatives before Saint Gregory, as they were before Peter the Apostle. Saint Gregory suggests that the path of sanity and health, of personal stabilty and spiritual strength, is laid down within our heart through the discipline of ascetic struggle. And that must be the way we look at things, whether the ascetic struggle is carried out in the context of married family life or of the monastic life. Consistent, persistent, motivated by love of God and of the least of His brethren, whose serving accomplishes our salvation - these are the elements that converge today on our patronal feast as we hear the Gospel of Peter and the storm, at whose heart is Christ. We already hear the Saviour's triple question to Peter, asked after the resurrection: Peter, lovest thou Me?

The Lord grant that we hear all the lives of all the Saints who speak to us across the centuries, or from our own fleeting moment in history, who discover Christ in the midst of the day's stormy struggles and questions. And may the prayers of the uncomplaining Gregory of Sinai, driven hither and yon in a time of violent change, strengthen us in our own struggle and in our own love for the Lord of the storm.

--A word from Bishop Sergios on the feast of Saint Gregory of Sinai, August 8/21, 2005

Update, Cheesefare Tuesday, 2002

www.gsinai.com — 2002-02-16T14:47:00-08:00

The Monastery has had to neglect updating this website for the better part of a year due to construction work on our first building, coupled with increased work due to the blessing of having more, and more frequent visitors than had previously been the case.

Monk Simon completed one phase of frescoing the east wall of a local church and has re-set up his studio in our new building, continuing to prepare and paint individual panels for communities and individuals. Monk Simon also serves as Devteros of the Brotherhood and is responsible for our liturgical music.

Monk Aimilianos has continued to work as site and building manager, and with some consultation with local builders and contracters, has kept the various projects moving forward smoothly. In Monk Simon's absence, Monk Aimilianos has charge of the choir and, if the building project ever ends, will return to the Ikon Studio.

The construction of a multi-purpose structure, 120 feet long and 24 feet wide, has been completed through the exterior tar paper stage. Interior facilities have been completed just short of final cosmetic details such as window and door framing. If God wills, before the cold rainy late winter/early spring weather departs, we hope to stucco the exterior of the building using techniques partly derived from our work in fresco painting, using a special hydraulic lime imported from France for the final layer. That will complete the weather-proofing of the structure, at which point the three decks (one north, one south and one connected to the exterior staircase leading to the attic) will receive their permanent decking, a beautiful cedar cut from our own forest and milled locally with our help which has been air drying for some months.

Novice Ephraim was appointed Ekklesiarch by Metropolitan Ephraim, and saw this past Christmas' line of cards through printing. Monk Simon had a new card based on an illumination which he painted in traditional technique and media on vellum. Novice Ephraim also acts as the Monastery business manager and chief administrator and, if his tasks ever lighten, will be found in the Ikon Studio. This year we also have a new card for Pascha based, again, on a traditionally-painted illumination on vellum by Monk Simon.

Novice Athanasios continues to maintain the interior of the Monastery facility, acts as Guest Master, and chants most of the weekday services. Novice Athanasios is also in charge of the Monastery dispensary and inventory and maintains our weather records

Novice Nilos participated in a three-day ecology conference sponsored by Ecology Action in Willits, California, in early November of last year, which enabled him to introduce the French Bio-Intensive Double-Dig method of preparing seed and transplant beds in our vegetable garden, which even without this approach gave us bumper harvests of heirloom Black Krim tomatoes, as well as cucumbers, squash, peppers of several varieties and a summer- and fall-crop of small intensely-flavoured strawberries. A variety of herbs also did well in a garden which, until last Spring, had been a forest floor for untold centuries, worked up into a basic garden by Priest Bohdan Barody visiting from Calgary, Canada. The very large local deer herd and rabbit population respected our fence, although a few ornamental plants were not so lucky. As if gardening were not enough, Novice Nilos also acts as Monastery cook.

Due to errors made by a local immigration lawyer, our petition to secure residency last year for Novice Nilos failed and he was ordered back to his native Canada on September 11 - it was some time, of course, before he could actually find his way back given the tragedy of that day, and he remained in Canada until October 26. Priestmonk Sergios travelled to Calgary a week before that date to help with any questions raised by US immigration, but in fact all went smoothly. Father Sergios and Nilos were blessed to participate in the patronal feast day of our parish in Calgary Thursday evening and Friday morning, returning to California that evening.

The Monastery was greatly blessed this past November when a large contingent of adults and children were received into our Diocese by Metropolitan Ephraim, assisted by Protopresbyter Neketas Palassis, Dean of St. Nectarios Parish in Seattle.

Due to the growth of our Diocese in the western United States, our Synod of Bishops decided to establish our flagship parish of St. Nectarios in Seattle as a Cathedral, and named the Vicar Bishop of Roslindale, Moses, as the first Metropolitan of the new See. Metropolitan Moses elected to reside at our Monastery whenever not on active pastoral and administrative duties, so we have the joy of welcoming a new monk who is also our Chief Shepherd. A native of San Jose, Metropolitan Moses is familiar with the West Coast and had visited our Monastery several times, contributing construction skills this past Summer learned as a novice in Boston when he joined them almost 30 years ago. His presence in the Brotherhood has been a blessing beyond words. We reap where we did not sow.

Most of the Brotherhood drove north to Seattle for His Eminence's installation on December 30 by his brother Bishops, Metropolitan Makarios of Toronto and Metropolitan Ephraim of Boston.

Metropolitan Moses presided at our celebration of Theophany, blessing the Monastery facilities and walking up to the center - and highest point - of our 300 acres, accompanied by a large contingent of kids - to bless a 12 foot high redwood Cross set up at the site of our future, permanent Monastery.

Generous friends donated a new Chevrolet Suburban to the Brotherhood some months ago, and other generous friends donated a new BSC rototiller in late February of this year. This follows upon very generous gifts of commercial-grade equipment for our new kitchen, and for all these and many other gifts beside, we are grateful to the Lord and to the cheerful donors, who humble us with their love. A number of regular donors have often enabled us to get through the month materially intact, and we are daily praying for them, whose love feeds us.

Igoumenos Sergios made his annual pilgrimage to Mount Athos in late January - early February of this year, spending wonderful days at Esfigmenou and again visiting the Skete of St. Evthymios next to the Cave of St. Nilos the Myrovlite. The joy of seeing old friends and acquaintences in several of the ruling monasteries, and of meeting new ascetics, makes of this yearly visit in January-February the greatest blessing.

Two more stray cats, one a kitten, the other 4 years old (according to the family vet) made it to the Monastery one way and another, bringing the feline corps up to four following the still-lamented disappearance of the much-loved Ramses late last Fall. Living with animals puts us in mind of one of the sayings attributed to the Blessed Nikolai (Velimirovic) of Ochrid - When a dog barks at a man, he should be ashamed of himself - pointing to the loss of that relationship we had with animals before the Fall. An elderly monk feeding a herd of some 30 cats one day at Grigoriou on Athos was asked, some years ago, by some visitors, if cats would go to heaven. Of course, replied the Elder unhesitatingly. Why? asked the visitors. Because, he said, they spend their whole lives making us happy.

As this is being written, we are already close to the beginning of the Great Forty Day Fast before Pascha, and we send joyful greetings to friends near and far, wishing them a fruitful struggle towards the luminous vision of the passover from death unto life of the Lord Who saves us. Pray for us, as we pray, by day and by night, for each of you.

Igoumenos Sergios
Cheesefare Tuesday, 2002

Update, Feast of St. Athanasios of Athos and St. Sergios of Radonezh, July 5/18 2001

www.gsinai.com — 2001-07-18T14:46:00-07:00

The Brotherhood continues to live in tents and trailers while working on its first building. Exterior and interior walls had been framed by SS Athanasios and Sergios day, July 5/18, and roof trusses were installed as we celebrated St. Thomas of Maleon, July 7/20.

We were blessed by the presence, for two months, of Mihailo Repovic, a retired engineer, born in Serbia and living through the unbelievably hard years of the Second World War, who spent most of his later life as a bridge builder for the state of Massachusetts. He, with his 15 year old godson Kosta, both members of our St. Mark of Ephesos Cathedral in Boston, made significant contributions to the design and building in its early stages. A 19 year old member of our Portland parish, John Ashling, has been with us for over two months and has put his construction experience to good use energizing the day’s work through what has become a very long summer.

From June 11 to June 18, Bishop Moses of Roslindale was in residence, joining the work force daily and bringing his own construction experience, gained as a young novice at Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Boston, to help the project along. During his stay the subflooring of the 120 foot long building was installed. His Grace held several synaxes with the Brotherhood while he was with us.

On Sunday June 17 he blessed Reader Timothy Vargas of St. Peter the Aleut Mission in Hayward to act as Ekklesiarch for that community, and our Novice Ephraim to act in the same capacity for us. At the Small Entrance of the Liturgy for that day, the Synaxis of the Fathers of Athos, he installed Priestmonk Sergios as Abbot of the Monastery, handing him the abbot’s staff and exhorting him and the Brotherhood regarding the installation and the significance of its symbol of office.

Bishop Moses was able to meet with a number of lay people who attend services at the Monastery regularly, and to discuss questions of the day with laymen from other jurisdictions, concerned about the progress of syncretist ecumenism in our time.

On Tuesday June 12 we at last commenced the drilling of our well and on June 22, the Feast of St. Kyril of Alexandria, the drillers struck water at 495 feet, continuing on to 520 feet, somewhat less than the 550 foot estimate given originally.

Monk Simon and Novice Ephraim, assisted by Monk Aimilianos (who is our foreman on the building site) are completing the largest fresco we have ever undertaken, consisting of the Ascension of the Saviour, covering the entire east wall of a newly-constructed church in Santa Rosa, the ascending Saviour depicted some 30 feet above the floor of the Church, four large angels beneath and to either side of our Lord, and the Theotokos and Apostles in two groups on either side of the apse at the level of the ikonostasis. Euphemia Briere, from our St. John the Confessor parish in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a student of ikonography, spent some 10 days with us, understudying Father Simon during the mid-phase of this painting.

Two new greeting cards have been completed and added to our catalogue, one for Pascha 2002 and the other for this coming Christmas, 2001. A newly-designed brochure detailing all of our cards will be in the mail, if God wills, early this Fall. Both new cards are based on 11th century Byzantine illuminations, and were painted in our workshop on vellum in egg tempera.

Our first garden, laid out and dug by Father Bohdan Borody from our parish in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, 2 months ago, has been overseen by another Calgarian, our Novice Nilos, and for all the difficulties of working with what had been for centuries a forest floor, is doing amazingly well. We have a large planting of heirloom tomatoes - a Russian variety called ‘Black Krim’ - and we are just beginning to add them to salads of fresh organic greens from our own garden.

Thanks to the help of our good friend Michael Gombos, a test planting of a dozen olive trees from northern Italy and France was put in (also by Novice Nilos) on July 4/17, the Feast of St. Andrew of Crete. The hope is that if God blesses this, a larger grove can be established.

We continue to live off the grid, away from phones and refrigeration, giving us both a great deal of peace and some extra work. We have a temporary office at St. Makrina’s House, where two women associated with our work for some years, Melania McAfee and Joanna Howland, live. Both have been away all Summer, and we are grateful for the use of their on-grid facilities.

Later this month, on the 26th, 4 or 5 men from our Portland parish will spend some days with us helping on the building site. For this, for the many prayers offered in our behalf by so many friends, we are grateful.

Trip to Athos, 2002

www.gsinai.com — 2002-07-16T14:45:00-07:00

Father Sergios was on pilgrimage in Greece and on Mount Athos from June 24 to July 17, and was blessed to visit Monasteries and Shrines on Chios and Oinoussai, in and around Athens, on Evia and Aigina, in Thessaloniki and on the Holy Mountain.

He spent a number of days at Esfigmenou, which is now the largest monastic community on the Holy Mountain, thriving through a number of difficulties for which it glorifies God, and at Kapsala, where he visited the kellion of the renowned confessor of the faith, Father Savvas (reposed 1991), whose remarkable letter on the crisis in the contemporary Church, the result of enforcing syncretist-ecumenism from 1924 until today, has appeared in English translation in an appendix to "The Struggle Against Ecumenism".

Kapsala remains a region of great faithfulness to the Church during our troubled times, and not the only one on the Holy Mountain, for which glory be to God. Father Sergios was able to see a number of other old friends on Athos, as an additional blessing.

Metropolitan Moses of Seattle upheld the Monastery's liturgical life while Father Sergios was away, for which the Brotherhood and everyone worshipping with us is grateful.

If God wills, a more detailed report of this pilgrimage will be forthcoming here.

Father Ioakeim of Mount Athos (+8/21 March 2003)

www.gsinai.com — 2003-03-21T14:44:00-08:00

Monday in Saint Gregory Palamas week, the 24th (11th on the Church calendar) of March - and we are celebrating the Memorial Service for the renowned Athonite Elder and confessor, Archimandrite Ioakeim of St. Evthymios Skete in the desert at the end of the peninsula, next to the Cave of St. Neilos the Myrovlite, who reposed on Friday the 21st (8th).
I met Father Ioakeim in January 2000 under challenging circumstances. A blizzard had blown up after the small boat carrying me from Daphne to Kavsokalyvia had left port, and instead of disembarking at the Kavsokalyvia port, the boat discharged all passengers at the port of Katounakia, far distant from my intended destination. By the time I had clambored up a sharp ascent from sea level to the top of a rock face along lightly-indented steps cut into the rock, the snowfall was accumulating alarmingly, cutting off the mid-afternoon light and leaving me wondering when - and eventually if - I would find shelter before sundown locked all the gates on Athos.

And, although I arrived after sundown, the famous zealot Skete of Saint Basil had left its gate open, and took me in, finding room in an upstairs hall usually occupied by one of the many young novices crowding this small facility in recent years. More than half the monks living on Athos live in the deserts, not in the ruling monasteries, and the vast majority of the desert-dwelling monks will not commemorate the ecumenist Patriarch of Constantinople, a matter which divides the contemporary Athonite community tragically.

By morning, the snowfall was a meter deep on average, and the Skete Fathers forbade me to attempt to continue my journey. But by 8 am I had convinced them that the inexorabilities of a fixed-date airline return ticket necessitated my attempting to move on and, promising to return at the first sign of trouble, fortified by toast and jam and raki, and several cups of hot "nes", the updated form of coffee on the Holy Mountain, I set out, arriving at the katholikon of the great Kavsokalyvia settlement on the eve of the Feast of Saint Maximos of Kavsokalyvia, whose intense freedom from attachment to the comforts of this world took the form that gives the settlement its name - he periodically burned down the hut he happened to be living in, with all its contents (they could not have been many, given the austerity of this monk) and moved on.

He had lived around these steep, forbidding parts in the 14th century, he was a contemporary of our Saint Gregory of Sinai, and a famous conversation held by these two great hesychasts, recorded by a disciple, forms part of our modern Philokalia. I spent the festal eve with the Fathers of this Skete, well-supplied with a feast prepared for an expected 100 pilgrims, none of whom came given the storm, and slept in a large guest dormitory - also well furnished for the multitudes - by myself. Early the next morning, after the Liturgy and another overly-laden table, I went to a cave once inhabited (and not burnt!) by Saint Maximos, and thence on to the Skete of Saint Evthymios, laden with greetings from a monk in Boston who had lived with Father Ioakeim for some time, and with other greetings and gifts.

Father Ioakeim was ill when I arrived but insisted in sitting up in the spartan arkhondariki - the guest reception room - in a very small, dilapidated stone building, in process of rehabilitation by the 4 or 5 young monks and novices who formed his Brotherhood. While reduced to a real minimum of elaboration, the building, its rooms and furnishings were scrupulously clean and the small guest area, accomodating 5 guests in a single, and two bunk beds, was thankfully supplied with a small wood stove to take the damp chill out of the low-ceilinged room in the evening.

The first thing one noticed about the Elder was his voice - clearly coming from within and, at the same time, in a most amazing way, coming from a place not within himself - truly a voice from another age. He was entirely calm at all times, and fixed his attention both on the Skete's daily program of activities, and on its guest, and at the same time, on a deeper level, his attention was always clearly somewhere else. It was an entirely wonderful 2 hours' conversation, made more wondrous by his strange gift for making himself understood to someone not fluent in Greek.

Father Ioakeim was a strikingly handsome old man, and shows up here and there in the standard photograph books on Athos - twice in a volume called "Athonite Moments" published in German and English, on page 101 (over the caption, "Fromme Gestalt - A Saintly image") and on page 196 (over the caption, "Asketen" - "Ascetics"). The photographs are accurate and show a face dominated by large, ikonic eyes, just as he really was in life, his austere face framed with a great white beard and hair. The photographer saw what truly was to be found in that face, in those eyes - meekness, humility, charity, and the courage that these virtues engender - a face, really, on which is written St. John of Sinai's wonder-working book "The Ladder of Divine Ascent", a face on which is imprinted the Gospel, for which he had ears with which to hear. What the photos do not capture is the transparency of the face and hands.

Any who can consult these books will also see, in the photo on page 196, one of his own monks, in fact his eldest monastic son, Father Evthymios, to the far left (the other two are neatly-attired visitors from elsewhere) and it was the vigourous Monk Evthymios who acted as my guide to the immediate region of St. Evthymios Skete, taking me on a hair-raising climb down into the Cave of Saint Neilos the Myrovlite on my first two visits, he skipping like a goat, and me lagging far behind in vertiginous terror at the great height of the place, and the sheer drop into the sea.

In discussions of the contemporary crisis in the Church at large and on Athos, Father Ioakeim was dispassionate, never evincing the slightest anger or passion of any kind, but maintaining always a complete and, one could say, saturated peace, reminding me of that peace in the heart spoken of by Saint Seraphim of Sarov. When mention was made of some clear breach of faith on the part of Bishops or Athonites still claiming the name of Orthodoxy while embracing the heresy of ecumenism, he would merely gesture quietly heavenward with his hand and, pointing there, say in the mildest voice, "O Theos" (God), or again, "God will judge".

When a currently-famous remark of a well-known Elder, to the effect that the Virgin Mary had advised the man, in a vision, to support the program of the current Ecumenical Patriarch, Father Ioakeim said, again in an entirely uncombative voice but with firmness and with the complete confidence that comes only from an authentically humble heart, "Psemmata" (Lies), as the content of this well-known tale was repeated, clearly not for the first time, in his hearing. It was very odd to hear such a strong word of condemnation spoken with a complete absence of rancour, bitterness or anger: it was not only Father Ioakeim's face that was "ikonic"!

Father Ioakeim had a great respect for the founder of the venerable monastery in Boston, Holy Transfiguration - Archimandrite Panteleimon - and spoke of his remarkable achievement in founding a truly Athonite house in the uncongenial environment of the contemporary, paganized culture of the U.S. He was particularly concerned that his admiration and support for Father Panteleimon and his work be realized.

I visited again in January of 2001, and last year in July. With each visit, I became more familiar with this small, intense community, some of whom hailed from traditional Orthodox families in villages, and two of whom were the sons of new calendarist families in Thessaloniki. Quiet, self-effacing, given to the hard work days required for survival in the desert of the Athonite peninsula, without self-pity or sentimental expression, an air of quiet, sober joy permeated the place where prayer without ceasing reigned in the hearts of all who dwelt there.

When, a few years ago, Father Ioakeim made the demanding trek from his Skete to Great Lavra, from which the Skete is leased, to have his youngest monk written in according to Athonite custom, the Fathers at Great Lavra refused to accept the name, as the policies of the current Ecumenical Patriarch harden against those who will not commemorate the name of an ecumenist Ecumenical Patriarch. Father Ioakeim shrugged peacefully, turned and said to the young monk, "Well, the Panagia will write you in" and they departed, after venerating the relics in the Katholikon.

What will now be the fate of these young, dedicated monks of true confession, in the increasingly rigidly-polarized world of the Holy Mountain?

Perhaps they will be allowed to continue their lives in this historic Skete. One of the factors motivating commemorating ruling monasteries to allow zealot, non-commemorators to inhabit their sketes, kellia and hesychastiria, is the fact that the zealots take very good care of the ruling monasteries' far-flung properties, rehabilitating them and providing an otherwise economically-unattainable work-force, in the long run, improving the monastery's assets.

Another is the fact that even within the ruling monasteries' in-house communities, there is almost everywhere a significant population in overt or covert sympathy with the zealots' position on the matter of syncretist-ecumenism. The cold expulsion of a small house of zealots can have a disproportionally disruptive effect on the home community, and simply not be worth the trouble.

But finally, the pressure to expel numbers of zealot Athonite Fathers into mainland Greece may also be restrained by memories of the 1920's, when the expulsion of the first generation of so-called "old calendarists" into Greece merely spread the cause of rejecting the uncalled-for - and already often ecclesiastically-condemned, and deeply-divisive - new calendar across the nation. No government in Athens is openly courting the galvanizing of one of the country's most significant, if also most unreported and unacknowledged fissures, especially in times that daily seem more unsettled, above all for a country in as vulnerable a position geographically, socially, economically and politically - not to mention spiritually - as contemporary Greece.

"As God wills", would say the newly-reposed confessor of the faith, and, "God will judge". "Aionia i mnimi tou", we sing in the Memorial Service - "Eternal be his memory". There will be many who, having sung that, will be quickly seeking the intercessions of this dispassionate, confessing monk, this quiet zealot who, already in this earthly life, was a truly heavenly man.

--Archimandrite Sergios Gregoriosinaitis Monday 11/24 March, 2003 Feast of Saint Symeon the New Theologian

Summer Pilgrimage to Greece, 2003

www.gsinai.com — 2003-07-16T14:43:00-07:00

Igoumenos Sergios was blessed to travel again this Summer to Greece, arriving in Chios in late June and spending several days on the adjacent islet of Oinoussis. In sharp and pleasant contrast to last year's pilgrimage at the same time, this year the weather was moderate and blessed with cooling breezes day and night. The revered Gerontissa, Mother Maria, in her 90's, continues to be alert and dynamic, participating actively in reading the appropriate parts in services, and continuing to offer exemplary leadership to her nuns and the many pilgrims coming to the community.

Another full week was spent in Athens and again, as in past years, the city's wealth of sacred relics beckoned us as did sites hallowed in recent times by the holy lives of such 20th century luminaries as Papa Nicholas Planas and Fotis Kontoglou. We visited the monastery and venerated the relics of the renowned Elder of Aigina, Geronta Ieronymos, who played such a decisive part in the spiritual formation of the founder of Boston's Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Archimandrite Panteleimon, as he did in the lives of so many others, including Mother Maria of Oinoussis and her family. While on Aigina, we also venerated the relics of St. Nektarios of Pentapolis.

Another full day was dedicated to visiting the relics of St. John the Russian on Euvoeia. In addition, we visited monasteries in Kapandriti and Keratea and were hospitably received by the active sisterhoods in those places, which have played such distinctive roles in the history of the Church of Greece since 1924.

Athens was very hot, in contrast to Chios, and pounding with the din of street and building renovations in preparation for next Summer's Olympic Games.

On the Holy Mountain for the Sunday of the Athonite Saints and the following week, Father Sergios visited old friends, staying in the Kapsala region, and made an extensive day pilgrimage to Prodromou Skete, Lavra, St. Athanasios' Well, Iviron, Skiti Iviron, and Protaton in Karyes, meeting new friends along the way.

The uncertainties surrounding the fate of the biggest community on Athos today, Esfigmenou, have disturbed much of the usual peace of the Athonite community. The matter is in the hands of the Greek Supreme Court, which will hand down its decision later this year regarding the demand of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew that the 120-strong Brotherhood be expelled because of their refusal to commemorate him at their services.

Even members of commemorating monasteries give strong expression to their dismay at what is regarded as an unwarranted interference by the Patriarch into Athos' internal affairs, feeling that the Athonites themselves should resolve this matter in their own way, and with patience. Patriarch Bartholomew, however, is not a patient man, and is particularly impatient at any signs of disapproval of his unionist/ecumenist agenda, and he has enforced his will in this matter with the help of the younger, more recently-installed Abbots, whose education in the secular institutions of "the new Greece" has disposed them to think in terms less resistant to modernist ecumenism than did their immediate predecessors.

The general feeling among traditional Christian monks on Athos at the moment seems to favour the view that the Supreme Court will decide the case against the Esfigmenou Fathers, that they will be expelled and replaced with a community led by an Abbot favourable to the agenda of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and that eventually the large community of non-commemorators scattered hither and yon throughout the Athonite peninsula, living in sketes, hermitages, caves and small cells, of whom the great majority will not commemorate an ecumenist Patriarch, will also be expelled.

This does not seem to engender any panic or bitterness, and is spoken of with humble acceptance everywhere. Truth to tell, the last mass-expulsion of Athonites, in the 19th century, when the Kollyvades Fathers were scattered throughout Greece by decree of the ruling Athonite communities and of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of that day, saw the re-education and the renewal of ecclesiastical life throughout the country as Kollyvades monks exiled from Athos took up residence everywhere, on the mainland and on the islands. In pursuit of his ecumenist goals, the current Patriarch may actually be doing traditionalists a great service in the long run.

This Summer brought Father Sergios into contact with a hitherto-unsuspected group of gifted, educated, non-commemorating Athonites, coming from new calendar families, from non-observant families, even from communist backgrounds, most of them having been entry-level professionals - engineers, teachers, lawyers, medical personnel - who at various times and in various ways underwent a conversion experience, usually to the new calendar, ecumenist State Church, and then, encountering the doctrinal crisis brought about by that community's decision to embrace syncretist ecumenism, a further conversion to what is popularly, if inadequately, called old-calendarism, who later became monks, and today are quietly absorbing the unique gifts of the Holy Mountain for whatever time they are given to be there. Those Father Sergios met live scattered here and there in small, often very remote cells.

The non-commemorating movement on Athos has recently received unusual and unexpected support from one of the ecumenist State Church's most prominent public figures, Father George Metallinos, a professor on the theological faculty at the University of Athens and Greece's best-known ecclesiastical television personality, who has bluntly stated in the national media that the Esfigmenou Fathers are indeed right to not commemorate any Patriarch who embraces the theory and practice of institutional ecumenism.

Other voices from the State Church, perhaps emboldened by the public statements of Father Metallinos, have been raised to similar ends, and as of this Summer, the debate over the Esfigmenou matter has become far more serious (albeit admittedly marginalized in contemporary, secular Greece) and far more responsible than any debate involving the question of the calendar since 1924 - and this is because the debate has largely ceased to be about the calendar, and has become, rightly enough, a debate about the real question raised by the shift of calendar in 1924, namely, about religious syncretism.

That in turn will increasingly reveal itself to be a debate about the person of Jesus Christ and the nature of the Church, amongst the competing dogmas of the world's religions, just as, at a certain moment, the ikonoclast question ceased to be a question about ikons and became a question about the Church's teaching about Jesus Christ.

Again, the unintended result of the current Patriarch's decision to call the question of Esfigmenou may turn out to be the reinvigouration and renewal of the badly-divided, and often inadequate and irresponsible character of contemporary traditionalist movements in Greece.

But, as the Athonite Fathers say in mild voices, "As God wills".

+ Archimandrite Sergios Gregoriosinaitis

Dormition Fast

www.gsinai.com — 2003-08-16T14:41:00-07:00

The Dormition Fast begins with the feast of the Procession of the Honourable Cross, a Constantinopolitan office for taking a fragment of the True Cross processionally through the neighbourhoods of the City each day until the feast of the Dormition. It was the high season of contagious diseases in the hot, humid eastern Mediterranean Summer, and Constatinopolitans poured out into the streets to share in the purification of the air, praying to be either delivered or preserved from illnesses.

The other side of the feast has to do with the inauguration of a fast which, on Mount Athos and undoubtedly in the many equally great, now-vanished monastic centres of the world of New Rome, is taken as seriously and observed as intensely as is the Holy Forty Day fast before Pascha. And of course no fast - no effort involving ascetic struggle - is possible without that personal self denial which is the unique gateway to the Cross of the Saviour.

August was always - as it is today - a season of intense labours in the agriculturally-based empire of the New Romans. Long as the days are, there is never enough time to finish the work of the day and the level of physical exhaustion for the great majority of the New Romans was high. And yet, coming just at the centre of these hard months is this great 15 day fast. The surviving literature from the period attests to the seriousness with which all parts of society fasted and prayed, certainly inspired by the ubiquitous figures of the monks and nuns living everywhere across the face of the empire of the New Rome.

With all the well-known and glaring defects of that Christian civilisation, with all its short-comings and outbursts of heresy and violence and the sinful betrayal of the Gospel, the Church still provided the calendar of a structure of life which kept the incarnate Logos in full public view, and at prime focus. The great public processions that constitute so striking a feature of the liturgical experience of the early Church, beginning at Jerusalem, and which have been virtually ruled out today by an increasingly-strident secularism that stifles the Church's public role and her visibility, those great processions were indeed the popular rallies that kept the faith so vibrantly a part of the populist Christian culture of the eastern Mediterranean.

The fragment of the True Cross, moving solemnly from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, stopping at the great squares of the City for special litanies, purified more than the fetid air of an August Constantinople. Through the rite, the nation itself prostrated in prayer before the All-Holy Trinity and referred itself forward to Christ as the central figure in the human saga.

And here on the southern flanks of a small mountain in Northern California we, too, "clear the air" for the beginning of another fast, another time of opportunity, to redress the wrongs of the inner man, to repent of those things that tend to go off so long as we are alive in space and time, to let go of all things corruptible and corrupting - to let the dead bury their own dead - and, relieved of darkness and the stink of death pervading life on earth, to find again in Christ that blinding light in which we see never so clearly, in Whom already we find the fragrance of eternal life.

Like most of the people living in the Christian empire of the New Romans, this Brotherhood is also for the most part an agricultural work-force, struggling not only with the usual round of tasks every day of the long growing season but coping this year with an unusually-long heat wave that has sapped our strength and left us very worn down. And yet, no matter how much fatigue we bring to the Vigil for the feasts of the season, we are always remarking how quickly we are revived and provisioned with stamina aplenty to accomplish what must be done.

The Vigil for the Procession of the Cross could not be simpler and is shorter than most, a mercy under the circumstances. As in past years, everyone left after its final words last night, renewed for the great engagement of self-denying love that has been laid out by the office as the main matter to be considered until the fast is done.

This morning's liturgy began early - still in darkness - and after its communion, we blessed water and then, after blessing the Monastery itself with the new holy water, carried it out into the fields and gardens and orchards that we have started - all growing organically - and which are now in their second and third year - and blessed them and the work of our hands.

And what might seem to be somewhat odd - a fast in the midst of the season of hard, physical work - becomes another gift of the liturgical calendar, another joyous excursion during the slow unfolding of the Christian year. Everything is filled with the spirit of thanksgiving for all things and the sanctification of the time of our lives.

Holy Land/Mount Sinai Pilgrimage 2003

www.gsinai.com — 2003-11-16T14:34:00-08:00

Evidently every year for the past few years, the liklihood that there would be a Pilgrimage to the Middle East from Boston seemed small given the continuing upheaval, the veritable civil war, disturbing the peace in that region. But until now the Pilgrimage has confirmed its reservations year after year in spite of all the bleak and disturbing news, and flown into Tel Aviv for a highly-concentrated 10-day tour of the sites where our salvation was wrought in the midst of the earth.

This year we are 36, including some teen-agers travelling with their parents or guardians, some quite elderly women, and many in-between. Some, of whom I am one, arrive already with sore throats and cold symptoms. Fortunately, an unusually compassionate and communicative medical doctor (V. Mihailoff) is with us with the kind of bedside manner that prevents any of us slipping off into despair over the barb in our throats that makes every swallow painful. We also have an eye surgeon with us - our Deacon, Father Chris Patitsas.

Only a few of the moments along the path trodden by this year's Pilgrimage can be recalled here in this essay. The highlights, almost overwhelming in significant presence, are of course in Jerusalem itself, within the walls set up by the western Crusaders and, more particularly, the Muslims who drove them out of the Middle East. The Holy Sepulchre and Golgotha rest beneath a veneer of modern marble slabs and an overlay of 19th century, mostly-Russian, ikons, themselves overlaid with the elaborated silver and gilt metal covers reflecting the ecclesiastical taste of that era, the whole fronted by a wall of oil lamps suspended on chains. At the sites, one reaches into recesses, down through the veneers, significantly enough, to touch the actual rock that was the surface of the events we celebrate every year in Holy Week and at Pascha. Over the time of almost daily visits to the principle shrines, the names of the men and women who stood just where we are standing reel through the mind like the long lists of credits at the end of films, there are so many, they are so close to us who from childhood have been told the Bible stories that constituted the core of what had been the Christian West.

Archimandrite Panteleimon, leading yet another crowd of pilgrims through the labyrinth of the Old City, and through the Holy Land and Sinai, came here in 1957, 22 years old, dazed with reverence for the place which still reverberates with the awesome mystery of the Church of the Old Testament and of the New, and lived for a time within the precincts of the Holy Sepulchre in a tiny wooden cell built out from the stone walls of the present Crusader-built church, high up, reached by a ladder. He knows all the older people who are still resident here, and all the little alleys and winding staircases that course through the vast constructions like veins.

Everywhere we walk, someone carries a little censer with the familiar incense fragrances made in Boston, and gifts of incense and coloured glass oil lamps are given to all the shrines we visit. There is an outpouring of alms for the poor of Jerusalem - and at all the holy places throughout Israel and on Sinai - that is especially awaited by Palestinians in these long oppressive years during which, as always, it is the poor who pay the heaviest prices for the violence over which they have no contral at all, and by Bedouins in Egypt. Tourism and pilgrimage are at their lowest ebb in memory and everywhere we go we are told we are the first to enter the shop since the last pilgrimage a year ago.

We visit Khozeva, an ancient monastery deep in a ravine ("wadi") well-documented in Derwas Chitty's wonderful history of the first centuries of the monastic adventure, "The Desert a City", written almost half a century ago, still in print (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, NY) and still by far and away the best account in any languge of the early history of Christian monasticism. When Father Chitty visited Khozeva in 1925 he remarked its poverty and particularly remembered two monks, whose personal and spiritual inadequacies served him as a kind of existential question mark over the whole enterprise of monasticism as such. Khozeva had been burned in 1917 by retreating Turkish troops, defeated by their Arab co-religionists in episodes familiar to us from the celebrity of Lawrence of Arabia, and the monastery, remote and difficult of access as it was and is, still showed signs of the Turkish destruction when Chitty visited it as a young archaeologist in 1925 . Today it is in far better material and spiritual circumstances. It is a small community (one of its members is Japanese, whose courteous hospitality was wonderful) but overall it is a young and fervent brotherhood. I have no idea if the chanting today includes the "interminable, tinny, nasal, gabbled Kyrie eleisons" that Father Chitty found so irritating in 1925, but the kindness and warmth of the small community could not itself have constituted a more harmonious prayer.

We venerated hundreds of relics from the more thorough destruction of this (and many other) monastic settlements in the 7th century by Chosroes II of Persia. When the famous Qumran "Dead Sea" scrolls were found in 1947 inside a cave, western academics of all kinds descended on these valleys and deep ravines, ransacking the caves and simply throwing the human bones (devoutly interred in them when the monks returned to survey the carnage and destruction of the Persians in the 7th century) out into the ravines. The famous modern Elder, Saint John the Romanian of Khozeva, beholding yet another depradation wrought against the monastic community, prayed that God would intervene and, suddenly, a large section of a ravine collapsed and fell down, covering the naked bones carelessly tossed out like so much garbage. St. John the Romanian's body is incorrupt and reverently venerated inside a glass casket at Khozeva. In addition to a life of remarkable ascetic struggle, he left a body of wise sayings and the example of steadfast fidelity to the Church's historic calendar and faith.

We visited Bethany School, a most beautiful complex of buildings put up by the Russians in the 19th century. During the First War the Turks used the buildings to stable their horses and mules and a great deal of wanton damage was done by the retreating, demoralized Turkish military. Metropolitan Anastassi, the second Primate of the Russian Church Abroad, had lived in Jerusalem in the 1930's, and he it is who began the work of repair, reconstruction and renewal. The site's importance lies in a large rock, on which sat our Saviour awaiting Martha and Mary to escort Him to Lazaros' tomb. One venerates this rock in the forecourt of the School, remembering what words were spoken here. The administrators of the school, Mothers Martha (a Russian-Australian) and Agapia (a Greek-American) offered coffee, banana cake, a tour of the neighbourhood and the most insightful and carefully-balanced assessment of the ongoing crisis brought about by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heard on the pilgrimage. We also saw the wonderful work being done at the school which educates some 300 girls, some of them Moslems.

A highlight of the trip was a tour through Galilee, positively green from the Jordan river and a beautiful contrast from the rocky desert landscape predominating elsewhere. We are in Cana, Nain, we are on Tabor, and we are on a long boat ride on the Sea of Tiberias/Galilee ending up in Capernaum on a wonderfully mild day, in a modern boat modelled on one dug out of the lake bottom some years ago by archaeologists and dated to the time of the Saviour. We then are back on our Arab bus, driving through Gadara (of Gadarenian Daemoniacs fame) and pass by cliffs where, one day, a herd of Hellenistic pigs tumbled off into the water. And we end the day changing into chitonas, and going down into Jordan River, chanting the troparia of Theophany. On the way back to Jerusalem, in addition to troparia, a few African-American spirituals themed to Jordan are also sung. Quite amazing.

One morning we are up at 3 am and onto our bus, stepping off later that morning at Mount Sinai, spending the night, and (almost everyone) up again at 3 am to climb Mount Sinai and see the sun rise. But of the 3 of us from St. Gregory of Sinai two of us are having about our worst days coping with sore throats (in the midst of it, Father Anthony alights on the right phrase for our collective suffering - "barbed throat", which says it all) and general malaise and we decide to forego that climb in favour of a far easier walk out into the desert to the cave of St. John Klimakos, the author of the "Ladder of Divine Ascent". A Bedouin teen ager is hired as guide and off we go, just under an hour of mild climbing and descending out through the stark beauty of great granitic cliffs, changing colour as the sun rises (we leave at 5:30 am) and we spend over an hour in and around St. John's cave, mostly in a silence meant to honour one who gives so much to our lives.

A nun from France lives in a modern, tiny complex of Chapel cum living quarters at the base of the cave, where one begins the climb up and into it. She is highly-educated, in her late 60's, and tells us that St. John spent only one year as abbot of Sinai. Put off by the demands on his time and attention there, he returned as soon as he could to solitude and spent overall 40 years in this very cave. It was here that he wrote the "Ladder of Divine Ascent".

We read the "Ladder" every year during the 40-day Fast for Pascha, communally, in our chapel. All of us are also reading the "Ladder" throughout the year in our cells, and if any single book other than the Bible informs our particular community off in a remote forest here in northern California, the "Ladder" is that book. We three pilgrims return to St. Katherine's Monastery certain that other than Jerusalem's major shrines, this is the highlight of our pilgrimage - that we came here to see this, to stand in these places, to pray here.

The long time spent in silence at this place gives us the chance to look out at the stark rocks soaring high up into the sky, not very much changed since the time that St. John gave a lifetime to this place. Here he worked out what is, for all the change in vocabulary (especially in the last century thanks to the popularizing of a kind of psychology), the most amazing study of the human condition - we often call it the "Grey's anatomy of the human soul".

No matter how many times we read this book, it is always pouring new things into us, and demanding new things of us. One understands how it came to be the companion of the salvation of so many Christians since it was first written. It was the second most-popular book in Christendom (based on the number of extant manuscripts) until early modern times; it was the first book to be printed in the new world (in Lima, Peru, in the 16th century, long before English Protestants landed on Plymouth Rock) and until fairly recently, was standard lenten reading even by married laymen in Russia. The beautiful editions found today in religious bookstores in Greece demonstrate its continuing vitality.

A fine and incisive study of the "Ladder", entitled "Ascent to Heaven", written by Father John Chryssavgis (his doctoral dissertation at Oxford), is available from Holy Cross Press. The best English version of the "Ladder" is published by Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Boston, based on (and improving) a translation done originally by Archimandrite Lazarus (Moore) published in the '50's by Faber's. Another, less complete and somehow less successful version is published by the Roman Catholics (Paulist Press). We were glad to see the Boston edition in use wherever the "Ladder" was in evidence throughout the Holy Land, and glad to hear monastics everywhere calling it the best edition for English-speaking readers. It is that.

Particularly moving for us is the fact that our patron, St. Gregory of Sinai, was here, albeit briefly, and as we look up into the conch of the apse above the Holy Altar, at the great mosaic of the Transfiguration of the Lord, it is something to realize that he also stood here looking at the same great ikon, as did, apparently, St. John of the Ladder - and how many, many others whose names we hear at the dismissals through the year. This Church is one of the few Byzantine constructions still above ground and in use, and the sense of connectedness with the culture that is normative for the Church, and especially for monastics, is overwhelming.

A pilgrimage like this is not for everyone. The pace is intense, and the constant Israeli military check-points and the presence of uniformed soldiers armed with machine guns everywhere is frankly oppressive. There is no need to comment on the Palestinians' grievances against the Israeli's and no need to comment on Israel's need to eliminate terrorist attacks. On the whole, it was interesting (upon return to the US) to compare notes with non-Orthodox and non-Christian visitors to Israel over the past 20 years or so: the vast majority come away with a markedly pro-Palestinian tilt. This might have something to do with the characteristic preference for the "underdog" to be sure. It may, however, have wider sources as well. Never has the phrase, "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem" meant more, however, and while instances of unfortunate behaviour were encountered on both sides of this deep human divide, one is grateful to remember kindnesses on the part of both communities as well.

Towards the end of the pilgrimage, one began to hear from all age groups the idea that it would take a long time, after returning to the US and Canada, to "unpack" this experience. That has turned out to be so, writing this reminiscence about a month after the pilgrimage's end.

We were told by "old hands" that this was a most remarkable pilgrimage. First, the weather was uniformly wonderful, mild and pleasant day after day. There have been times when from beginning to end the pilgrims had to cope with cold, or heat, and often with constant rainstorms. We had light rain in Jerusalem off and on for the last 2 days, and it was welcome and refreshing. Secondly, at 36, we were a small group, moving more conveniently and able to hear more of Father Panteleimon's descriptions of the sites accompanied by reminiscences of what the places were like almost 50 years ago when he lived there. There have been as many as 50 on these pilgrimages, making for a more crowded, more slow-moving and less agile tour overall. Third, in spite of hearing from time to time of "incidents" here or there in Israel, we were remarkably secure throughout. We had one unpleasant encounter with conservative Jews - four men in their early 20's in yarmulkas at the pool of Siloam who heckled us throughout Deacon Chris Patitsa's chanting of the Gospel associated with that site, but the Israeli soldiers the four Jews summoned and encouraged to tell us to leave instead pushed them off and when, a few minutes later, they returned alone, their catcalls and derisive gestures were much toned down. And at the end of the tour, a power outage one night caught some of us (me among them) out in the labyrinthine, tunnel-like streets of the old city on the way to the Holy Sepulchre, and for a few minutes there was a sense of unease, quickly overcome. Minutes later we were all inside the Holy Sepulchre, a blaze of warm light from candles and oil lamps, finding the rest of our party already inside, and everyone feeling very safe indeed. In contrast to what pilgrims have encountered over the centuries of coming up to Jerusalem, we were in very comfortable circumstances indeed.

Around the turn of the 20th century, an Anglican named Stephen Graham wrote a series of books including one about a pilgrimage he took alongside Russian pilgrims of that era. Three nuns from our convent in Boston were on this pilgrimage and they had copies of that book with them which they loaned to our California pilgrims. It remains a fascinating book on its own merits but, for us who were there, it became a wonderful revelation of that world of piety bludgeoned into bloody graves by the marxists who short years after Graham's pilgrimage, imposed a lawless power in the world's largest Christian nation, ending a thousand years of national aspiring to that salvation to which we are summoned by the Church, and driving the Church herself underground into the pre-Constantinian world of catacomb Christianity, having murdered St. Constantine's last heir, and his family. Nothing could inform a pilgrimage like ours more deeply and movingly than the view of those earlier pilgrims coming from a radically different culture than our own, yet who gave evidence everywhere of our own ecclesiastical life.

Next year, as God wills, three more from the forests of Lake County will be part of the pilgrimage, all things earthly being equal in Israel. We have some idea of what they will be feeling as they move from sacred site to sacred site. We ask their prayers, long in advance, at those holy places.

Archimandrite Sergios

April on the Holy Mountain, May in Greece, 2004

www.gsinai.com — 2004-05-20T14:36:00-07:00

Over the past years I have been a pilgrim on Athos in January and rejoiced in the lovliness of the Theotokos' Garden in Winter, and in July, and rejoiced in the Garden's Summer, although heat, humidity and mosquitoes conspired to make the Athonite Summer a test of patience. This year, by a great mercy, I was able to be on the Holy Mountain in April, leaving Greece in May. On the long flight to Greece I turn 62 somewhere over the Atlantic.

Visiting old friends and familiar places, venerating the wonder-working ikons (the great Axion Estin ikon of the Virgin is now in a small chapel across the street from its usual home in the apse of the Protaton, and is much more easily seen and venerated - the move brought about by the recent fire in the Protaton's belfry) and the relics that strengthen faith, nerves and the souls of pilgrims.

The Athonite Spring is a wondrous event, unusual for Greece in that the entire region is heavily wooded, abundantly fed with water, and relatively unspoiled. Irises, red poppies and other flowers of every colour and description waved in cooling breezes, making the long walks from one place to another events of great joy. A sad note was sounded by the terrible wound inflicted on one of Athos' most beautiful Monasteries - the burned-out sections of Hilandar, victim of yet another fire on Athos. Far more of the overall complex was destroyed than verbal descriptions had suggested. The place is filled with volunteer workers from Yugoslavia.

This year, for the first time, I visited St. Basil's Skete next to Hilandar's arsanas, having viewed it from a distance for many years. The interior of the old chapel has some impressive frescoes that are gradually being uncovered.

This year I encountered some younger monks who, in spite of their youthfulness, have attained remarkable depth as they pass through the tough spiritual school of Athonite monasticism. Almost all put some years in at large communities; but the ones whom I met are now living in small settings which enjoy a number of descriptive names in Greek - Kathismata, Hesychastiria, Kalyvia - living by 2's and 3's and 5's here and there, in old (usually Russian-built) dwellings some of them having been empty for generations, with the attendant neglect and decay of the structures. But new life and younger men have quickened the rhythm of modest, gradual repair and recovery - a new tile roof here, newly-plastered walls there, a new floor somewhere else. Everything is simple, austere, and lovely.

At the same time the renewal of the fabric of buildings is accompanied by an attentive and intelligent renewal of the surrounding olive groves, garden areas and fruit orchards. Paths are rebuilt and re-paved, almost always by the very small communities themselves, perhaps with the occasional help of Romanian workmen who are still trained in stone-masonry and other construction skills which make working on these late-18th and early-19th century buildings natural. There is a judicious and ascetic employment of electric power, almost always sourced in solar panels, and often modern fixtures have replaced the Turkish toilets that were practically everywhere - even in the ruling monasteries - when I first went to Mount Athos in 1976.

Of course, all this renewal reflects the inner renewal of men, who come from our own world of contemporary western technologies and conveniences and systems of education. Some English at least is almost always found, and a modern sense of history and science and the arts is far more widespread than was the case a generation ago. But these men have left that world, and turned to a different world, to learn its skills and languages, and to lay the foundation for an entirely different life - one that "knoweth no eventide".

After all the times I have visited St. Panteleimon's Monastery over the decades, after all the time I have spent at that vast Monastery, I had never visited Old Rossikon, well up in the hills from the big seaside complex. This April a young monk who has been given a rather old pickup truck by his family offered to take me and my host there to see the hut in which St. Silouan the Athonite - patron of our chapel in California - had spent some time. So off we went and stopped first at the man-made lake put in by the Russians so long ago, in a very different world. The place is one of surpassing beauty, and is often well-covered in photograph books on Athos.

On we went and suddenly great stone buildings loomed up out of a tangled Athonite forest - Old Rossikon, built to house a large monastic community, now home to a single caretaker. The beautiful Church bears the date 1889 and is in very fine condition. Across the new logging road from the big Church is a small incline, overgrown with every possible vine and plant and shrub under the big trees and there in the midst of this tangle is a tiny hut, stone, plastered, painted white, peeling, with much of the roof in disrepair and both doors off their hinges, and that is where St. Silouan spent, our driver told us, some 3 years in intense spiritual activity. We entered, and were overcome with the sense of the spiritual world inhabited by St. Silouan and inhabiting him over the long years of routine monastic struggle. But what a routine!

Praying in the place, walking around the building and slowly walking back through the jungle-like tangle to the logging road and the old truck, the 3 of us were all absorbed by the place and the memories that have been handed on by the writings of monastic ancestors.

Everywhere in this world, there is the familiar sober joy of the monks who are utterly absorbed in the process of inhaling Athos' wisdom and practices that support that wisdom, made more sober still in that almost all of my time is spent with monks who will not commemorate the ecumenist authority installed in our times almost in every direction one looks.

For the most part well- and even highly-educated in the world, the non-commemorators are humble witnesses to the faith of the Church catholic and to the canonical order that manifests that faith in practical, daily affairs. Extremists to the right as well as to the left of the catholic orthodoxy of the Church are equally regretted, and equally prayed-for. I found neither triumphalism nor despair amongst the ranks of these intense, intelligent and prayerful men - but a continuing joy in the monastic life, wariness in the face of their own inner temptations, and sadness for the terrible plight of Christians in our ecumenist age. It was said of Christians in the era of the first "world wide heresy" - of the Arianism of the 4th century - that "the world awoke and groaned, amazed to find itself arian"; one feels that in our time, few awaken to the dreadful corruption of faith entailed in ecumenism, but surely among the awakened are these gifted, humble men, equally pained by the excesses of ecumenist extremists as of the extremists of the right.

Following a long pilgrimage on Athos came unexpected visits to other areas - among them Thebes (Thiva), where I met 2 dedicated monks who are building an entirely new monastery, one of whom was a youthful disciple of the renowned Elder of Aigina, Priestmonk Ieronymos.

The "resistance" in Greece is certainly numerically diminished from its heyday in the '30's and '40's and even into the '50's. But the impression is that intelligent fervour remains very high, spiritual morale is very high indeed (I speak of the monastic members of this "resistance") and if there could be a wider agreement on "first principles" amongst the Synods of Bishops and a wider agreement regarding what must be insisted on, and what can be left to gradual, pastoral resolution over time, one has the impression that there are certainly very many and dedicated people ready to support the work of the Church in the face of an almost overwhelming, but shallowly-rooted, engagement with ecumenist principles. The bones could live.

Athens is a cacophany of jack hammers and drills and cement trucks as the August Olympics loom, somewhat fearfully. Greece is the land of deferred maintenance, and the decision to go after the Summer Olympics has revealed just how deferred essential maintenance has been since World War II. The serious threat of terrorist action adds to the unusual mood of this over-populated, unregulated sprawling city that is home to over 50% of the nation's population. The Olympics will strain the country mightily in August and if Greek newscasters and pundits are to be believed, for years if not decades beyond.

On my last Sunday in Greece we celebrate the Liturgy in the beautiful women's Monastery of Kapandriti, where the elderly Abbess, Gerontissa Theologia, is bed-ridden. We take communion to her and, later, have the service of Unction. The clear, bright air of this small village north east of Athens tells why the late Archbishop Avxentios of blessed memory chose it for his residence.

The Abbess' illness seems to have resulted in a focussed brightness in both her own face and in the life of the community as a whole. She lies abed, awaiting the death that comes to all of us, and her quiet joy invites us to consider ourselves and our own frail existence in terms that console and inspire. Gerontissa Theologia is a strikingly handsome old woman - she must have been a great beauty in her youth - but the veil of the flesh has become transparent to the beauties of faith, of hope and of love, and her actual radiance is all the more apparent through the slow wasting of her body. We leave Kapandriti refreshed and buoyant, filled with the reflective gifts she is offering to everyone who visits her.

We visit a large number of monasteries everywhere, and everywhere we visit, there are stories - the early, hard days, the uncertain times, the opposition, the near-collapse of the community, the endless work, the thin resources, and the victorious trust in the Saviour that gradually transforms everything - these stories with variations on the theme are repeated again and again. As the days and visits go on one is increasingly humbled and made all grateful for everything, for everyone - the gifts to us pilgrims of these often unnoticed, small monastic communities.

We venerate ikons and relics, we sing the troparia of the patrons and the saints whose remains we are blessed to kiss, we are treated to Greek coffee and loukoum and raki in every kind of monastic venue, we are given paper prints of ikons and photographs of buildings and communities. What a world, what a course in sheer survival, all fueled by faith and love and hope.

The final days of this year's 3 week pilgrimage come, and one is filled with joy and amazements, glad to have been able once again to touch the living face of this wondrous world, glad too to be returning to one's own monastic home, to be serving again with one's own brethren, to be breathing the familiar air of one's own place.

And, paradoxically, aware also of how relative this "one's own" really is. One could as well not return, but stay. And another gift of the pilgrimage comes into view on the long ride home to California - the gift of inner freedom.

Archimandrite Sergios
Friday before Pentecost, 2004