Ξένες γλώσσες

God’s love, which is one of His God-like attributes, is also the reason for the creation. Because for His consummate love, God wished to create beings to which He would pass on part of His Goodness and His Kindness. That’s why it is written that His created beings were “very good”. In summing up the teachings of the Holy Fathers of the Church, Saint John of Damascus writes on the reason for the creation: “Because, the Good and Most Kind God did not regard as sufficient the contemplation of Himself, but because of His excessive Goodness He took delight in creating beings which would benefit and participate in His kindness, has brought into being all creation- visible and invisible- out of ...

Mosque in Detroit The western world has entered a period of decadence and decline, departing far from her Christian roots. With the European Union denying the historical and cultural Christian heritage of her member states, a secular based world view reigns dominant. This, together with the mass immigration of peoples from Islamic countries at a time when the birth rates of indigenous peoples are at an all time record low, threatens the very existence of  Western civilization. The naive would have us believe that we are living in an age of enlightenment, with borders falling, people uniting. They ignore the plight of the Coptic Christians of Egypt whose churches are being burned down in record numbers, young Coptic women being kidnapped ...

Do you want to live properly? Make sure you have humility, because without it there’s no proper life. People start being abandoned by God once they lose their humility. Love humility and you’ll never fall into one of the devil’s traps.

It is commonly agreed that the end of the second millennium after Christ was marked by a succession of events, by unexpected historical changes, which shook even those societies which traditionally had a sense of security and self-sufficiency. It is not possible to tell if people today are entering the historical era of the third millennium with any awareness, or whether events are progressing at such a rate that we are left trailing, in fetters, in the wake of a course which we are unable to influence. In the East and West today, there is a growing feeling of apprehension and, to a large extent, fear concerning the events that await us. The Alexandrine poet Constantine Cavafy would have said ...

Obedience constructs and self-will destructs. A child has to learn to be obedient to its parents and to God. It’ll remember the words of its parents all its life and will always respect its elders, and not only those but people who are younger, too. It’ll be polite and careful with everyone. Unfortunately, there are very few families who bring their children up in this way.             The spirits of evil provide a distraction in the minds of our children and they try to upset them. Children have to be taught obedience, especially before they’re five years old, because it’s at this age that their characters are formed. So the traces of the way their characters have been shaped will remain ...

B. ORTHODOXY IN THE NEW EUROPEAN CONTEXT 1. Relations between the Orthodox. Dogmatically, we Orthodox emphasize that we belong to the “one, holy catholic and apostolic Church”, that we are this Church. Certainly our Eucharistic conscience, the apostolic succession of our bishops and the structure of the Orthodox Church all guarantee its unity. It must be confessed, however, that every so often issues arise which damage it. On occasion, the situation worsens, not because of different theological positions but for other reasons which are not purely ecclesiastical. Quite a few Orthodox Autocephalous Churches lived in a homogenous setting, where they made up the overwhelming majority of the country (e.g. Greece, Romania and Serbia). An exception was the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople – ...

The time will come when people will behave as though they’ve lost their minds. And if they see somebody behaving reasonably, they’ll all gang up against that person and they’ll say: ‘You’re being absurd’. They’ll do this because that person won’t be like them.

  Since we have determined that abortion cannot be sanctioned by oikonomia for reasons of rape, incest, "defective" fetus or "health" of the mother; and that the application of oikonomia is unnecessary in those cases where the life of the mother is actually in danger, the question which must be asked is: why would any Orthodox Christian, especially someone in a position of doctrinal authority and trust, choose to place a woman in spiritual and physical danger by counseling an abortion using the pretext of oikonomia (or for that matter, any other pretext)? Such a thing is analogous to deceiving a person with cancer and delaying acceptance of his condition until medical assistance is no longer efficacious. Indeed, the former situation is ...

Christ, as the true and universal man, is the measure of all things for all people. He is the ultimate measure, universal and timeless, for the whole world. He is the true measure by which we can define or revise our spiritual quests.   The universality of man is an expression of his catholicity, that is, of his status as an image of the True Being, Christ. In contrast, the universality proclaimed by those engaged in the destructive process of global unification obliterates man’s personality and restricts his freedom. Christ Pantocrator. Portable icon, 14th c. Vatopaidi Monastery.   The rapid rate at which globalisation is currently taking place focuses attention on one of Christ’s essential characteristics: His universality. Christ’s universality comes into focus ...

If Moses was excluded from the promised land over a single word, how much more will our big, sharp tongue deprive us of the Kingdom of Heaven, since the Lord says we’ll have to account for every empty word we utter?

My immediate answer to both parts of this question is a very affirmative ‘Yes’. God does not change. Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and for ever. And the nature of human beings has not changed either. Since Adam, humans are dignified with such a power over their own destiny that they can to a great degree turn their backs on God, on spiritual life, on the quest for holiness. But until the end of the world, there will always be people who, even if they are in the minority, will call down God’s grace upon the earth and their fellow humans. That the world continues is proof that there is holiness today. Saint Silouan said, ‘I tell you ...

Those people are Christians who, as far as humanly possible, imitate Christ in word, deed, and thought.

In the dependency of the Holy Monastery of Simonos Petras, in Propouli on the island of Limnos, there’s a very beautiful and rare icon of Our Lady of the Harvest (1707). It’s the patronal icon and its main feature is that the Mother of God is dressed in white, rather than the customary purple. It has also worked a number of miracles and is venerated by all the people of Limnos. On the 15th of August, there’s a festival which involves the whole of the island. One now elderly lady from Propouli, the nearest village to the dependency, relates: ‘My father was the village president. After the expropriation in 1932, the monastery sent monks by boat to collect their icons. My ...

At the end of the excerpt of Saint John Chrysostom’s homily on the Sunday of the Paralytic, we read: ‘Even now I can show you many who naturally hate having anything to do with women, and avoid conversation with them as impure. Shall we call them chaste; tell me, shall we crown them and proclaim them victors?’ This seems fairly simple. If you’re not troubled by a particular temptation or sin, it takes no great effort to avoid it. This is hardly a victory over temptation, since there was none in the first place. By the same token, if we make a virtue out of a necessity, it’s not the same as making a virtue out of temptation. Abba Dorotheos gives ...

At the beginning of the 20th century many predictions were made that religion would soon die out in Europe. But at the beginning of the 21st century, in tandem with secularization and religious indifference, there has been, on a world-wide scale, a rekindling of religious interest in the Transcendent, in God. A metaphysical quest which is highly flexible. Some people try to satisfy it with religious concepts of Indian provenance (Hindu or Buddhist schools and so on). So what is often on offer to the unsuspecting public is modified products of different religious theories from a variety of sources, which propose a vague spirituality which, in the end, leads to an undefined void. But, to a greater degree, the European public has ...

The only psalm that is prescribed to be recited in its entirety at every Divine Liturgy is (in the Orthodox Old Testament)1 Psalm 50 (Psalm 51 in the Hebrew text)2. During the Cherubic Hymn, just before the Great Entrance when the gifts of bread and wine are brought to the altar as the Church prepares for the Holy Oblation, the priest censes the altar, the sanctuary and the people, and quietly recites the psalm (and is expected to know it by heart): “Have mercy on me, O God, in accordance with your great mercy…” The priest recites the psalm up until verse 17: “A sacrifice to God is a broken spirit; a broken and a humbled heart God will not ...

If you want to set somebody on the right path, to teach them and advise them, you first have to humble yourself and speak to them with great love.  They'll accept your advice because they'll feel that you're giving it with love. But if you insist on what you want, come what may, you won't get anywhere. That's how to make children rebellious. If a child's disobedient, the answer isn't to give them a beating.

Following Paul and the Bible in general, Chrysostom  says that a Christian can be subject to non-believing rulers. He recalls that, when Paul  gave his support to obedience to rulers, he was himself living under the regime of a persecutor. This certainly doesn’t represent the will of God, but in the eschatological scheme of things this subjugation is temporary and has as its purpose only the peaceful settlement of current problems. In the event that the ruler didn’t possess the moral fibre required, the task of the Christian was not to seek salvation by fleeing or rebelling, but rather to save the ruler himself from his own aberrance. In the well-known saying of the Apostles, “Obey God rather than other ...

Rod Dreher I had a prayer rope, in fact, one that had been given to me a few years earlier in New York by an Orthodox friend. I had been grateful for the gift, but had never prayed it. I prayed the rosary. Still, I cared for the chotki, though I hadn’t seen it in a while. I jumped out of bed and went into my office, where I found it in a drawer. I remembered how my friend had shown me how to wrap it around my wrist, and I did so. Haunted by that dream, I decided that I should find the nearest Orthodox church and go to it to pray that very day. It was a Saturday, and I ...