The Catalog of Good Deeds

I can remember the moment clearly. My husband and I watched, slightly nervous, as our priest took our son from his godfather’s arms. My firstborn began to howl immediately – a howl which was silenced as he was plunged into the water not just once, but three times. Baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Our son sputtered with a slightly shocked expression on his face, and that same shocked feeling resonated in my soul.

I was a mother. An Orthodox mother. My husband and I, under the guidance of our spiritual father and with the help of our son’s godparents, were responsible for raising this child in a Faith that we ourselves were just beginning to understand.

Every day in the eight years since that day, this remains my prayer: Lord have mercy. Have mercy on my children. Have mercy on our family. Grant mercy to me, your unworthy servant, as I seek to serve you as a wife and a mother.

If this is your prayer as well, and if you are wanting to raise your infants in the Church, here are a few ideas and tips gained from not only my experience but the wisdom of many mothers and spiritual fathers.

1. Have Your Infant Baptized

Obviously, this is by far the most important thing that you as a parent can do for your infant. Speak to your priest in order to find out all the details and learn what is entailed at your parish. You will also want to take your time in selecting godparents for the child, so that you can choose people who will pray for and guide your child spiritually throughout life.

2. Take Them to Receive the Eucharist

The importance of take your child to receive the Eucharist on a regular basis simply cannot be overstated. In the Orthodox Church, a baptized child is fully part of the Church and receives the Body and Blood of Christ along with the rest of the parish. The Eucharist is spiritual nourishment for your baby and works within them in ways that are beyond our ability to comprehend.

3. Bring the Baby to Church

I know, I know. It is REALLY hard to bring a baby to Church. There are feeding and napping schedule to consider, diapers to change, and, let’s face it, even just getting out the door can be hard to do early in the morning. But, it is worth it. When a child grows up in the Church and is accustomed to being in church each week, the Church and the Faith become part of life.

A much-loved mother of older children in my parish often tells me that she wishes she had brought her children to church when they were younger. However, because it was difficult, they didn’t start going until the children were in elementary school. By that time it was even more difficult because the children didn’t know how to behave, were resistant, and just had a hard time adjusting. (Though, they are both lovely young adults who are involve in their parishes now. So, don’t give up or become discouraged if your older children resist going to Church!)

For more on this subject, see my articles on Engaging Young Children in Church and How to Help That Young Mother in Church.

4. Pray for Them

Pray daily for your children. This could be simple, short prayers throughout the day such as, “Lord have mercy on my son. Keep him safe and help him to love You.” When you have more time, you can also pray the Akathist to the Mother of God Nurturer of Children, which is a heartfelt, beautiful prayer of a mother.

5. Pray with Them

You can also bring your baby in to your family prayer time. Some of my sweetest memories of my oldest son’s first months are of family prayer times together in our small icon corner in our tiny apartment. My husband and I stood side-by-side, holding our newborn, praying the Morning Prayers or Evening Prayers together each day. Now as we have more children (3) and they are older (8, 5, and 3), it can be harder and a lot more chaotic. So, savor those quiet moments together!

6. Fill the Nursery with Icons

Many young couples spend hours planning the perfect nursery. They agonize over every piece that will fill it from the crib to the sheets, the paint color to the rocking chair in the corner. While you are designing a lovely nursery, don’t forget to add icons. You may want to include an icon of Christ and the Theotokos, an icon or two of your child’s patron saint, an icon of Christ blessing the children, and any other icons that have meaning to your family.

7. Have “Tummy Time” in the Icon Corner

Another super easy way to integrate the life of Faith into the home is to have “tummy time” in the icon corner. When putting your baby down for their daily dose of tummy time, why not place them in front of an icon or two so that they can look at (and perhaps venerate) the icons? I am always amazed at how much young children are drawn to icons. Perhaps God works in their souls in ways that we don’t understand whenever they see an icon of Christ or the saints.

8. Make an Icon Book

You can also make a little icon book very easily. Simply purchase a small photo album. Then fill the pages with paper or laminated icons. This is a wonderful first book and is great to bring along to Divine Liturgy on Sundays!

9. Create an Orthodox Children’s Library

In addition to your icon book, add other Orthodox children’s books to your child’s library. Some of my favorite board books for young ones are Goodnight Jesus by Angela Isaacs, What Do You See at Liturgy by Kristina Tartara, and Josiah and Julia Go to Church by Kelly Ramke Lardin.

10. Play Orthodox Music

With so much quality, streaming music available now, it is really simple to fill your home with the sounds of Orthodox church music. We often stream Ancient Faith Radio’s music throughout our day, and I just discovered the music of Eikona and am really loving it!

11. Sing Church Songs as Lullabies

One of my favorite times of each day is that sweet time right before bed, when I get to cuddle my little ones (even my eight-year-old will let me get in a few hugs before bedtime!). Singing lullabies has always been part of our bedtime ritual, and those lullabies come from the music of the Church. I have sung the Trisagion Hymn, the Hymn to the Theotokos, the Lord Have Mercy in various languages, O Taste and See, and O Give Thanks Unto the Lord to my children. But, whatever hymns that you know in whatever musical style that you know with whatever amount of musical ability that you have is wonderful!

12. Live a Faithful Life Before Them

Finally, most of these ideas won’t mean very much at all if you aren’t trying to live a faith life before your child. Model your faith, live out your salvation, be the image of Christ in your home. The rest will follow.

Lord have mercy on us all.

Source: http://www.orthodoxmotherhood.com/creating-orthodox-home-baby-tips-parents/

The African-American community is being drawn to Orthodox Christianity, inspired by its roots in Africa, claims to authenticity, and reverence to black saints.

The Rev. Moses Berry, an Orthodox priest and pastor of Theotokos “Unexpected Joy” Orthodox Mission, Ash Grove, Mo., began his career as a Protestant preacher, a family tradition reaching back into the 1800s. He grew up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Then, in 1983, he visited an Orthodox church in Atlanta and was so moved that he retrained to become a priest in the Orthodox Church in America. He also helped to organize the coalition of clergy, scholars and lay leaders coming to Detroit.

Fr. Moses Berry

“Reconnecting with the Orthodox tradition connects us with the earliest Christian traditions,” Berry says. “It means that, when our ancestors were brought here as slaves, they didn’t arrive here with just a collection of tribal religions. They didn’t all discover Christianity here. In fact, many Africans already were part of the ancient Christian church.”

Karl Berry, now known as Father Moses, is one of a few black Americans to be ordained an Orthodox priest.

He said he’s “always had a love for Jesus,” but he wasn’t sold on the Christianity he was being exposed to.

In 1983 Berry walked into an Orthodox Church for the first time and was surprised by what he saw: icons of black saints.

“My first thought was that these were just some very liberal white people who were doing some outreach and trying to appeal to black people,” Berry told The Daily Beast.

The priest told him that they were actually replicas of third century icons, linking back to a Christianity that originated hundreds of years ago.

“And that was my first introduction to the universal church, not just in theory or in words but in actual depictions of saints from different countries who were always part of the development of Christendom,” he said.

In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that an increase in racial diversity also applies in the Church. The number of people of color ascribing to Orthodox Christianity went up by 6 percent between 2007 and 2014.

“I think that the generation of younger people are looking for something more substantial. They don’t want necessarily a feel-good religion,” Berry said. “They want something they know will have to be a little difficult in order to be transformative.”

African Americans Turning to OrthodoxyThat was especially true for Africans with roots in the eastern part of the continent, Laike-Mariam Misikir, 50, says. An automotive engineer from Ann Arbor, Mich., Misikir is from a family of Orthodox priests that extends back many centuries in Ethiopia. In Detroit, Misikir serves as a subdeacon, assisting priests during liturgies.

The Brotherhood of St Moses the Black is a pan-Orthodox nonprofit organization. Its mission is to minister to Americans the gift of Orthodoxy. In an effort to be good stewards of the manifold grace of God (I Peter 4:10), the organization presents an annual conference that targets those who have little exposure to Orthodoxy as well as the African roots of Orthodoxy. Its vision is to bring Americans closer to Jesus Christ.

Mother Katherine Weston, an Orthodox nun, told The Daily Beast that outreach to African-American communities began in the early 1990s with a series conferences on the ancient church and the African-American experience which continue to this day.

Eventually, Berry and some other conference attendees founded the Brotherhood of Moses the Black in 1997 when he lived in St. Louis. The city was seeing an influx of Orthodox refugees from Africa who lacked support networks, and the Brotherhood sought to provide them with aid and community.

“Our tradition does not begin with slavery. It’s a part of it, and it’s a major part of our tradition in this country. But it also began with our church in Africa. And people need to know that,” he said. “If you don’t know anything about your heritage, you run the risk of not being too stable.”

Several hundred people attended the latest Moses the Black conference in October, Berry said, which was held to inform people and to connect those who might sometimes feel isolated within the church.

But they weren’t all black. In fact, the attendees were about evenly split, and many of them were young.

“They really don’t suffer the same way that my generation did with race,” Berry said.

Source: http://journeytoorthodoxy.com/2016/09/african-americans-drawn-orthodox-church/

You want to know the meaning of those seven phrases uttered by Christ on the cross. Aren’t they clear?

The first one: ‘Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing’. (Luke 23: 34). With these words, Christ showed His mercy to His executioners, whose malice didn’t abate even when He was suffering on the cross. Besides this, the words He cried aloud from the top of the rock of Golgotha represent a proven but never well-understood truth: that those who do evil never know what they’re doing. By killing the Righteous One, in reality they’re killing themselves and, at the same time, are actually glorifying Him. As they’re trampling all over God’s law, they don’t see the millstone which is descending invisibly and will crush them. As they’re mocking God, they don’t see that their faces have become transformed into the snouts of wild beasts. Imbued as they are with evil, they never know what they’re doing.

The second phrase - ‘Truly, I say to you, today you’ll be with me in paradise’ (Luke 23: 43) – was addressed to the robber who repented on the cross. A very consoling phrase for sinners who, even at the last moment, repent. God’s mercy is indescribably great. The Lord was fulfilling His mission even on the Cross. To His last breath, the Lord was saving those who indicated even the slightest desire to be saved.

The third phrase was: ‘Woman, behold your son’ (John 19: 26). Christ was speaking to His Holy Mother, who was standing at the foot of the cross, also being crucified in her heart. To Saint John the Apostle He said: ‘Behold, your mother’. This demonstrates the concern which everyone owes to their parents. You see, He Who gave people the commandment ‘Honour your father and mother’ (Ex. 20: 12), was fulfilling it in His very last moments.

The fourth phrase was: ‘God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Matthew 27: 46). These words show both the strength of human nature and the Lord’s foreknowledge. As a man, He was suffering, but underneath human pain there’s a mystery. You see, only these words would be able to dispel the heresy which was later to shake the Church and which stated that the divine nature suffered on the cross. But the eternal Son of God became incarnate as a man so that He could be a human person in body and soul, so that, when the time came, He’d be able to suffer for people and to die on their behalf. Because, if the divine nature of Christ had suffered on the cross, this would mean that His divine nature would have died. And that’s something we shouldn’t even contemplate. Ponder as deeply as you can on these great and terrible words: ‘God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’.

The fifth phrase: ‘I’m thirsty’ (John 19: 28). His blood was flowing. This is why He was thirsty. The sun was beginning to set and struck Him full in the face, so, together with all the other torments, He was burning up. Naturally, He was thirsty. But, Lord, were you really thirsty for water, or for love? Were you thirsty as a human being or as God, or both? The Roman centurion gave you a sponge soaked in vinegar. A drop of mercy such as you hadn’t experienced from other people for the whole of the three hours on the cross. To some extent, this Roman soldier relieved the sin of Pilate- the sin of the Roman empire- towards Christ, even if it was with vinegar. This is why, Lord, you would eradicate the Roman empire, but would found another.

The sixth phrase is ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’ (Luke 23: 46). He said this to show that He came from the Father, not of His own volition, as the Jews accused Him. But these words were also said so that they’d be heard by the Buddhists, the Pythagorans, the apocryphers and all those other philosophers who babble on about the transmigration of the souls of dead people into other people, animals, plants, stars or metallic elements. Get rid of all these fantasies and see where the soul of the dead Righteous One is headed: ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’.

The seventh phrase is ‘It is finished’ (John 19: 30). This doesn’t mean that life is ended. No! It means that His mission, which was concentrated on the salvation of the human race, had ended. The divine task of our sole, true Messiah had been completed and was sealed with His blood and earthly death. The torments were over, but life was just beginning. The tragedy was finished, but not the drama. Next to come was the majestic achievement: victory over death; resurrection; glory.

By St. Nicholas Velimirovich

Source: http://pemptousia.com/2017/10/the-seven-times-christ-spoke-on-the-cross/