The Catalog of Good Deeds

Introducing new eco toys made from natural materials including wood, fabric, and wool.

These handmade toys are made in the Felting & Textile Workshop of St Elisabeth Convent. Each toy is unique and made with attention to every detail: for instance, the toys’ eyes are not glued to their faces, instead they are embroidered with color threads or painted with child safe acrylic paints.

Buckwheat hulls are used as the filling for most of our products, which are the dry outer layer of buckwheat seeds.

Most importantly buying eco toys and other products from the workshops of St Elisabeth Convent enables you to support the social ministry of the Convent and help others this Christmas season.

Small Anti Stress Bear Toy

Thanks to the soft fabric and the rustling filling, this small hand sized toy can help relieve stress. It can be used as a bed warmer by heating it up in a kitchen oven or a microwave oven to a preferred temperature. $9 Click here to order today

Kitten Developmental Toy

This eco toy made of natural materials is manufactured in the textile workshop of St Elisabeth Convent. The cat’s paws are made of contrast colored fabric and loosely stuffed. This toy can teach a child to tie shoelaces and can improve their manual dexterity. $17 Choose your design here

Horse Eco Toy

Just a few advantages of this Organic Toy includes:
Great for children of any age.

- Only natural non-toxic materials are used.

- It is hypoallergenic and may be used as an interior decoration.
$17 Click here to order this unique toy

Penguin Anti-Stress Toy

Made of сashmere and linen. Can be used as a toy, a pendant or a Christmas tree decoration. The toy is not stuffed tightly, and theres a reason for it: when you touch the toy, the swishing of the hulls has a relaxing effect. This toy can also be used as a pendant of Christmas tree decoration. $11 Be the first to order this new toy here

Sleeping Angel Pillow

This unique toy comes in first because it is both a toy and a pillow and processes therapeutic qualities.

Fabric: 100% linen.

Filling: 100% buckwheat hulls.

Size: 30 cm high, 40 cm wide.

$30 - Click here to order this multipurpose gift today!

Learn more about St.Elisabeth Convent:

Much has been written about original sin. The Scripture is quite laconic about what happened. Adam and Eve–they!–stole a piece of fruit. Surely, the original sin was not theft. Many correctly say that it was disobedience. But there has to be more–much more!–to the story. Making a rule just for its own sake, for the sake of obeying or disobeying it, seems petty. There are some beautiful, mystical explanations of the nature of the original sin offered by Father Kuraev and others, and I quite like them, but there is one aspect of it that has captivated my attention for a couple of days now.

In one sense, the original sin was the killing of God in self. He, who from the creation of man was ever-present with him was cast out, the presence was killed. This is symbolically represented by the discovery of nakedness. It is a common opinion of the learned theologians that until the sin, God’s glory (that is to say, His presence) covered Adam and Eve as if with a garment. After the sin, the presence of God was no more, and they saw their nakedness.

When Cain killed Abel, he killed the presence of God in the other. What bothered Cain was not that God did not regard his offering but that He regarded Abel’s. Whatever it actually means that God “regarded” Abel’s sacrifice, it implies some kind of attention, active presence. Once again, man wanted to be left alone, without God. The presence of God proved intolerable and needed to be destroyed.

This act of killing God’s presence–this original sin–continued through the killing of the prophets and eventually of Christ Himself. The same desire to be left alone, the same intolerance for the presence of God, the same insatiable drive to be our own gods–nothing changed. And it still has not.

For a very short while, at the very dawn of the Church, the faithful could say: “Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!” This is long gone. The Church is now terrified of the Second Coming, Her prayer has long been “Don’t come, Lord Jesus! Not now, not in our time.” She no longer–and has not for a long time!–prays for and eagerly awaits a speedy judgment of this world, its end, the end times. Instead, the Church prays and longs for the peace, stability and prosperity of this world and for the delay in the Second Coming of Jesus.

When Jesus came the first time, man did what he had always done with the presence of God–he killed Him. Man wanted to be left alone, he wanted to be his own god. He had a perfectly good altar, like Cain. He offered sacrifices in proper order and with proper prayers, like Cain, I am sure. Even if he believed in God’s presence, he understood that it inhabited that large stone box he called the Temple–it was not with him, in his home, in his life, in his being. Man put God in a box and hired guards-priests- to keep Him there. But when God came to man’s town, to his village, to speak to man face-to-face, to eat supper with him, to touch him–man could not tolerate such an intrusion and so he killed God.

This sin–the killing of God in His Son–is much more grave than the killing of God in self, as did Adam, or the killing of God in other, as did Cain. I have no good reason to believe that man today–today!–would not do the same as he did two millennia ago. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is not about the Catholics, or not exclusively about the Catholics. It is a commentary on the Adam and the Cain in every man.

Rosanov once had a frightening insight: the tragedy is not that Jesus had enemies, but that He did not have friends. His enemies conspired to kill Him, but His betrayer was a disciple! His enemies came with weapons, but His disciples were asleep! His enemies mocked Him, but a disciple denied ever knowing Him! In Orthodoxy, we have a tradition of identifying ourselves with John. “Behold, your Mother!”–we believe that these words said to one disciple apply to all disciples and to us. What fanciful thinking! Why identify with this particular disciple? Judas was also a disciple, and so was Peter, and so were the rest who ran away and locked the door behind them! No, we are not heirs of just one disciple; we are heirs of all of them. We carry the nature of Adam, and Cain, and Judas, and also of Abel, if we have not slaughtered him in ourselves, and also of John, if we have not run away from the Cross and locked the doors in fear. The saints saw this; that is why they cried and repented so much.

By Fr. Sergei Sveshnikov

Source: https://frsergei.wordpress.com/2017/07/01/a-friend-is-revealed-in-times-of-trouble/

In 1932, the year of Andrei Tarkovsky's birth, Stalin declared that the Russian Orthodox Church would be wiped out within five years. Through forced closure of churches, seizure of Church property, imprisonment and execution of bishops, priests, and lay people coupled with anti-religious propaganda, the Soviet regime, since the revolution, had expended vast amounts of energy combating the “opiate of the masses”. Despite a 1927 decree in which the acting head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Sergius, declared the Church's allegiance to the Soviet Regime in an effort to mitigate persecutions, the Orthodox Church remained one of communism's main ideological adversaries. Spiritual life was seen as antithetical to materialistic communist dogma.

By 1966, the year in which Tarkovsky's epic Andrei Rublev was released, the Soviet regime had somewhat altered its position towards the Church. In 1943, after a Russian victory at Stalingrad, Stalin sanctioned the recreation of the Moscow Patriarchate, utilizing the Church as a unifying agent to bolster patriotism and national identity after a devastating war. Although persecution of the Church waxed and waned over the course of the next two decades, at the time of the release of Andrei Rublev, the Soviet regime was still willing to accept some aspects of religious life which could be used to build nationalist sentiment.

The Soviet position on art was likewise utilitarian, being summed up in this Communist Party declaration which came less than a decade after the revolution: "Cinema can and must occupy an important place in the process of cultural revolution as a medium for broad educational work and communist propaganda, the organization and education of the masses around the slogans and tasks of the Party." With the death of Stalin in 1953 came the Khrushchev “thaw”. Artists began to stray somewhat from the parameters of Socialist Realism and art created for party purposes. Still, art which did not conform to Soviet standards was not sanctioned by the state sponsored Artist's Union. Even as late as 1974 non-conformist artists faced harassment by the authorities when they had their exhibit bulldozed by the KGB for not conforming to Socialist Realism's norms. This is the climate in which Andrei Rublev was produced. A film about an Orthodox Christian saint considered the greatest of Russian iconographers for the glimpses which his artwork provides into spiritual realities.

Andrei Tarkovsky was born in Yurievets on the Volga April 4, 1932 and died in Paris on December 8, 1986. Born to the poet Arseni Tarkovsky and actress Maria Tarkovskaya. From 1951 to 1954 Tarkovsky studied Arabic at the Moscow's Institute of Oriental Languages, after which he studied geology in Siberia for a short period. In 1956 Tarkovsky entered the Soviet State Film School where he studied under director Mikhail Romm. Romm became famous for his depictions of Lenin in a three part series entitled Leniniana. For this and his other works, Romm had been awarded a total of five Stalin Prizes. Although a concept running entirely contrary to the style of Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky's teacher believed that cinema should be a “direct observation of life”.

Not much is known about the specifics of Tarkovsky's religious life. However, Tarkovsky's friend Michal Leszczylowski has said that, “Religion played an important part in Tarkovsky's life and he was always eager to meet religious people, to discuss with them problems of faith.” It is through Tarkovsky's art that we come to understand the nature of his faith more fully.

Tarkovsky understood there to be a bond between art and spirituality. "Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual." This bond between art and spirituality is typified in Tarkovsy's depiction of Andrei Rublev. Completed in 1966 yet not released in the Soviet Union until 1971 due to censorship, Andrei Rublev won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 1970. It is hailed by film critics as one of, if not the, greatest films of all time. Just six years before the completion of the film, the 600th birthday of Andrei Rublev was celebrated in the Soviet Union with the official backing of the authorities. Included in the celebrations was the opening of the Andrei Rublev Museum of Old Russian Art. The widespread attention given to the memory of Rublev at this time provided an opportunity for Tarkovsky to, “engage spiritual concerns under the guise of patriotic myth-making”. Despite what seemed a ripe time, religious persecution continued, still making the production of Andrei Rublev something of a risk. The year 1962 saw the reiteration of a law denying parents the right to raise their children as believers, backed up by ideological justification. Between 1958 and 1966, the number of registered Orthodox communities in the Vladimir diocese, where much of the film was shot, decreased by 17 percent, leaving only 54 churches and monasteries. Moscow saw a decline of 19 percent during these years. Still, Tarkovsky pushed on with production.

Andrei Rublev, simply speaking, is the biographical account of the renowned iconographer of the same name. Rublev was a monk of the Trinity St. Sergius Lavra and a disciple of the monastery's founder, St. Sergius of Radonezh. Rublev is accredited with, amongst other works, the iconography of the Annunciation Cathedral in Moscow and the Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir, and most famously the icon of the Holy Trinity. Rublev's style of icon painting is a departure from the more angular Byzantine style. Forms with less sharpness are used to create a softer image. The icon of the Holy Trinity is highly praised for its pure representation of Orthodox trinitarian theology. Rublev's genius comes in his presentation of the one Christian God in three hypostases, or persons. The three hypostases of the Holy Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - are depicted as equal, yet unique. Rublev's perfect placement of the three persons allows for a feeling of union between the three, all acknowledging each other, while a symbol of the eucharist, the life they have given the world, rests on a table between them. Between them also exists space in which the viewer of the icon almost seems called to enter by the position of the three persons. This space can be understood as the creative energies and love which flows between the three. It is here, in this seemingly blank yet utterly full and unified space that we can begin to penetrate the meaning of Andrei Rublev.

Robert Bird points out that the Trinity icon inspired Tarkovsky “in the film's thematic structure, in its visual composition, and also in his aspiration to give voice to a silenced culture”. It is through this inspiration of the icon that Tarkovsky comes to present the story of Andrei Rublev, living under the oppressive Mongol yoke of the first quarter of the fifteenth century. A yoke, of course, in many respects not much different from the Soviet one under which Tarkovsky lived. In this respect the film draws a parallel between Tarkovsky and Rublev in its treatment of the adversity an artist must endure while at the same time maintaining artistic integrity and producing quality art.

Tarkovsky's film lacks “clear linear narrative”, and is presented primarily through means of aesthetic impressions which the viewer must take and interpret to gain a sense of the film's overarching meaning. Tarkovsky utilizes these impressions, or images, as if they were pieces of a mosaic. When one stands too close to a mosaic the entire piece cannot be properly understood. One must stand back and view the mosaic in its entirety to see its true beauty and give it meaning. Tarkovsky's scenes present an aesthetic or feeling, not strict storyline or narrative. It is this style which enables the absence of Rublev, the protagonist, for large segments of the film. Through his impressions Tarkovsky thought it possible to capture the essence of Rublev's character and life even without his presence, just as the “emptiness” between the three persons in Rublev's Trinity icon is able to capture the essence of the Trinity.

This lack of participation from Rublev in the film is best seen in the episode entitled "The Raid". Here Tarkovsky places Rublev as, “a spectator alongside us”. It is in this segment of the film that Rublev meets with the spirit of the reposed Theophanes after the destruction of a church by the Tatars in which Rublev had completed an iconostasis. Theophanes, now dwelling with God, has no need for physical forms to lift his mind to the divine. Theophanes explains that images and words fall short of the glory of the truth and direct experience of God. These images exist to imprint men with godly impressions as a means of contact with the divine, yet they never fully succeed. It is at this point that Rublev, shaken by Theophanes' words, renounces both speech and icon painting as essentially futile endeavors.

The next episode, "Love", lacks any speech from Rublev as Tarkovsky presents us with dry, mundane, and sometimes incomprehensible characters such as the Mongols who do not speak Russian. "Love" is followed by "The Bell" in which Rublev regains his will to speak and create. The seemingly hopeless endeavor of the casting of a bell under the leadership of Boriska, a young man with little skill, comes to represent the hopes of an entire village. The bell, in fact, is cast and rings. At the ringing of the bell Rublev is found comforting Boriska who feared the bell would not ring. Boriska here serves as a representation of Rublev coming to terms with his own God-inspired talents. Boriska was fearful that his bell would not ring in the same manner Rublev feared for his failure in his depiction of divine things. We see Rublev holding Boriska near the same spot where the crucifixion scene was shot in episode two. Only now, the cross has been replaced by the resurrection which the bell serves to represent.

Andrei Rublev's lack of clear linear motion unbound by time and space can create a dizzying effect for a viewer. Yet it is the aesthetic impressions which Tarkovsky creates that bind the seemingly disjointed parts to create a truth more mysterious, and existing deeper than the parts themselves. It is this focus on beauty rather than a clear philosophical and ordered construct which I consider to be the films defining characteristic. A characteristic which, in my view, is decidedly Russian. It is a love for beauty which surpasses understanding that helped Rublev create his icon of the Holy Trinity, a true “window into heaven”, at a time when Tatar domination would seem to hinder such creativity. It is this same understanding and love of beauty which allowed Tarkovsky to create Andrei Rublev, in a period of Russian history which was dominated by those who sought to eradicate this love and replace it with cold realism and materialism. In this film Tarkovsky joins these two worlds together to present the timelessness of the creative impulse and man's yearning for truth. By not confining Rublev to iconic historical status, which linear narrative and archaic speech would have helped to do, Tarkovsky is able to create a more universal Rublev. Tarkovsky wanted, “The viewer to see Rublev with 'today's eyes',” in order to show that the human spirit can triumph under the most trying circumstances.

Source: johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/01/tarkovskys-andrei-rublev.html

I was born and raised in Pasadena, California. I’m of English descent and one of my ancestors actually did come over aboard the Mayflower. So you probably are wondering why I became involved in the Greek Orthodox tradition. I was raised a Presbyterian and when I was eight I had a friend who was Greek and who I played baseball with. I used to spend the night at his house on the weekends and he took me to his church in Pasadena. That was my first exposure to Orthodox Christianity and I didn’t understand much because it was a heavily Greek congregation and I didn’t speak any Greek at all.

Fr. Josiah Trenham

When I was 18 I had just gone to college and I met a woman there who became my wife, Catherine (and who is in the background of the video standing next to Father Josiah) and she was the youngest of six and was from Mount Shasta. Two of her older brothers had become Orthodox Christians and before had been Methodist. That was my second interaction with Orthodoxy and I began to court her. Her brothers sent me books and they sent me letters and began to engage me about religion because they didn’t want their sister to marry a Presbyterian. We started corresponding and that was at a time when I was in college and I was very interested in it. That began about a five year process of reading and at first I tried to make them Presbyterian but they won. We now have 9 kids and we’ve been married for almost 24 years.

I’ve been at this church since the early 90’s and before that I spent a year in one of our orphanages in Mexico. I was ordained in 93 and before that I was an assistant priest at a wonderful parish up in Santa Barbara. I did my undergraduate at a place called Westmont College which is up in Santa Barbara and after that I went to what is called the Reform Theological Seminary which is Presbyterian which was during the time I was going through the process of becoming Orthodox.

As a matter of fact when I went to the seminary I wrote out a list of all of the difference between the Reform Faith and the Orthodox Faith. I then did independent studies for a semester trying to solve these problems and I graduated from a school called Westminster Theological Seminary, which is an old Presbyterian seminary, and then I did a PHD with an Orthodox scholar in the northern part of England. My thesis was on “Marriage and Virginity According to St. John Chrysostom” who was the patriarch of Constantinople and the greatest preacher in the history of the church. He died in 407 A.D. He was actually born in Antioch but his name means “Golden Mouth”.

Then he became a saint and became known as St. John Chrysostom. I learned everything from him. He is everything to me. He taught me how to pray and he is very much alive in Christ. Most people think that when a saint dies they are in some other place and if you pray to them you are practicing a form of idolatry. Presbyterians may think that but Orthodox never thinks of Christ as being apart from the saints. The scriptures say that he is wonderful or wondrous and though their bodies rest in the grave their souls are very much alive.

Chrysostom was the most incredible bishop in the world at that time. We have volumes of his writing and they are all very practical. There are homilies that he preached where he teaches us how to live as a family and my dissertation was pretty much on family life. What is it like to live as Christians in the home and also in the monastery? Marriage and virginity both. I read him every day and I will until I’m dead.

The Church says St. Paul was the mouth of Christ and St. John Chrysostom is the mouth of Paul He wrote commentaries on all of Paul’s letters and they are still read. After I got my doctorate I’ve been a pastor and that is what I’ve been doing here. This is a young community which was started in 1992 and the previous pastor left to go back East. We started with about 12 people and we had our original meetings at room at the Baptist University here in Riverside.

After that we rented a store front on Indiana and Tyler and then we moved to an industrial warehouse off of Van Buren and then in 1999 we purchased this property which was owned by a wonderful retired botanist from UCR named Dr Homer Chapman who was at that time 101 years old. We didn’t have enough money to buy it but I wrote him a letter and said we really would like to buy it and this is what we can offer. He wrote back and very graciously said that even though our offer was 35% less than he wanted he told us fine build your church. He died a few years later at 106 and he wrote letters in support of us when we were going before the city. We bought it in 1999 and started building in 2001 and built the hall and occupied it in 2002. Two years later we purchased the last vacant piece next door which was three acres and we designed our church temple which we just finished which is our second phase. We got three phases approved by the city which are the hall our offices are in and the church and then next a school as an education center which we are hoping to do in the future.

So what did I find interesting about the Orthodox Religion? Well I’m tempted to say, “Everything!” However I would say the immediate draw for me was the orthodox liturgy. The actual worship service. It left me absolutely undone and done and fulfilled. With the Presbyterians we had great preachers but the worship itself sitting down and saying your prayers while on your rear and as a young man I knew there was no example of that in the Bible. There are hundreds of references to positions in prayer in the Bible but there is only one that is about sitting down.

The Orthodox take worship very seriously and it is not about entertainment. I most of the liturgy the priest has his back to you and isn’t even looking at you. There is however the sense of the grandeur of God and the majesty of the Holy Trinity and this being something that the congregation was doing for him and not for themselves. That deeply affected me. The beauty of the churches themselves, the iconography and the writings of history really got to me.

The Presbyterian Church was changing so rapidly and I knew enough to know that if this was a matter of truth why is there so much change? As a young man it made me feel like I was not confident in my church. I got married at twenty and I remember as I was preparing to get married as a 19 year old asking myself: “I wonder if I have kids will the church be anything like it was when I was growing up?”

And I answered that by saying that I doubted it so why would I invest in it? Why would I invest in something I didn’t have any confidence in? With Orthodoxy well someone told me a joke about it. How many Orthodox Bishops does it take to change a light bulb? And the answer is “CHANGE?” I like that and it has been almost 21 years now since I’ve been Orthodox.

What is the foundation of my beliefs? It is the entire church built upon the belief in the Man who is Jesus Christ! We call him a word in Greek Theanthro which is a combination words in Greek which means “The God Man.” He is the person upon which the whole church is built. His life and his death and resurrection are everything to us. It is what we celebrate constantly year round and every Sunday we have the celebration of the feast and the Church is what he established. He said in the New Testament that He would build His Church and he has. The Church is intimately connected to him.

As a matter of fact we call it a “Body” because it is a living organism within which he dwells. It is a temple for his birth as well as his father and the Holy Spirit. That is the foundation of the church. We view the Church as something that is human because otherwise we wouldn’t be in it and also imperfect in that sense allowing there to be sinners like me. At the same time it is not just human but also divine as something that God had invested in and has promised to uphold as a beacon of light. Jesus called his disciples a city set up on a hill as a light of the world. That certainly is what it has been for me in my life.

This spiritual life is not just about experiences so much as it is an encounter with the Living God. The heart of what an Orthodox things of salvation is not about forgiveness or a courtroom idea of God declaring us OK. It is much more of an organic interaction between God and man which takes place in the church through what we call the Holy Mystery where we actually believe we mesh with God and he meshes with us and we are transformed by that. That is at the heart of every liturgy which looking at it from an objective view point is what it is and what it says it is which is full of miracles.

Often Pentecostals come and visit here. I tell them that while speaking in tongues may be one thing but what we have in the liturgy is so mind blowing and beyond anything the Pentecostal experience may have that it is also a very personal thing. There is a beautiful historical account of something that took place at the end of the tenth century around 988. The great prince of Kiev at the time was Vladimir. His grandmother Olga had become Christian and had gone to Constantinople to be baptized and she was living among the Slavs who were all pagan at that time. She had become Christian and she tried to convince her son to become Christian but he never did. Her Grandson Vladimir did.

The way that he did was he sent out delegates al over the world to Rome, Baghdad, and he wanted to explore Catholicism and Islam and also sent them to Constantinople. They wrote him a letter in which they said that when they entered the great church of Santa Sophia, which was the queen of Christian churches in the world, that they did not know if they were in Heaven or on earth and that they were overwhelmed by the beauty and that the only thing that they knew was that their God dwelt amongst men. That was enough for him and he told them OK to send Bishops and priests and and that is how Russia ended up being converted to Christianity in 988. That experiences that the ambassadors had really resonated with me and I said that what really hit me was the service.

St. Paul even mentions it and he says in I Corinthians 14 That the worship of the early church was such that an unbeliever who entered into the middle of a service would be pierced through the heart and their conscience would be quickened and that they would fall down on their faces and declare that God is certainly in your midst. This is the effect that the services have and what he experienced in the First Century I experienced in the Twentieth and the ambassadors experienced in the Tenth Century.

That is because that is what the liturgy actually is because the church is an outgrowth but after it is concentrated it becomes a beacon and an outpost of Heaven and that the liturgy is actually an ascent. St. Paul describes it as an ascent to Mount Zion and a Heavenly Jerusalem where there is an intermingling of angels and me, saints and sinners and where God comes to dwell amongst us at the call of the priest the Holy Spirit descends. The gifts that we offer to God he takes and transforms. He gives us grapes and wheat and the ground and we take it and we make the best things we can such as bread and wine and give them to him and he takes them back and transforms them to be the body and blood of his son and feeds us the divine. That is incredible. That happens in every single liturgy. That is a lot better than speaking in tongues.

We have a lot of pleasant people here in the sense of constituency. We have about 450 active and about half of them are from about 15 different countries. They are first and second generation immigrants and the other half of the parish are persons who have become orthodox and their children from this area. There is a real mix and we use predominantly English at about 95% and I can speak some Spanish since I spoke a year in Mexico and can actually do the whole service in Spanish. We do a little Spanish and a little Arabic and I can read in the Greek language so we use a little Greek and a little Arabic and some Slavonic which is the old Russian and a little bit of Spanish just just for people whom English is a difficulty. Not enough to make it difficult for English speakers but enough to cheer up those who are just here.

This is a unique moment in American history. It has really only been in the last twenty years that Orthodox Christianity has become an option for Americans. Prior to that it was for foreigners very much like it still is in England and I go back to England every year and have for 15 years. There is a lot of Orthodox in England but still the English people will view Orthodox Christianity as something for Cypriots because there are so many Cypriots there or that’s for Russians. They like it in general and they probably know more about Orthodox Christianity than Americans do. In America Orthodoxy is not viewed just as a foreign faith. It is viewed really as part of the religious collage and there are a million Orthodox here now. We’ve had enough American converts now that people who want traditional Christianity without faddism and without change it is a very attractive feature. I think that is what is most important for Americans, to see Orthodox Christianity as something that they could consider and has now become accessible to them.

A Church with a 2,000 year history of worship and faith and martyrs and saints that hasn’t blown with the wind.

An interview with Fr. Josiah Trenham

Source: http://journeytoorthodoxy.com/2011/09/in-the-shadow-of-st-john-chrysostom/

“Love the One so that all will love you”.

(Elder Amphilochios of Patmos)

Speak to almost anyone today and they will tell you that our love for one another is getting colder. Why should this be? As pious and Orthodox Christians we have been brought up to know that the first virtue is love for one another. How, then, is it possible that this love we should be demonstrating every day is getting colder?

Perhaps many of us need to re-examine our Christian lives, go back to basics, and realize once more that the most important virtue is to love one another (members of the Family of God) and our neighbor (who maybe doesn’t know Him at all), and to pray for one another, even for those that hate us. In the service of Great Compline in the Orthodox Church the priest offers this prayer: “For all those who love us and hate us.” The response is “Lord, have mercy.”

All of us desire and need the mercy of our Lord, and to receive this great mercy we need to have sincere, heartfelt love for Him, and one another, every day. Surely we cannot expect the great love of our Savior Jesus Christ to fill us to overflowing when we have let our hearts become cold towards one another? Our Gracious Lord God turns His Face away from us when we do not show love and kindness towards one another. He turns His face away, and we are left with a terrible sense of loneliness and suffering, for to be without God is the saddest time in our lives. Our hearts have become cold and we do not love as He has commanded us to do – “Love one another” (St John 13:34). Such love is a command of our Lord, and is the sign of our discipleship. So let us pray that the Holy Spirit of our God will warm our cold hearts and return us to obedience to Him.

Just because others have become cold in their hearts it does not mean that we should copy them, becoming unkind and not showing love towards each other. We need to sense the true peace of God within our soul, the peace that only comes when we are in union with Him in love. The divine love that He pours into of hearts radiates out to those around us, even to those who do not appear to love us in return. Many people seem today to live in the situation where they cannot count on the fingers of one hand the number of their friends, yet their perceived enemies are multitude! Strange, but not beyond the healing, loving power of our Lord!

Our purpose on this earth as Christians is to prepare ourselves for the Kingdom of our God, and in doing so we seek to walk in the light of Christ with our neighbor on the same path - not only seeking Paradise, but also becoming friends with our neighbor and our Lord God. He is the truest friend we can have, Almighty God, who loves the mankind He has created. The Greek word philanthropia means our Lord God is the friend of mankind. So our Gracious Lord loves us, our friends, neighbors, and even those who hate us! With both hands we can now pray and give Him glory and honor.

As we continue to worship and pray within our local parishes and in our homes, let us realize that when we walk outside of those churches and homes, we must face the world around us. We do not live insulated from contact with the world: our loving God has placed us in His world so that love can flow through us into the world. So do not let your heart become cold, but always show the same friendship our Lord God has for us towards every soul we meet. Finally, we can find true peace within our souls, as where there is love for God, and for one another, Christ dwells within us. What a blessing for us all! Now coldness towards one another has turned to love towards everyone!

Let us love one another, so that with one mind and heart we may confess: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one in essence and undivided. Amen.

Humbly In The Love Of Christ Our Lord,

Very Rev. Archimandrite Nektarios Serfes

Source: http://www.serfes.org/spiritual/october2004.htm

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