The Catalog of Good Deeds

Question: Dear Father Andrew, your blessing. I am a mother of two. My younger son is 7 and he is autistic. I have a husband but we are not married in church. I go to church with the kids often and have them partake of the Holy Eucharist, although it’s difficult for the younger son.

Father, how does the Church view autism? Why are these kids even born? Man is made in the image and likeness of God, isn’t he? Essentially, what a human being must do here on earth is to get to know God and get closer to him. My child does not say anything and does not understand anything. Please tell us what to do. Olga.

Answer By Archpriest Andrew Lemeshonok: You have to carry your cross. Your child has an immortal soul. In spite of the fact that he cannot interact with you right now, his soul is alive, and it’s all part of God’s plan. We cannot intervene into God’s plan. We can only accept it or not.

Praise be to God that you didn’t deny your child, that you look after him, and he lives with you. I think that this child will some day become the spiritual centre of your life. Of course, it’s not easy. It is painful and difficult. However, life is like that — it isn’t easy because it is poisoned by sin.

Why is this child born this way? Why God let this illness happen? It was due to our sins or to teach us a lesson of humility and repentance. It’s all in God’s hands.

It is great that you go to church and that your children partake of the Sacraments. I believe that after a while you will be able to notice that your son loves and understands you. Every Easter, we give communion to bedridden children who stay in the Boarding Home for Children with Special Needs. They are old enough but their bodies remain short. When I give the Blood of Christ to those children (because they cannot digest the Body of Christ), I feel that I’m in Heaven already. They are quiet and holy sufferers…

Just keep carrying your cross. God will comfort you, trust me!

August 31, 2018

St. Elisabeth Convent

No Orthodox Christian in Russia doubts the existence of Demons, and that they wage brutal war against people. Neither do they doubt that Christ is stronger than demons; that He has won the war and continues to conquer. Why are they so sure? Because they see it with their own eyes. They see the pitiful victims of demonic possession who come to church to find relief but are tormented by the demons for doing so. Anywhere we go in the world we can see the result of diabolical hatred—violence, lewdness, profanity, coldness of heart—however, we fail to see the cause. But in the presence of the power of God, they are unmasked and revealed. The curtain is withdrawn that hides the puppeteer behind the puppets.

When I was in Russian, I stayed near a monastery where a priest lived who performed exorcisms. The rite of exorcism in the Orthodox Church is a formal service that has been the same for centuries. It includes generous amount of holy water, and is highlighted by the reading of the Gospel passages wherein Christ drives the demons out of people and demonstrates His authority over them. Just as the demons in the Gospels wail and lament when Christ appears, so they wail during these services.

Once the services are in full swing, the demons being to show themselves. One woman rages in a male voice, another person shakes violently, another shrieks in fear, yet another is thrown to the floor, losing consciousness. They scream their hatred for the priest, vowing to have their revenge as he douses them with holy water. Some demons make jokes some sound like dissatisfied customers (“I don’t have to take this!”), others are just raw anger and hatred. But the loudest noise always seems to be that of animals: mooing, crowing, and especially barking and growling.

Not all of the victims were adults. I saw one young girl being dragged and carried up to the priest. She was flailing and howling and wailing. When the priest finally came close enough to douse her with holy water, she moaned in a ghostly voice, which trailed off as she stopped her thrashing, finally collapsing. I saw another boy, held in his mother’s arms, who has the appearance of a poor, special ed. Child. He looked as though he was in distress and pain, just before he vomited on the floor.

Everywhere wailing, moaning, barking, convulsions, shrieking. It was a vision of hell. “Yes, you may attend,” the priest permitted me after I asked to witness and exorcism, “But stand near the icon of the Mother of God, and say the Jesus Prayer (‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’).” This is not something to be taken lightly. It is not a horror film, not a ghost story, but pure evil tormenting real human beings.

Naturally, I could not help but wonder why these people are possessed. But it is not right to inquire—they are sufferer and it is not for me to judge. But there are cases when the demon itself provides the answer. One woman was being exorcised when, to the priest’s astonishment, the demon informed him that God Himself does not will that she be released, “She killed three babies in her womb,” the demon revealed, “I am here to punish her.” Very many ended up in their pitiful state after going to “psychic healers.” They had turned to these so-called healers with some physical illness, or simply in search of pseudo-spirituality, and received some relief of fulfillment. But then they became demonically possessed, for the “healing” or “experience” was made possible solely through the psychic’s own pacts with demonic powers. These people, however, were impossible to help if they were not prepared to abandon the pseudo-spirituality and embrace the spiritual life of the Church, putting their trust in Christ.

But what about the children? What had they done to deserve this? Usually they have nothing. Their parents had brought this catastrophe upon them by their own unwholesome lives. This may sound strange and unfair, but we all acknowledge that a mother who smokes puts smoke into her child’s lungs, and a mother who drinks nurses her child with alcohol. When a father curses, he puts curse words into his child’s vocabulary. So is it really so surprising that parents who immerse themselves in the forces of darkness being those forces down upon their children?

The service concludes and I am in awe. The priest’s countenance us one of intense concentration, authority and sternness. Throughout the service he held the holy water sprinkler like I mighty whip; now he holds the cross as an invincible shield and a trophy of victory. His long, grey hair is a bit tousled, and sweat glistens on his forehead. Those poor people kiss the cross and clamor desperately to receive his blessing, then gradually leave the church. They feel better. In spite of the demon’s torment during the service, they now feel relieved and strengthened. They can go on, they are no longer overcome by despair.

Some people come to the exorcisms thinking that they are possessed, but they are not—it is a sort of spiritual hypochondria. Others speak blasphemies against God and man, not realizing whose mouthpiece they are being, and therefore will not even consider going to church. But wonders never cease. Once when the Communists were in power, some top party members were “touring” the monastery, laughing at its out datedness. One of these happened into the church where an exorcism was taking place. You can imagine the confusion that ensued when she began crowing involuntarily, like a rooster. She realized her great mistake in denying God, and became a Christian.

Still others have chronic, seemingly incurable illnesses that bring them to the monastery in search of healing, and there they encounter the power of Christ, which exposes the demon inhabiting them. Then the battle begins—fasting, praying, repenting, suffering. These are their “medicines.” But what is the doctor’s scalpel? Humility. I cannot forget one incident related to me by a possessed woman herself. At her exorcism, the demon in her reviled the priest, saying that he would spit on him. “Go ahead,” the priest answered, “Spit. It will make me humbler.” At this the demons shrieked as if seared by a blowtorch. But this is not surprising. Jesus Christ, by Whose authority this Orthodox priest, and indeed all those apostles, saints and righteous ones before cast out devils, was also spat upon, reviled, even crucified. But the devil’s rage was his own defeat.

By Nun Cornelia

Originally Printed in Issue 6, 1995

Source: http://deathtotheworld.com/articles/exorcisms-in-russia-from-an-eyewitness/

Question: How can someone best assimilate into the ‘culture’ of Orthodoxy even picking up other national customs without losing their own nationality (being of the USA for example)? How do we find that middle balance of taking the good and leaving the bad from our own culture?

There is no such thing as a generic Orthodoxy. Our faith is handed to us by particular people, who come from particular cultural expressions of the faith. Consequently I think a convert can only embrace the particular expression of the faith as they receive it, in the context that they have converted in. Some converts have gone so far as to actually try to adopt the ethnic identity of whatever Orthodox Jurisdiction they convert into -- I have even heard of cases in which people Russified their surname. This is of course ridiculous, and is neither necessary, nor helpful.

When I first encountered the Orthodox Faith, it was in the Russian Orthodox context. I was never under any illusions that I could become a Russian, nor did I have any great desire to do so. When the Orthodox Faith was brought to the Slavs, they embraced many aspects of the Orthodox Byzantine culture that brought them the Faith, but they remained Slavs, and with time, they in turn made the Faith their own, and a new Orthodox culture developed. You could go back one step further and talk about the Jewish culture of the Apostles, and the interaction that the Greek converts had with it, which ultimately developed into the Byzantine Greek culture. So while I am not a Russian, nor could I ever become a Russian, my experience of Orthodoxy came in a Russian package, and so I am Russian Orthodox, and love and appreciate the best aspects of Russian culture.

Anything in any culture that is contrary to the Orthodox Christian Faith has to go. But anything that is good or virtuous in a culture can be embraced. The Greeks certainly did not give up the best aspects of their culture when they embraced the Christian Faith, and the Church has been enriched by the Greek Christian culture that came out of that. The same is true of Americans. Anything that is good in the culture that you have when you enter the Church you get to keep.

And while we have to embrace the expression of Orthodoxy as we receive it, since we live in a context where we have many other cultural expressions of Orthodoxy, we should resist the temptation to look down on other practices that are no less authentic, but nevertheless different than what we are familiar with.

Someday, God willing, we will see a distinctly American Orthodox culture, but attempts to force that into existence prematurely have met with bad results, and I think this fails to understand how Orthodoxy changes a culture. The Russians did not decide one day that they were going to toss out Greek culture, and concoct a Russian version of it. It happened naturally, as their national Church matured. The American Church has a very long way to go.

However, none of this means that those of us whose language is English need to have the services in a foreign language. The texts of the services have all been translated into English, and so there is no reason why we should not use them.

What a convert should do is try to learn what they can from the most pious and mature Orthodox Christians they encounter in their parish, and emulate them. You will inevitably find some faults in such people, and so those things you should not follow. And you certainly should not emulate the bad habits of those who have grown up on the Church. For example, many Orthodox Christians have a bad a habit of coming to Church late, or coming to Church inconsistently. Ignore the bad example of those people, and imitate the ones that are doing what they should be doing.

One temptation for any convert is to take things to extremes, and so finding the balance is something that you have to work towards. For example, while we can and should learn from monasticism, unless and until you go to a monastery, you should not try to live like you are an Athonite monk. For one thing, it's not going to work, and you are likely to have the wheels of your faith come off at some point. Keep your focus on trying to live like a normal pious layman, and if God leads you to a monastery eventually, you will be a lot more likely to work out your salvation there, if you have learned how to work it out in a balanced way, while living in the world.. We should always remember the wise words of St. Poemen the Great:

"Everything that goes to excess comes from the demons" (Benedicta Ward, translator, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, The Alphabetical Collection (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975, 1984 revised edition), p. 185.).

By Fr. John Whiteford

Source: http://fatherjohn.blogspot.com/2017/08/stump-priest-converts-and-culture.html

There are plenty of testimonies concerning miracles and graceful help through prayers to the Holy Royal Martyrs. By the time the Romanovs Family was canonized in August 2000, there had been lots of accounts about miracles related to them.

Myrrh-Gushing Icon of the Emperor

I would like to share one such miracle in detail. An artist by the name of Pavel Tikhomirov painted an icon of the Emperor Nicholas early in 1997. Later, the icon served as the basis for color lithographies, one of which was owned by Oleg Belchenko, a surgeon from Moscow. He attended a service in the cathedral church of Sretensky Monastery on September 6, 1998 with this icon in a plastic bag. It started emitting fragrance, which was so strong that people were turning their heads to look at him. When he took the icon out of his bag after the service, the scent increased.

The image spent three weeks in the sanctuary, emanating fragrance continually. It started to pour myrrh late in 1999. The icon was placed in the Ascension Church in Gorokhovo Pole, then transferred to St Nicholas the Wonderworker Church in Pyzhy in February 1999, and then to other churches in Moscow. Hundreds of parishioners could witness the pouring myrrh with their own eyes. When this icon was in Holy Trinity Church in Khokhlovsky Pereulok, it healed Alexander Vytiagov, a veteran of the WWII and a retired 87-year-old colonel. He had been blind for fifteen years by that time. He met Father Alexius Uminsky, the rector of that church, and said, “I believe that this icon will heal me.” Father Alexius replied, “Let it be to you according to your faith.” He covered the man’s head with a towel soaked in the myrrh. The colonel woke up the following morning, looked around, and screamed, “I can see!” His family ran to his bed and saw that he was able to see.

The wonderworking icon traveled around many churches and monasteries. It visited more than twenty dioceses before the 2000 Synod of Bishops. The myrrh was seen pouring from that icon on numerous occasions. A number of healings was also recorded.

Miracle in Krasnodar

Here is another example. Archpriest Alexander Ignatov, the rector of the Holy Nativity of Christ Church in Krasnodar, bought an icon of the Royal Family in the icon store of St Daniel Monastery in 2000. A cleaning lady who washed the icons after a Sunday Liturgy in 2002 noticed that the glass became blurred. When they opened the kiot, they saw that the icon of the Holy Royal Martyrs was imprinted on the glass from the inside in slightest detail. Miracles like these are well known to the Orthodox. A similar miracle happened in 1993 in the Monastery in honor of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple (Kyiv) with an icon of Look at Humility Mother of God, which had an imprint on glass not made by hands. The image on glass was then put in a separate kiot and is said to work miracles.

The icon of the Holy Royal Martyrs imprinted on glass in Krasnodar was sent to the Commission on Research of Miraculous Phenomena of the Moscow Patriarchate, with the blessing of Metropolitan Isidore of Krasnodar. Forensic experts from the Institute of Forensics of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, Forensic Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the laboratory of the Institute of General Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences tested this icon for a year using advanced equipment and modern methods. They confirmed the existence of the image on glass but could not explain its origin. The icon and the image on glass are made of different matter.

By Fr Job (Gumerov)

Translated by The Catalog of Good Deeds

Next in this commentary series we examine the Anaphora, which is a Greek word meaning “offering” (the verb form is used in Leviticus 17:5, for example, where it describes the offering of sacrifice). It is a long prayer, punctuated by a number of “Amens”. It begins with the celebrant’s blessing “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all” and does not conclude until the end of the words, “and grant that with one mouth and one heart we may praise Your all-honourable and majestic name: of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages”. The congregational “Amen” which follows seals the entirety of the long anaphoral prayer. It is sometimes referred to as “the Eucharistic prayer”, since it constitutes the heart of the Eucharist and serves to consecrate the gifts of bread and wine, transforming them by the Spirit’s power into the Body and Blood of the Lord. A Eucharist can do without the antiphons if need be, or even without the Creed, but not without the Anaphora, for it is this prayer which makes the Eucharist to be the Eucharist. We may look at three of its characteristics, for they reveal something about who we are as Orthodox Christians and how we are to live.

First the prayer is dialogic. That is, it begins not with words addressed to God but with a dialogue in which the celebrant and the congregation address each other. The long prayer is prefaced with this back and forth: the priest first blesses the congregation in the name of the Triune God (in the words cited above), and they respond by blessing him in return: “And with your spirit!” He then tells them, “Lift up your hearts!”, and they respond, “We lift them up unto the Lord!” In this second exchange he is not urging them to cheer up, encouraged possibly by the fact that the end of the long service draws near, but telling them to ascend. The Lord reigns in heaven, and in the Liturgy we ascend to where He reigns. Our Liturgy in St. Herman’s therefore is not served in Langley, but in the Kingdom; not on earth, but in heaven. In the Liturgy time and eternity intersect, and heaven meets earth. We serve and worship with the Mother of God, the saints, and the angels, for we ascend to where they are. In a final exchange the priest says, “Let us give thanks unto the Lord”, and the people respond, “It is meet and right”. The meaning of this last exchange is easily missed: the priest is obtaining the liturgical assent of the gathered community to offer the Eucharist, for it is as part of that assembly that he speaks and acts. It is his signal to proceed with the anaphoral prayer.

It is not just in the opening preface that we find congregational response. Throughout the anaphora the congregational voice is heard, joining the priest, finishing his sentences. Thus, for example, when he rejoices in the heavenly song of the angels and says that they are “singing the triumphant hymn, shouting, proclaiming, and saying” the congregation joins in and completes his sentence: “Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord of Sabaoth! Heaven and earth are full of Your glory! Hosanna in the highest!” And again, when the priest says, “Your own of Your own we offer unto You, on behalf of all and for all”, the people again join him, saying, “We praise You! We bless You! We give thanks unto You, O Lord!” It is as if they are so enthusiastic they cannot keep themselves from joining in. Yet these congregational interruptions do not reveal only their liturgical exuberance, but also their sacramental status. They join in with the priest because they are the royal priesthood, the body of the high-priest Jesus Christ, and it is this corporate priesthood to which the celebrant gives voice. Their dialogic participation reveals that they are not simply passive observers, but active offerers; not an audience, but a priesthood, not the great unwashed, but the holy people of God, made holy through the washing of holy baptism.

Secondly, the anaphora is an anamnesis, a word sometimes rendered “remembrance”. Thus in the Authorized King James Version of Luke 22:19 we read that Christ said, “This is My body which is given for you; this do in remembrance of Me”. Such a translation can be a bit misleading, for we often tend to think of remembering in terms of mental activity—I can daydream about the future or remember the past, but in both cases words describe a purely cerebral happening taking place inside my head. The word anamnesis is less misleadingly rendered as “memorial”, and in Hebrew thought a memorial is not a merely mental process but an action that is done. Thus in Numbers 10:1f, Moses was commanded to make two silver trumpets which were to be blown over their sacrifices in times of war, and “there shall be a memorial for you before your God” (v. 10). In other words, when the trumpets are blown over the sacrifices, they will “be remembered before the Lord your God and you shall be saved from your enemies” (v. 9). In this memorial, it is God who does the remembering. And God’s remembering here is also not a purely mental act, but means that God takes action and saves. That is the point of Christ’s words at the mystical Last Supper: the act of eating bread and drinking wine during their gathered assembly is Christ’s memorial, the means whereby God remembers Christ and His sacrifice and take action to save us. Through this memorial, Christ’s saving sacrifice becomes present and active in our midst. The bread which we eat as His memorial is His sacrifice, His true Body, and the cup from which we drink is His Blood. That is why the liturgical tradition everywhere speaks of the Eucharist as a bloodless sacrifice—it is not a fresh immolation of Christ, or a re-crucifixion, but an anamnesis of His once-for-all offered sacrifice. There is no salvation without the Cross, and the Cross is not sacramentally saving in our weekly lives without the Eucharist. We are saved by His sacrifice, since we are the people of the Eucharist.

This means that the Eucharist is the most important thing we ever do, and we live from Eucharist to Eucharist, even as we live from breath to breath. Without the Eucharist, we have no life. One remembers the story recounted long ago by Gregory Dix in his classic The Shape of the Liturgy, about the importance of the Eucharist in the early church: “A whole congregation of obscure provincials at Abilinitina in Africa took the risk of almost certain detection by assembling at the height of the Diocletian persecution in their town, where the authorities were on the watch for them, because, as they said in court, the eucharist had been lacking a long while through the apostasy of their bishop Fundanus and they could no longer bear the lack of it. And so they called on a presbyter to celebrate—and paid the penalty of their faith down to the last man.” The story reveals not only the courage of these obscure Christians, but also the importance of the Eucharist for all of us even today.

Finally the anaphora is an extended epiclesis or invocation of the Spirit. The epicletic character of the entire prayer is summed up most succinctly in so-called epiclesis itself, in which the celebrant asks God to send down His Spirit upon the offering. But we must look more carefully upon the actual wording, for the Spirit is not simply invoked upon the gifts of bread and wine alone, but also upon us as well. Thus the celebrant prays, “Send down Your Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts here offered and make this bread the precious body of Your Christ and that which is in this cup the precious blood of Your Christ, making the change by Your Holy Spirit.” Note: “Send down Your Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts”. The final goal of the epiclesis and of the anaphora and the Eucharist as a whole is not to merely change the bread into the body of Christ, but also to change us into His body. Through eating the sacramental Body of Christ, we are incorporated afresh into Him as His mystical Body. The goal is not simply the transformation of the gifts, but our own transformation as well. Regarding the transformation of the Gifts of bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood, St. Cyril of Jerusalem once said, “Whatever the Holy Spirit has touched is sanctified and changed”. He might have said this about us also, for the goal of the Eucharist is to sanctify and change us as well. We walk into the church guilty, stained, weighed down with sins and heavy laden; we walk out of the Church after receiving the Eucharist forgiven, cleansed, liberated and light.

The Anaphora is the heart of the Divine Liturgy, for it is our liturgical thanksgiving. It reveals us as the holy people God, baptized so that we may declare the wonders of Him who called us out of darkness into His marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).

By Fr. Lawrence Farley

Source: https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/nootherfoundation/commentary-divine-liturgy-anaphora/

It is not a secret that St. Elisabeth Convent is running various charitable project to support people in need. The Catalog of Good Deeds is one such projects, too. On September 5, which was proclaimed by the UN as the International Day of Charity, we decided to ask the fathers from our Convent about what they think on charity in the context of our Orthodox faith.

Fr. George Glinski:

Charity is an inseparable part of a Christian community’s life, and we know that from the Holy Scripture. We can read about the life of the early Christian Church, the circumstances in which that Church existed and see how numerous early Christian communities, which we could name local churches today, helped each other and supported each other not only spiritually in their prayers, but also materially. For example, Apostle Paul writes that Christians from new religious communities supported the Christians of the Jerusalem Church. The Gospel calls us upon to help not just our brothers in Christian faith, with whom we make up the one body of Christ, but also strive to help any person because we all bear the image of Christ inside ourselves. So, our deeds of mercy and our love should not be targeted at the humanity only because the whole universe is called upon to transfigure through the human being, who is supposed to be a mediator between God and all the other creatures. As St. Maximos the Confessor wrote, “The human being is supposed to be the one through whom the grace of God will be spilled all over the world”. This is why it is rather important that we take part in the life of those people who need our help, drawing on our own possibilities and forces. If we cannot help with money, we can help with our wholehearted prayer. We should strive to do acts of mercy where it is possible by our own forces, and where our forces are limited, we should ask for God’s help, so that the Lord acts through our prayer and helps the people who really need His help, whatever help it should be.

Fr. Andrew Malahovsky:

Charity is one of the possibilities to be within God’s grace. There is mercantilism in the world and of course, it will exist forever. This mercantilism is predetermined by certain economical motivations, when we try to find out whether there is any profit for us or not. So, it is just a human attitude. But if we talk about charity and mercy, it means that the grace of God’s world is joining the human world. There is no mercantilism in it, there is only a pure desire to do good, the desire to take part in other person’s life. Charity always means sacrifice. A person gives not just something useless, but something what is essential for him in some way.

It is also great when our charitable work is connected with the interpersonal relations. When it is not just like someone brings some clothes or money somewhere or hands them out to a boarding home and forgets about this. Sometimes it is quite easy for us to leave some things. However, when there is a personal contact, when the one who gives and the one who takes see each other, then the work of such act of mercy becomes more deep and spiritual. One has to find time for another person, to talk to this person, to devote this time to him. It is not just financial help, which is more simple. Such involvement in other person’s life is more difficult, because in this case we talk about the sacrifice of our soul.

Fr. Artemii Tonoyan:

In fact, any liturgy is charity. The Body of Christ and we all are charity. You know what the Lord says about it: “do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3). We cannot even say more. Our life should be filled with God. We have to keep this state always inside ourselves, you see? Just do what you can do and leave… Do what the Lord lets you do. Nothing is possible without God. We all have the heart, and it will say us what to do. We just need to listen to it and see God in everything.

September 6, 2018

St. Elisabeth Convent

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Why Are Some Children Born Ill?

Exorcism: a Story from an Eyewitness

How Can Converts Accept Orthodox “Culture”?

Miraculous Images: the Myrrh-Gushing Icons of the Royal Martyrs

Anaphora: the Meaning of the Central Prayer of the Liturgy

Priests Answer: Why Is Charity an Inseparable Part of Spiritual Life?

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