The Catalog of Good Deeds

A word given at the reading of the Great Canon of Repentance of Venerable Andrew of Crete on Thursday of the Fifth Week of Great Lent.

The penitential canon of St. Andrew of Crete is read for the last time this the year in the fifth week of Great Lent, thus closing the book on this Great Canon until next year. The holy words of the penitential canon will be read again by those who live until next year, and who heed these many lamentations: “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me”—by those whom the Lord blesses to meet Great Lent next year.

In reading this canon, we repeat the words “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me” many times, and in doing so we as if see the scroll of our whole lives unraveling, from the day of our birth, and not simply until the present day in each of our lives, but until the day of death, and further until the day of the final Dread Judgment of God. How does life begin for every one of us? With crying. But there would be no suffering for the one bearing us, and the one being born if there was no guilt or impurity. What suffering? That which cried out in me when I, a newborn babe, began life with crying? I as yet had neither memory nor intelligence. My nature cried out from its inherent imperfection. Every child is born with the stamp of the ancestral sin of our forefathers and with the inclination to sin, which is inherited by every one of us from our forefathers. And when we, having defiled our lives by many sins, remember that we are born with an inclination towards sin, and that our duty is to master it, and that we cannot manage to do so, we bow our heads low at the recollection of our first day of birth, and from our heart breaks forth this prayerful cry: “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me!” Look, God, upon Thy poor creation, which was born with an inclination to sin, which for many years of this earthly life did not want to refrain from this inclination and now fears Thy righteous judgment!

While we were yet insensate and unconscious beings, the Lord God, our philoprogenitive Father, led many of us to the enclosure of His Holy Church, and gave us, Orthodox babies, the joy of receiving the grace of Holy Baptism. The Holy Church cleansed from our souls this seal, the vestige of the hereditary sin of our forefathers, the first people, in Holy Baptism. It made every one of us clean, it adorned our souls in angelic clothing, it sealed us with the sign of the Holy Cross, it cleansed and sanctified us and, to strengthen our spiritual powers, the Holy Spirit was given to us in the Sacrament of Chrismation, strengthening us in the spiritual life, and in the battle with temptations, with seductions, with vices and with passions.

And when it’s given to us think about how we have lived our lives, when we remember that we were given freedom from this inclination towards sin already in childhood, and that we began to defile the pure, snow-white garment of our immortal souls already in childhood, by speaking lies, showing anger, laziness, disobedience, and other childhood sins, then the same supplication to the Lord arises again in the soul of every one of us, coming from that freedom from the inclination to sin: “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me.”

The days of our childhood and youth have flown by. We were similar to our forefathers, the first people in Paradise, in those years when they were innocent, before they had sinned: Before them was the tree from which it was forbidden by God to pluck any fruit, and before us all stood, and stands, the tree of sins and passions, from which God’s will prohibits us to pluck these fruits which destroy our immortal souls. And, thinking about our youth, many of us are ready to beat ourselves on the breast, recalling how we had been careless and flippant, how we didn’t give much thought to how man should live, and how from the days of our childhood and youth we did not accustom our sinful hearts to fulfilling the will of God and preserving them in purity.

Perhaps many of us would like to regain our irreversibly gone youths, to begin life again, that our souls would not have those sins, vices, and passions which have so greatly accumulated in our souls—but it remains only to speak with and pray to the Lord with the words of the prophet David: Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions (Ps. 25:7). And once again this sigh of our heart: “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me.”

Whether our adult years have already come, or are coming, or we have already passed through them, they are a time when we, Orthodox people, consciously look around ourselves, and learn from the Holy Church, its homilies, and the holy word of God, how to live, how to look at our own lives as preparation for eternal life, and how to protect our souls. When we look at our adult years, in which we must consciously and bravely battle with vices and passions, and wisely use the gifts which the Lord sends us, and patiently endure life’s blows, this prayerful lamentation, which St. Andrew of Crete puts into heart and soul of each of us, is ready to erupt from the depths of our hearts again: “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me.”

I know Thy will, Lord. I want to do good, but I do evil and wickedness as before. I know that I am not walking along the path that I should, and, yet, I do not walk it. So many times I have promised not to repeat my sins and defile my soul, and again I break this promise! When will this battle between my conscience and my passions end? When will this captivity to sins and passions end? This cry is borne to the Lord from our souls: “Touch, O Lord, my sin-loving soul, that it would no longer serve sin, that it would not walk this path of sin, because my heart knows that this path leads to eternal destruction! I infect my immortal soul with sins, I drown it in a wave of passions and lawlessness, and I must give answer before Thee, O Lord, at the final and Dread Judgment!

And old age is coming, or for many of us it has already come. O how fruitlessly we have lived our lives! What have we done for eternal life? What have we done for the salvation of our sinful souls? How should we use the remainder of the days of our earthly lives? Will we spend them doing good works, to cleanse our hearts from defilement with bitter tears of repentance, and fill our hearts with good deeds at least in this remainder of days, or will passions and vices, as before, lacerate the remainder of our days and will my eyes, as before, be blinded by this vain sin and the stench of my passions? And again a groan arises from the depths of our souls to the Lord: “Take, O Lord, this blindness from my eyes, and grant that the remainder of my days may be short, and that I may not take these sins with me with which I have defiled myself throughout my entire life, and for which I have not been able to bring forth such repentance as would forevermore blot out these sins from my heart!” And again, the prayer, “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me.”

And the last hour of this earthly life will come for every one of us. The doctor will be powerless. Death will approach us. It is fitting if the Lord pleases to send us the happiness of a priest with the Holy Mysteries, to bid us farewell into life eternal. And what a prayerful groan from the heart of the dying will be sent up to Heaven, as that which St. Andrew Crete teaches us to cry out to the Lord with many times over: “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me!” “Grant me, O Lord, Thy mercy in the hour of my death, that my sinful soul might leave this body with the sentiment of the Wise Thief, with his repentance, with his faith and with his hope in Thy mercy!”

Then our earthly life ends, and even if our soul wants to bring confession of sins and repentance, there’s already no one to accept this repentance and this confession. And, perhaps, I will painfully want to return at least an hour, at least a minute of this earthly life, that in that hour, in that minute, while the doors of Divine Grace are not yet closed and the doors of repentance yet open, I will weep bitter tears for my perishing soul. But it will be too late: life is already over and no one will have the power to return one hour, or even one minute.

And there will be that hour when the Lord commands our bodies, returned to dust, to rise, to unite with our immortal souls, and commands us to stand before Him (cf. Jn. 5:25, 29), before the face of His angels (cf. Mt. 25:31), before the face of the innumerable host of God’s faithful children, holy God-pleasers, and simple people faithful to the Lord, who were able to live and die with the Lord in their hearts. We will stand before them with our innumerable sins, with all our falls, and with all our filth. And in the hour of the final and Dread Judgment, will not these words erupt from our souls, to the Righteous Judge: “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me?” This will be our last cry, which can only be addressed to the Lord, for this judgment will be final, and after it will be either eternal joy for Christ’s faithful children, or eternal tribulation for unrepentant sinners and for those who have pushed Christ’s hand away, and who lived without Christ and died without Him (cf. Mt. 25:46).

So, my dears, the manifold repetition of this prayerful lamentation reveals our whole life to us—from beginning to end and to the final Dread Judgment of God.

What the Lord will say to each of us—that’s His holy will. But, while we yet live, while we yet walk this earth, while we yet have these great and saving days of repentance given us by the Lord, let us bring our repentance to the Lord, with tears! Do not be ashamed of these tears, for our guardian angel collects these tears unseen. Weep bitter tears for the transgressions we have committed, and with these tears for our sins, draw nearer to the Lord with a prayer that He would save us by His mercy before we die to eternal life, and that He would cover our souls weeping before Him with His love, and that in eternal life and at His Dread Judgment he would not recall those sins for which we here brought repentance to the Lord with tears.

We will not hear these repentant sighs again until Great Lent next year. But may these holy words of the repentant canon never die in our hearts. May they live in the days of Great Lent, when we bring our repentance, and may these wonderful words of prayer, with which we ask forgiveness of our sins from the Lord and pardon for eternal life, not decay throughout our lives.

I wish you all, my sweet dears, with my whole heart, that the Lord grant you in these days of Great Lent to bring to Him not just your contrite souls, but your souls with tears wept for your sins, and that these tears would eternally cleanse our sinful filth; that we would not take our sins with us into the life of the future age.

Source: http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/102307.htm

Sermon by Metropolitan Nicholai (Yarushevich)

Translated by Jesse Dominick
March 30, 2017

An analysis of iconography based on eastern and western sources and traditions:

The Golden Legend's account of St. Mary of Egypt is based ultimately on a 7th-century Life by Sophronius of Jerusalem. According to the Legend, Mary was an Egyptian prostitute who at the age of 29 traveled to Jerusalem out of curiosity regarding the Holy Cross. Finding herself incapable of passing the threshold of the church where the cross was being worshiped, she repented her sins and became a solitary contemplative in the desert beyond the Jordan River, where she eventually died at an advanced age, her clothes having rotted away with the passage of time.

Two years before her death she had been discovered by a monk named Zosimus. In Sophronius her hair was short and white with age, a detail that Voragine omitted, and her skin burned black by the sun. Zosimus gave her his cloak and returned the following year to bring her communion. When he came back the year after that, he found her dead and buried her with the help of a lion.

How to portray a saint who wore no clothing

Mary's nakedness is an important part of the story, but exhibiting it in a sacred image was problematic. In the East, Zosimus' cloak usually hangs from one shoulder and covers her from the waist down, with her upper body either turned modestly to one side, as at right, or simply presented as if it were the chest of a man. The hair is short and white, as in Sophronius, and the body is gaunt. Images in the West follow a different strategy, giving the saint copious dark hair that falls over her body, covering it to mid-thigh, as in the first picture at right, or even to the ankles.

Hans Memling's portrait of 1480 draws on the eastern tradition for the cloak draped from the shoulder and abandons the long-hair strategy, leaving the saint's upper body exposed to view. In Memling's and almost all other portraits she has a fair young face, despite the statement in the legends that Zosimus found her blackened by the sun.

Attributes

The Memling panel also exemplifies an attribute often seen in portraits of this saint: three loaves of bread held in one hand. In the Legend she took these loaves with her into the desert and they lasted seventeen years.

She is also sometimes shown with a book. No books are mentioned in the Golden Legend account or in the much longer tale in the South English Legendary, but according to Sophronius she had a knowledge of scripture that came directly from God. The books in the images thus refer to this knowledge, even if actual books were not its source.

Narrative images

The Russian icon above covers the whole story from when Zosimus is told to go into the desert until he and the lion bury the saint and her soul is carried to Heaven. Among images that focus on single events, the last communion and the burial are the more likely to be presented.

Source: http://www.christianiconography.info/maryEgypt.html

The Rev. Gregory Joshua Edwards didn't always believe in God.

Growing up in Pennsylvania, Edwards avoided his family's Episcopalian beliefs and focused on academics.

Valedictorian of his 1996 high school graduating class, he served as student body president and editor of the yearbook.

He referred to himself as an atheist.

Then, as a student at Brown University, he began to question the meaning of life.

Edwards' spiritual inquiries led him to the Greek Orthodox Church, into which he was received in April 2003.

After graduating with a degree in religious studies from Brown in 2003, Edwards worked as a teaching assistant and master's candidate in the religion department at Florida State University. He volunteered with AmeriCorps, managing soup kitchens and building houses for people in need. In 2006, he enrolled as a doctoral student in the School of Theology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

On Feb. 22, 2009, he was ordained in the holy priesthood of the Orthodox Church.

Edwards, 38, recently accepted a position at St. George Greek Orthodox Church in New Port Richey. The church, at 9426 Little Road, welcomed him as its father in October.

I asked Edwards about his path to faith, what it means to serve others and his new position in Pasco County.

What appealed to you about the Orthodox faith?

When I was in college, I was an atheist, studying Nietzsche, Sartre, etc. At a certain point, I came face to face with a real existential crisis. Why was I here? What was the purpose of my life? Was it really only to get good grades so that I can get a good job, so that I can buy a big house, fancy car? I came to realize that there was a God, but I didn't know who he was. I wanted a relationship with him because I understood that he was life. But how can you have a relationship with someone you don't know? So I changed my major in college and began studying the history of religions.

I went back to the Protestant church I grew up in. But the Christianity that was being presented to me in the U.S. didn't ring true. Disillusioned, I began exploring Buddhism, and I was attracted by its mystical prayer and contemplation. But something was missing there, too. I had never even heard of Orthodox Christianity until it was mentioned by a professor in a course about the history of Christianity. She said that the same worship service that Christians were using in the 5th century was still being used today in the Orthodox Church. I had to know where I could find this. The more I read about the history of Christianity, the more I was convinced that the Orthodox Church had preserved the Christian inheritance in a way that western Christianity had not. I was especially moved by its unchanging doctrine and its focus on mystical prayer.

Why did you decide to pursue a career within the church?

Once I discovered where the spring for the water of life was, I wanted nothing else but to be near it at all times. Everything else, my promising worldly career, suddenly paled in comparison. I felt I could do nothing else.

What is most rewarding to you about serving others?

We Christians believe that Christ came "not to be served, but to serve," Mark 10:45. He who is God assumed the form of a humble servant. For me then, serving others is an imitation of Christ. I try to do it, however, not out of some religious obligation, but out of the radical freedom that God has given me by making me in his image and likeness, just as God himself became man of his own free will.

I'm not Greek, but I learned many things in my 10 years in Greece, one of which was the concept of philotimo, which actually can't be translated into English. It means something like "freely responding with sincere goodness to the smallest good done by another." When I look at how much God has done for me, I am moved by this sense of philotimo to serve Him and others.

What do you hope to offer your new church home going forward? What do you like most about the church?

I was fortunate to spend 10 years in Greece, soaking up the world view of the country where Christianity first blossomed in Europe, the land of Thessalonica, Corinth, the land which has preserved and maintained Christianity at great cost for 2000 years. I hope to be able to bring some of this experience to the U.S. and offer a translation to contemporary American culture. My goal is simply to try to bring authentic Orthodox Christianity and most important to try to embody it in my own person and life.

The thing I like most about the parish of St. George is its warm sense of community, its friendliness and openness to outsiders, including me, a former Protestant raised in Pennsylvania. We welcome everyone to join us.

Source: http://www.tampabay.com/news/religion/priests-spiritual-path-leads-him-to-st-george-greek-orthodox-church/2300825

“Oh, if only I could / At least to some degree, / Write eight lines I would / About passion’s properties. / About the / transgressions and the sins, / The running and the chasing, / The hasty inadvertences, / The elbows, my palms”¹— thus wrote Pasternak, aware that a precise, accurate word on the passions is difficult to give, and there can be few such words. Precise words on the passions slip out of your hands, like a wet and lively fish, and the passions themselves are interwoven together, knit together one with another, forming a repugnant unity. Obviously the word “passions” in the this case is used as a synonym for “disease of the soul,” and not as romantic longing or a noble fire in the blood.

That of which Pasternak confessed himself powerless was done long ago by Abbot John, called Climacus. This servant of God wrote not just eight lines, but an entire book on the passions and the battle with them. This book was born out of the experience of the struggle and victory, inasmuch as man, in his usual state, is found in backbreaking labor for sin, and, O woe!—he does not notice its evil. Only when man frees himself or begins to free himself is he given a view of himself from outside, and, therefore, the possibility of describing the process of inner healing.

This book is truly “about the transgressions and the sins, the running and the chasing,” and it begins with a chapter on the flight from the world. It’s the first of thirty rungs leading to Christ the King, and therefore it befits monastics in particular to read The Ladder. This book is also necessary for those remaining in the world and incapable of a full-fledged and irrevocable flight, but not as a handbook. It is necessary as an example of heavenly thinking while living in a fragile bodily shell. Perhaps, in Great Lent, when the marriage bed cools and is sanctified by abstinence, when there is no substantial difference between the food on the tables of monks and of the laity , a person not wearing a black robe, can read something from among the monastic books. To be engaged in such reading constantly and at all times can be dangerous for laity. The danger is that our lifestyle should correspond to our chosen reading. But if our books and our life differ, the soul bifurcates, suffering itself and inflicting suffering upon those around it.

So, not leaving the world in our body, we should be free from a worldly spirit to some degree. St. Symeon the New Theologian tells us that, “The world is neither silver nor gold, nor horses, nor mules, nor food, nor wine, nor bread. It is neither house, nor fields, nor vineyards, nor country homes. What is it? Sin, addiction to things, and passions.” If it is “the world which lies in evil,” then you can run, but you won’t get anywhere.

And the words of the wise better expose the sin living in man than those of others. The words of the wise put everything in its proper place, and give an exact value to those radiant forgeries that we ourselves are inclined to call virtues.

Climacus, for example, writes that zealous devotion in the world most often feeds upon vanity, as if upon some dirty and hidden runoff. It’s impossible to know anything about the spirit of a man, so long as he lives among people. A worldly analogy for such words can be the song advising, “Take some friends to the mountains.”² Any situation, carrying a risk or unusual heaviness, that demands a sacrifice and brotherly cohesion and does not promise a reward of flowers and medals, shows who is who. “There you will understand, who is who,” the song says. And the words of the saint: “I have seen how in the world they planted many different plants of the virtues, which were watered by vainglory as by an underground sewage pipe, and were hoed by ostentation, and for manure were heaped with praise. But when transplanted to a desert soil, inaccessible to people of the world and so not manured with the foul-smelling water of vanity, they withered at once.”³

These are barbed words, such as is becoming of words of genuine wisdom. The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd (Ecc. 12:1). The horror of the final and righteous Judgment may be not so much in that we sinned, and sinned a lot, but in that even our best impulses and efforts were deeply poisoned by sin and are unworthy of blessed eternity. That’s where the real trouble is, and I don’t know where healing might come from, if not from those salted with the wisdom of words of spiritual experience. One of those having love in themselves said that the books of the saints are worthy of the same honor as the relics of the saints, and maybe even more.

Or another example:

It’s hard to find a man who does not suffer, at least sometimes, from wanton lust. The corruption of lust rules in the world says the apostle Peter, and we do not have to read a lot to confirm the validity of these words. But how to fight it? There is fasting and prayer, but either we don’t know their strength, or our sin is so strong that we do not feel free. You can run from the world, plugging your ears and closing your eyes. But temptation will follow you everywhere, because it has made its way into your memory and its poisonous sweetness has settled in your heart. Here Climacus gives us unexpected advice: “Eagerly drink scorn and insult as the water of life from everyone who wants to give you the drink that cleanses from lust. Then a deep purity will dawn in your soul and the divine light will not grow dim in your heart.”⁴

That’s how it is. You suffer in secret in your heart from the adulterous thorns for a day, two, and more. Then your boss suddenly summons you, and sullies your good name, blaming you for all real and imaginary shortcomings. Then the fornication will permanently depart from your soul, giving place to bitter resentment, and God thereby delivers you from the chasm at the edge where you were standing. The resentment will pass; resentment is not so dangerous.

***

The so-called “mind of salvation” is necessary for salvation, without which all our work risks turning out to have been a sowing on asphalt and plowing in the swamp. The praying fool from the proverb really does break his forehead doing prostrations, and besides this unnecessary trauma he obtains no other fruit. Therefore, the crystallized experience of the Church should be in demand by us, and we must find time to become attentively familiar with it, with persistence, so we don’t run in the wrong direction and don’t beat the air (cf. 1 Cor. 9:26).

The Ladder is not the Typikon; it has a different value. There are no prayer rules written there, no defined number of prostrations or amount of food to partake of. More important things are disclosed there, the effect of which is not revealed to the superficial gaze. In fact, the reading of such books is healing from blindness. And we ourselves, no matter how many years the Lord metes out to us, will never understand our inner life with such depth and clarity as did Abbot John of Mt. Sinai.

Books such as The Ladder can be read for an entire life and digested slowly, according to the measure of our practical effort. In them breathes that wisdom which is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy (Jas. 3:17). nion with God, a livetc. , so when said about oursleves feel free.the be even more. . ideist, and hte rnce in the owrld..

Archpriest Andrei Tkachev

Translated by Jesse Dominick

Source: Pravoslavie.ru

27 / 03 / 2017

1 In everything I want to reach... (Во всем мне хочется дойти...)

2 “A Song About a Friend,” by Vladimir Visotsky

3 Ladder 2.6

4 Ladder 8.45

The oil that burns in our oil-lamps, "“τον του Θεού υπεµφαίνει έλαιον”" writes St. Symeon of Thessaloniki, the mercy of God that was revealed when the dove returned to Noah's Ark to signify the cessation of the flood, having in the beak an olive branch, or when Jesus, prayed at length, He watered with the sweat of His clots the olive tree, under the branches of which He knelt on the dreadful night on the Mount of Olives. Of course, we all know how infinitely superior of the material light is the internal light, a light lit by the Holy Spirit. So wrote the God-bearer Father Gregory Nazianzus: “Φωτίσωµεν… γλώσσαν” “Let us lit…the tongue” and the commentator adds: was this achieved? The oil symbolizes the infinite mercy of God, but the oil-lamps also, symbolize the Church that is imparting of the Divine Mercy and lighting. They also symbolize the saints themselves that their light shone according to the word of the Lord, "let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven." (Mt. 5:16)

There are many reasons for which the Orthodox we should lit the oil-lamp, for example:

1.In order to remind us of the need for prayer.

2. To illuminate the space and to drive-away the darkness where the evil forces are dominant.

3. To remind us that Christ is the only true light and the faith in Him is light,

4. To remind us that our lives should be bright.

5. In order to remind us that as the candle requires our own hand to light thus the soul requires the hand of God, that is His Grace.

6. To remind us that our will must be burnt and be sacrificed.

7. For the love of God, and many more...

Needless to say, that the vigil-oil should be an olive oil and the best possible quality. Besides, the Lord prayed in the garden of Olives and the temple with the oil-lamps is converted to a new garden and mercy (oil) and Divine Mercy, their oil reminds us of the compassion of God and their light in our lives, that should be bright and holy. The shedding of light in the temple symbolizes the divine light of God's presence that illuminates the hearts not only of neophytes but all Christians as well. The Lord revealed this great truth about Himself in the following words: "I am the light of world"(John 8:12). He is light not only because of His luminous teachings, but mainly due to His luminous presence. This is confirmed by the particular miraculous Transfiguration, where "His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light."(Matth.17:2).

In the Symbol of Faith (The Creed), the Son of God is presented as "light from light." In the service of Vespers the hymnographer also presents the Lord as "Joyful Light." And the Christians with the mysteries of the Church and their spiritual struggle can receive the light of the grace of the Holy Spirit and to radiate it with their lives. In "the sermon of the mount" the Lord advising His disciples told them: "Ye are the light of the world .... Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. "(Matthew 5:14-16). Here it is clear that the light of Christ’s disciples is the good works of their holy spiritual life. The saints, in the after-life will be like the Lord, they will become "gods by grace." The Lord expresses this clearly with His prophetic words: " Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. "(Matt. 13:43).

Source: http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/The-Meaning-and-Use-of-Candles-Incense-and-Vigil-Lamps.pdf

Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Search This Blog

featured Slider

The Scroll of Life. A Word on Thursday of the Fifth Week of the Great Lent

Video Monologue: The Nature of Depression

The Iconography of St.Mary of Egypt: Portraying a saint who wore no clothing

Achieving Artistic Equality for the Children with Special Needs

The Path to Orthodoxy: From Atheism to Priesthood

Why does the Orthodox church allow divorce and more than one marriage?

Climacus

7 reasons for which the Orthodox should light the oil-lamp

Partners

Search This Blog

featured Slider

About Our Blog

Most Popular Posts

Partners