The Catalog of Good Deeds

The Theotokos is considered by Orthodox Christians to be the Abbess of all the monasteries on Mount Athos. She oversees the welfare of the monasteries as well as the monks who have dedicated their lives to imitating her through humility, obedience and purity. One way she has manifested her divine protection throughout the Holy Mountain is through her many wonderworking icons in the various monasteries and churches. The most famous and celebrated icon of the Theotokos on the Holy Mountain is without a doubt the icon known as "Axion Estin".

The church that houses the icon of Axion Estin is in Karyes, the capital of Mount Athos, in a church called Protaton. It is called Protaton because it was the first church built on the Holy Mountain in 843 AD by Saint Athanasios the Athonite ["Protaton" means "the first"]. The iconography of the church seen today was done in the 13th century by the renowned iconographer Emmanuel Panselinos.

To show that the Theotokos is the head of the monasteries of Athos, the icon of Axion Estin is seated on a throne of the church. It is named after the hymn we chant following the communing of the faithful of the Holy Gifts in the Divine Liturgy, but the initial lines of the hymn itself has an angelic origin that was revealed to a monk in the tenth century by the Archangel Gabriel himself. The miracle took place near the Skete of Protaton, in the vicinity of the Sacred Monastery of Pantokrator in the cell of a monk and his novice. (The rest of this wondrous tale can be read here.)

It was after this miraculous occurrence that the icon of the Theotokos was transferred to the church in Protaton. The cell where the miracle happened is known today by the name "Axion Estin" as well. The miracle took place on June 11, 982 on a Sunday. The miraculous brick on which was transcribed the hymn of Axion Esti was transferred to the Patriarchate of Constantinople and displayed for veneration by the faithful in the imperial palace Church of Saint Stephen. From then on the hymn Axion Estin became a staple within the Divine Liturgy and other services of the Church. The icon is especially celebrated with festivities and a procession on Bright Monday after Pascha and many miracles take place on this day.

The icon itself is a bit faded, but covered in a silver sheath to protect it. It has been recently restored and is now in good condition. It bears the inscription "Μήτηρ Θεού Καρυώτισσα" or "Mother of God Kariotissa". Its origins are probably from Constantinople and is of the Panagia Eleousa type first painted by the Apostle Luke.

On October 3, 1913 after an all-night vigil in the Protaton church, the self-governed region of the Holy Mountain became part of the Greek state after a decree was signed by the Abbots of the monasteries in the presence of and after doing a prostration before the miraculous icon of Axion Estin. This was done according to the international treaties of London (1913), Bucharest (1913), Neuilly (1919), Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923). The Decree, "made in the presence of the Holy Icon of Axion Estin", stated that the Holy Mountain recognised the Kings of Greece as the lawful sovereigns and "successors on the Mountain" of the Roman "Emperors who built" the monasteries and declared its territory as belonging to the then Kingdom of Greece.

On the one thousand year anniversary of Mount Athos in 1963, the icon of Axion Estin left the Holy Mountain for the first time to be venerated in Athens by thousands of faithful. In 1985 it was brought to Thessaloniki aboard a military ship and received there with the same honors as a Head of State.

During the Greek Revolution of 1821, before the great catastrophe that took place on the island of Chios, the Turks pillaged the monasteries of the island of their wealth. One day a Turk happened upon two Greeks who were trying to save the treasures as he was holding an icon of the Theotokos. He told the Greeks: "Take this Mariam" (the Turks call the Virgin "Mariam"). The Greeks didn't understand why the Turk was giving them the icon. He went on to say: "I tried with my sword to cut this icon in pieces so as to throw it in the fire, but every time I went to chop it nothing would happen to the icon. I looked carefully at the icon and I noticed it smiled at me. I understood your faith is great and this icon should not be destroyed. Take the icon and put it in your church."

In tears the two Greeks signed themselves with the sign of the Cross and they took the icon and hid it in a bag taking it to their homeland in Reizdere, Asia Minor. They placed the icon in the Monastery of Saint Nicholas and it soon became known for its miraculous properties.

Of its many miracles, the following is told:

There was a sick woman who sought healing from the Holy Virgin and vowed an offering of her bracelets in return. She was healed. But she lived a distance from Reizdere and it made it difficult to go and make her promised offering. This thought occupied her conscience after the miracle.

One day the healed woman noticed her bracelets were missing. She thought someone stole them. At that time she left for the monastery and meant to give an offering of money for the worth of the bracelets. She told the abbess of all that happened and she lead the woman to the icon of the Holy Virgin. With amazement and tears she looked up at the icon and saw her two bracelets which were found in front of the icon a few days before. The Holy Virgin helped fulfill the vow on behalf of the woman.

The faithful Greeks did not abandon this icon neither during the exile of 1914 when they brought the icon with them to Chios, or even during the genocide of the Greeks in 1922 when they were permanently exiled to Greece.

During the Genocide of 1922 a man by the name of Barouma hid the icon in his furnace after he risked his life trying to save it. This Barouma became a monk on Mount Athos where he lived the rest of his life with the icon. Eventually the icon was brought to Chios and then Lemnos. Eventually the Greeks who had come from Reizdere wanted to bring it with them to Crete so they boarded the boat with their beloved icon. As they passed the Holy Mountain the monks requested that the icon stay with them, but the citizens of Reizdere could not part with their icon. It was brought with them to Ierapetra, Crete.

In Ierapetra the icon continued to work miracles for the inhabitants. Eventually a church was built in its honor named Panagia Eleousa. The story of this icon demonstrates the great faith of the Greeks of Asia Minor, the grace of holy icons, and the care the Theotokos shows to the needs of her beloved faithful.

Axion Estin (Greek)

Άξιον εστίν ως αληθώς μακαρίζειν σε την Θεοτόκον, την αειμακάριστον και παναμώμητον και μητέρα του Θεού ημών. Την τιμιωτέραν των Χερουβείμ και ενδοξοτέραν ασυγκρίτως των Σεραφείμ την αδιαφθόρως Θεόν Λόγον τεκούσαν, την όντως Θεοτόκον, Σε μεγαλύνομεν.

Axion Estin (English)

It is truly meet to bless thee, O Theotokos, ever blessed, and most pure, and the Mother of our God. More honorable than the cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim. Without corruption thou gavest birth to God the Word. the true Theotokos, we magnify thee.

Apolytikion in the Fourth Tone

Ye hosts of the Fathers of Mount Athos, gather today, and shout with a voice of jubilation, leaping for joy, and faithfully keeping feast: For, behold, the praise of the most pure Theotokos wondrously and awesomely is sung by the Angel; and therefore, as the Mother of God, we glorify her name.

Kontakion in the Fourth Tone

All of Athos keepeth feast this day in gladness; for it wondrously received from an Archangel's holy hand the hymn whereby thou hast ever been praised as the Mother of God, as is truly meet.

Source: johnsanidopoulos.com/2009/06/miracles-of-icon-of-axion-estin.html

The priest can serve Matins and Vespers without readers and singers, but only when the priest of the house or church is found alone, without anyone else coming and wishing to participate in prayer. They inform them about the lives of many saints pleasing to God that being in the desert or a recluse, they sang Vespers, Compline, Matins, the Hours and so forth by themselves, and even this was delivered to them as a special merit before God. Also in the moral sense it is possible to tell about reading the named services by priests without churchmen. For thus the priest himself personally should find everything, prescribed by the Ustav [Typikon], - both the Kathisma and the stichera, the canons and so forth, - not how it happens, when the priest serves with churchmen who reads the one, and the priest the other.

One priest alone cannot and should not do thus, - to say the Litanies; for in them it directly says: "Let us pray to the Lord", or: "Again let us pray", i.e. the priest or a deacon invites the forthcoming to take part in the general prayer, for what they, i.e. those who come, or instead of their choir, should also respond: "Lord, have mercy". When the priest reads this or that service alone, at home, even if it was in church he has nobody to invite to participate in the prayer with himself, there is nobody to respond to his invitation, but that is why even the litany is composed as an essential common part of the Divine service, it should be dropped in that case. If there are people together in church with the priest, wishing to listen to this or that service as the common Divine service, then, it should be understood by this, that he should serve together with the psalm reader, properly, according to the church Ustav [Typikon].

For without this very service this will have character of private instead of public prayer, and consequently cannot have that meaning it should have for those present, by the established order and custom of the church. Especially, of course, not otherwise, as soon as there is a psalm reader, the priest can and should serve a divine liturgy because 1) in itself it is one of the greatest public Divine services of our Church as its name is "public business" also shows by its name, "public service", and 2) in the Liturgy it is impossible to pass any word, and there, as it is known, it relies not only on Litanies, but on many other exclamations, to which it cannot be differently said, by the response of the singer, in the kind, e.g., of an exclamation: "Let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess"; - the answer: "Father, Son and Holy Spirit...", or: "Let us stand aright, Let us stand with fear", - the answer: "A mercy of peace! A sacrifice of praise!" and so forth. We already do not say that since ancient times the established order of our Orthodox Church the liturgy should always be accompanied by singing... Who begins to sing without the singer? (Rukovodstvo dlia Selskikh Pastyrei [Manual for Village Pastors] 1885, 35; Voronezhskiia Eparkh. ved. [Voronezh Diocesan News] 1887, 20). In the Polotsk diocese it has been made an indispensable duty of the church clergy to attend to the training of pupils in the local schools of boys to read and sing in the kliros so that the latter, in case of illness or absence of the psalm reader, could fulfill for them their obligation of completing the Divine services (Polotskiia Eparkh. ved. [Polotsk Diocesan News] 1879, 11).

S. V. Bulgakov, Handbook for Church Servers

Translated by Archpriest Eugene D. Tarris

Seek and you shall find... A couple's journey to Orthodoxy

My wife, Styliana, grew up in a family of non-denominational Protestant missionaries. When she was five, she and her family moved to Colombia, where they began working as missionaries among the Kogi Indians. Her childhood years were spent divided between living in a mud and thatch hut, washing clothes in a river and cooking over a fire, and living with other missionary families at the mission station, complete with a school, a store and a clinic.

As the years went by, her father began questioning Evangelical Protestant theology. He realized that salvation meant growing in holiness and not just a one-time emotional experience. But while he was able to diagnose the problems of Protestantism, he was not able to adequately formulate a solution. He still maintained the Protestant view of an "in-visible Church," composed of individual believers struggling on their own, equipped only with a Bible. Left to her own, without any church and without any practical way to pursue holiness, Styliana found herself falling into sin and becoming angry at God. The holiness required by God was simply impossible to attain.

Once, on a visit to the U.S., she spied a beautiful church from the window of her grandmother's car and commented on it. "But that's a Greek Orthodox church," her grandmother responded. "What's that?" "Ah, they're worse than the Catholics." Still later, as a teenager, she read The Brothers Karamazov and was struck by the glimpse it gave of Holy Russia. "What a wonderful kind of Christianity they had," she thought. "Too bad I didn't live in 19th-century Russia." As a young woman, working as a nurse in Dallas, she began to visit every church she could find, hoping to find one that could help her. Where was true sanctity to be found, and where were God's people? As she searched for a church that could help her, she felt God reassure her that He still had his "7000 who had not bowed their knee to Baal." But where were they?

I was brought up Baptist and, later, Presby-terian, though my father insisted that denominations did not matter, as long as a church "preached from the Bible." Even as a child I wondered then, why it was that there were so many different churches, if everyone was claiming to be Christian. When I was eight or so, I was urged to "accept Jesus" at a Bible camp, and I began reading the Bible on my own. In junior high I attended the church youth group on Wednesday evenings. The part I enjoyed most were the question-and-answer sessions, although sometimes the pastor's answers seemed too pat and unconvincing. At one session someone asked why we didn't include the Apocrypha in our Bibles. To convince us that these books are just "fairy tales," the pastor cited the passage from Tobit where Raphael advises Tobias to burn the innards of a fish in order to get rid of a demon. This kind of argument did not convince me. There are other parts of Scripture far stranger than this that Protestants have no difficulty accepting.

One Wednesday the pastor told us that we were not too young to ask God to show us what He wanted us to do with our lives. I sincerely wanted to serve the Lord, and I began praying in earnest that if He had a plan for me He would make it known. That very Sunday a family of missionaries visited our church. They shared about their work of translating the Scriptures for an Indian tribe in Colombia. They spoke of the thousands of people who do not have a Bible in their own language, whose language does not even have a written form. It struck me how much I took the Bible for granted. What if no one had ever translated it into English? I had always been fascinated with languages, and felt strongly that here was a speedy answer to my prayer: God was calling me to be a Bible translator.

In my high school years I did whatever I could to serve the Lord and prepare myself for mission work. Besides singing in the choir and helping in the church library, during vacations I helped with children's Bible classes in the inner city and with Hispanic communities in the countryside. One summer I went to Mississippi to help restore houses for a local Christian ministry. As my world grew larger and I met different kinds of Christians, my questions persisted. Why were there so many forms of Christianity? What was a Presbyterian, anyway? I searched the library for answers, but to my surprise there was very little information on church history, and no one around appeared to know much about it either.

My questions seemed only to multiply. Another memory I have of this time is of sitting in church and looking at the bulletin that read "Worship Service" at the top. I asked myself, "Why do they call this worship? We're singing about God. The preacher is talking to us about God. I hear plenty of jokes and announcements. The choir is entertaining us. But where is the worship?" Once I could drive, I visited different churches with friends from school, but none of them had the answers I was seeking, nor did they worship. Some, like the Charismatics, made a show of worshiping, but it never struck me as true worship. I never visited an Orthodox church simply because I didn't know anyone who was Orthodox. And I assumed that Orthodoxy was basically an exotic form of Roman Catholicism.

After college I moved to Dallas to begin my training with Wycliffe Bible Translators. Their philosophy was that since the Bible was all that one needed, the best method of evangelism was simply to give people that Bible in their own language. Whether the people then wanted to join a church, or form their own, was up to them. I was also taught the principles of "dynamic equivalence" translation. In this view, the language of the Bible needed to be "clarified," since the meaning was often "obscured" by poetry, metaphor and symbolism. Since "Son of man" was too exotic a turn of phrase to be readily understood, it was better to translate it as "Jesus." Since the blood of Christ was a metonym for His death (just as one can say "head" and mean "cattle"), it was better to say "death of Christ" rather than mention His blood. And if a culture knew nothing of sheep, but sacrificed pigs, then it was legitimate to change "Lamb of God" to... well, you can guess.

While in Dallas I met Styliana, who was there working as a nurse. Her parents were shaken by the recent kidnapping of her brother - held by Marxist terrorists for four and a half months - and had sent her to live in the U.S. for a while. After we were married, we moved to Colombia to resume the Bible translation work that her parents had set aside ten years before. Her family had raised a Kogi youth named Alfonso, and had him help them translate some New Testament portions into Kogi (the Kogi do not speak Spanish), although he complained that he was too young for such a responsibility. When he was grown, he returned to the Kogi area, and Styliana's family lost contact with him.

When we arrived in Colombia, I was not sure what work I was going to do. I had no way to learn the Kogi language - I didn't even know any Spanish yet - and there was no one to assist me in the task of translating the Scriptures into Kogi. God's Providence soon rescued me from this quandary. Shortly after we arrived in Colombia, a Kogi came down from the mountains bearing a letter from Alfonso-the first anyone had heard from him in ten years-announcing that he was now ready to resume work on the Bible translation. He had no idea that I had just arrived in Colombia with that very intention.

After a few years I knew Kogi well enough to begin the task of translating the Scriptures with Alfonso. This work was challenging not just because of the complexity of the language, but also because it made me realize how superficial my understanding of Scripture was. When you are forced to render something into another language, you have to have a good understanding of just what that something means. I suddenly found that I wasn't sure what many key terms really meant: justification, grace, blessing, holiness, even salvation. How could these be expressed in Kogi? How could I get Alfonso to understand them if I didn't understand them myself? It took eight years to translate the entire New Testament and the book of Genesis. Those eight years were also a time of intense study in the Greek and Hebrew texts. In the process I discovered that the Christianity that I was raised on bore little resemblance to what I was finding for myself in the original Scriptures.

I began to study church history, which I had never been encouraged to read before. I had been raised to understand that between the Apostles and Martin Luther, nothing important happened. It was understood that the Church had "apostatized" at an early date and that no one really understood what Christianity was about until the Reformation. Now I was seeing that I had been deprived. I also realized that the West, both Roman and Protestant, had been unduly influenced by Augustine without being balanced by the more ancient, Eastern Fathers, who, unlike Augustine, read the Scriptures in Greek. I shared all of this with Styliana. Her response was, "Well, if the Greek Fathers had everything right, then maybe we should check out the Greek Church." "You mean, like Greek Orthodox?" I asked. That seemed out of the question. I figured that since they looked so Roman Catholic, whatever truth they once might have had was now lost.

Our convictions, however, were becoming more and more Orthodox, which puzzled our friends. The church we attended put me in charge of the adult Sunday school class. I began it with the idea of just holding a round-table discussion on Gospel passages, where the Holy Spirit would lead us to the Truth. But soon I found that each of us had our own slant on the Truth; in a group of ten there could be eleven opinions. Each class ended with us more divided and more convinced of our own views. There was no final court of appeals, so where was the Truth? When I was invited to preach, my sermons tended to be on topics such as fasting, the struggle for holiness and the danger of apostasizing. Such non-Evangelical ideas were coldly received.

When Styliana was asked to head the Sunday school department, she decided to replace the materials which typically spoke of Jesus as our "buddy" and contained a page where the child could sign his name on a dotted line to "receive salvation." She ordered materials from every Protestant Sunday school publisher she could find. To her dismay, they were all the same. "If this is Protestantism," we decided, "then we're not Protestants." But we knew we were not Roman Catholics, either. So what were we? Finally we had to pull our sons out of the Bible club at the Baptist church. They would get points for memorizing Bible verses, which were invariably taken out of context and twisted. At one point they were to learn: In the beginning was the Word... All things were made through Him... The passage itself was intact, but the accompanying drawing depicted a giant, glowing Bible moving over the primordial waters. The message was clear: the Bible is the Word, therefore the Bible created the universe. That was the last straw. We withdrew our boys from the club, which scandalized the missionary community.

Soon thereafter, we went to spend some time in the U.S. We were staying in Minneapolis, when one day Styliana came home from a garage sale with a book that she thought might interest me. It was The Orthodox Church by Bishop Kallistos (Ware). It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I found that the Church of the Greek Fathers still existed after all. Why had I never looked in this direction before? On the very first page he quoted Khomiakov as saying that all the West knows is a single datum a. "Whether it is +a in the case of the Roman Catholics, or -a in the case of the Protestants, it is still the same a." It blew my mind to see that there was a Christian tradition that saw Catholics and Protestants as merely two sides of the same coin! Here was a whole terra incognita, so new and yet so old. Here were theosis and synergy, the Seven Ecumenical Councils, hesychasm, Mt Athos, and two thousand years of saints I had never heard of. All week Styliana heard me "oohing" and "aahing" over the book and saying, "This could be it!" "It?" she asked. "What it?" "The Church," I said. "But you don't believe there is a Church," she reminded me. "Well, maybe there is after all."

The next Sunday, Styliana asked where we were going to church. "Oh, the same church we've been attending, I guess." "But why? All week you've been saying, 'The Orthodox Church, this'; 'The Orthodox Church, that'; and now you want to go back to the same old church?" "But you don't understand," I tried to explain. "You can't just show up. They might not let us in. Besides, they might not even speak English." "Well, call one and ask," she suggested. At random I chose the OCA cathedral (it turned out to be the one where Fr. Alexis Toth had served). The deacon reassured me that we were certainly welcome, and when he met us at the door, he said, "You've come on a special day. It's Pentecost."

The moment we walked in we felt God's presence in a way we never had before. What was different? We couldn't put our finger on it. When Styliana saw the icons her first reaction was, "This is Roman Catholic." But then she thought, "No, this is different." Having grown up in Latin America, where the Roman Church is especially corrupt and paganized, she had been around many Catholic churches and always felt an aversion and a spiritual oppression around their images. I had had the same experience in the Philippines. Yet these icons, far from repulsing us, attracted us. Rather than a heaviness, there was a particular lightness to the atmosphere. It was a hot day, our sons were restless, the service was mostly in Slavonic, yet it was wonderful. Styliana said afterwards, "I don't know what that was, but I know I will never be the same for having been there." With only a few weeks left before returning to Colombia, we visited different parishes to learn as much as we could. The next Sunday we went to an English-speaking parish. As Styliana read the words, she cried and cried. They were saying everything that should be said: "Lord have mercy... That the whole day may be perfect, holy, peaceful, and sinless... a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ... grant this, O Lord." One priest was especially kind, giving us a whole Orthodox library and offering to visit us in Colombia. At his parish, Styliana had an experience that made her take a big step forward. At Vespers, she felt frustrated at all the bowing and formality, so unfamiliar to her experience. At the end of the service I asked if she wanted to venerate the cross. "Ah, they just do the hokey-pokey and turn themselves around," she muttered. "I'm not kissing anything." The next morning at Matins she walked in and saw Christ in the apse frowning at her. She felt convicted and vowed to venerate whatever they offered. At the veneration of the Gospel, she kissed the icon of the Crucifixion in the center, and as she did so she had a vision that to this day she cannot put into words.

On our return to Bogota, we began reading through all the books we had acquired, and many of our questions and doubts were finally resolved. One issue in particular that had been difficult for us as Protestants had been the role of the Theotokos. We had seen so much error in the Roman Church. Howdid the Orthodox understanding differ? The book that set this matter straight for us was The Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God, by Saint John of San Francisco. We finally reached the point where we knew we had to become Orthodox. It was everything we had been seeking all our lives. We searched for an Orthodox church in Bogota and eventually learned that there was only a small, non-functioning Greek parish under Constantinople. It would be a full year before we met any clergy serving this parish. During this time we shared about our new-found Faith with everyone we knew and were pleased to find that there was a good deal of interest. But since there was no functioning church, all we could do was have informal reader services in our home. I was ambivalent about this since I knew that what we were doing bore no resemblance to an Orthodox service. We had no icons, we didn't know how to chant, and I was afraid that we were giving people the idea that Orthodoxy was just some form of Protestantism. We gradually made contact with some of the Greek community, but they were not interested in lay services. "Just wait for the priest," was their advice.

We wanted not only to become Orthodox ourselves, but we felt a need to start up an Orthodox mission. We began looking for whatever Orthodox materials we could find in Spanish, but there was (and still is) little available. I had to translate materials myself to share with Colombian friends. The most help we received was from Christ of the Hills Monastery in Texas. They sent us Spanish materials that we found had originally been published by the Russian Church Abroad in Chile. We were pleased to find that there was already an Orthodox presence in South America, and that an attempt was being made to reach out to Spanish-speaking non-Orthodox. We also gradually realized that of the Orthodox materials that we owned, the ones that were most instructive, most serious, and most in line with what we understood Orthodoxy to be were those that were published by Old Calendarists. Eventually I wrote to Holy Trinity Monastery for direction, and we received letters from Fr. Luke of Jordanville and from Bishop (now Archbishop) Hilarion. They also sent materials explaining more about ecumenism and modernism, issues that had disturbed us, as had the involvement of so many Orthodox jurisdictions in the WCC. After a period of trying to be Orthodox "by correspondence," we came to the understanding that we had to live in an Orthodox community. We sold our car and furniture, handed over our house, and, with Vladika Hilarion's blessing, we moved to Jordanville, where I am now attending Holy Trinity Seminary.

We feel strongly that we must return to Colombia and establish a mission there. It is the only South American country without a single functioning parish. There are a number of Orthodox living there with no opportunity to worship. In the last two years we spent there, we told many people about Orthodoxy, and a surprising number showed interest. When they would ask to visit our parish, it broke our hearts to tell them there was none. We even met a young man, Javier, who had dropped out of Roman Catholic seminary. From his study of church history he realized that Rome had apostatized, and so he began seeking the Orthodox Church. He finally tracked us down just before we left the country. For his sake alone, Orthodoxy must be planted there, but we know there are many more like Javier, disillusioned with Rome. Please join with us in praying to all the saints of America to intercede not only for North America, but for the other America as well.

Source: http://www.roca.org/OA/149/149i.htm