Today is the fifth and final Sunday of Great Lent: though our fasting continues, the Forty Days end this coming Friday, to be followed by the brief but liturgically distinct two-day Feast of Palms, which…
Just a few days ago, we celebrated the Annunciation to the most holy Theotokos; now, we dedicate a whole liturgical day to her akathist hymn. This akathist is truly one of the great treasures…
The creation of the world began with God’s fiat, his “let there be” (Gen. 1:3). Today, the recreation of the world begins with the fiat of the most holy Theotokos, her “let it be” (Lk. 1:38). St. Gregory…
Our venerable father John, whose memory we keep this day, instructs us thus: “Blessed dispassion lifts the mind that is poor from earth to heaven, and raises the beggar from the dunghill of the…”
His Holiness Patriarch Ilia once explained how one of his hymns came to be written. He said: “There were days, months and years when the church was in a very difficult situation. I could not find the way anymore…
The Cross and Passion await at the end of Lent, but they also stand at the center of these Holy Forty Days. The Lenten season is an invitation to pick up our own cross and follow Christ…
Though St. Gregory is best known as a teacher and practitioner of hesychasm, the cultivation of holy silence, his life was in fact colorful and tumultuous: he was driven from his monastic…
During the sacred season of Great Lent, the Church calls us to sobriety and renewed stewardship. Through fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, we learn again that every aspect of our life—spiritual and material alike—is entrusted to us by God…
One of the unique liturgical features of this first Sunday of Lent, the celebration of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, is the proclamation of the anathemas. This rite is generally…
Today we commemorate the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. On the one hand, this is a sorrowful occasion; it is not without reason that we recall Adam’s lament before…