Sermons & Homilies
The Feast of Pentecost, also called “Trinity Sunday,” is a Feast which affirms the role of the Trinity in the creation of the material world and the role of the Trinity in the recreation of humanity who at one time only looked down towards the earth and towards earthly delights, but now is able to look up to the heavens and the delights that come from the heavenly world.
Continue reading
The life of an Orthodox Christian is not like the life of any other person. The life of an Orthodox Christian is lived within the cycle of the Divine Services of the Church which revolve around Pascha, the feast of feasts. The forty days which follow Pascha are termed the Paschal season. Traditionally, converts were received into the Church through Baptism on Pascha.
Continue reading
Perseverance is not just waiting. Waiting and thinking. Waiting anxiously. Waiting and despairing. It is not biding time until the problem (or worse, the person) goes away. Perseverance is a positive action. It is turning away from ourselves and our problems and our failures and looking toward Christ.
Continue reading
God is always providing a means to grant us humility. But humility cannot be acquired without humiliation. Humiliation comes about either through our interior passions and falls into sin, or from painful circumstances of body or soul, or from our brother, or by the feeling of God’s grace having withdrawn from our soul, or from all of these together, or a combination of some of them.
Continue reading
Our brother is our life. We’ve all heard this saying before. But have we really grasped it yet? Have we actually started to live it ourselves? Does it bear any relation to how we experience each day of our monastic life? Even in the monastery—or we might say, especially in the monastery—the force of this saying can be lost on us. Instead, we see our brethren as obstacles to be overcome, as burdens to be endured, as competitors to be defeated, or nuisances to be ignored.
Continue reading