Christ is Risen! Indeed He is Risen! Χριστός ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη! Христóсъ воскрéсе! Воистину воскресе! The Paschal Stikhera v: Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered; let those who hate Him flee from before His face! Today, a sacred Pascha is revealed to us: a new and holy Pascha, a mystical Pascha, a Pascha worthy of veneration, a Pascha which is Christ the Redeemer, a blameless Pascha, a great Pascha, a Pascha of the faithful, a Pascha which has opened to

And so, brothers and sisters, we come to Holy Week. Having passed through the forty days of the Great Fast for better or worse, we arrive in Jerusalem with the Lord and His motley band of followers who themselves did not know quite what they were doing or why they were there. The usual journey to Jerusalem for Passover was mixed with the Master’s cryptic talk of betrayal and suffering, a cross and resurrection, that left them wondering if they really understood anything about

This Sunday is the Lenten feast of Saint Mary of Egypt, while this past Wednesday we heard her life read in its entirety in conjunction with the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete. The life of St Mary illustrates well the saying of Fr Sophrony, one of the great holy elders of the modern world, "It is impossible to live as a Christian, you can only die as a Christian." We might say, in fact, that St Mary's life is divided into two parts corresponding to, first, her living and,

At the end of his long chapter on chastity (Step 15) in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, after spending pages discussing the never-ending struggle against sexual temptation, St John changes from his more usual didactic tone to one more pensive and reflective. In a series of questions he probes the mystery of the schism which sunders man from himself. Aye, there’s the rub. We are at war with ourselves! The soul is at war with the flesh while the flesh rages to satisfy its lusts. I

This Sunday, the third of Great Lent, is the Sunday of the Cross. On Saturday evening the Cross, decorated with flowers, is brought from the Holy Altar into the center of the church where it will be venerated by the faithful throughout the fourth week of the Fast. Hymns to the Cross are scattered throughout the various services of the Orthodox Church. There are hymns daily at the Ninth Hour (3PM) because at that hour our Lord through the Cross opened the way to Paradise. Ther