Friends, these words come from the book The Enlargement of the Heart by Fr Zacharias of St John the Baptist Monastery in Essex, England. I share them with you on the occasion of Zacchaeus Sunday. ~Fr John Remember when the Lord was going through Jericho to Jerusalem for His Holy Passion, a very noble and notable man of Jericho, Zacchaeus, desired to see the Lord, but was unable to do so, because he was “little of stature”, as the Gospel tells us (Luke 19:3). So he made him

Friends, I have been reading and learning about one of the great saints of 20th c. Georgia, St Gabriel the Fool for Christ, a monk who was arrested and tortured by the Soviets and who, upon his release, took up the cross of becoming a Fool for Christ. St Gabriel reposed in 1995 and is dearly loved in Georgia and, increasingly, throughout the world. Below are a few of his teachings as well as his Last Will and Testament. -With love in Christ, Fr John If you could see wha

Friends, I want to share with you some of my favorite “words” from St Nikolai Velmirovich, one of our great 20th c. saints, a Serbian bishop who was imprisoned by the Nazis during WWII and who later came to America. He reposed at St Tikhon’s in 1956. His book The Prologue is an excellent source for daily readings and the Lives of the Saints. ~Fr John Mercifulness opens the way to the heart of all creatures, and brings joy. Mercilessness brings fog to the fore, and create

[W]ith the Father’s words from above concerning Him who was baptized according to the flesh, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17), He made it plain that all those other things spoken earlier through the prophets, the giving of laws, the promises, the granting of sonship, were imperfect, and were neither pronounced nor accomplished in accordance with what God willed beforehand. Rather, they looked towards this present fulfillment, and through what h

2017 is here at last. In our increasingly media-drenched world, 2016 got a bad rap as the year that “killed” a number of celebrities including Prince, Carrie Fisher, and Leonard Cohen, to name but a few. And every death produced not only a spike in media sales, but an even greater rise in our collective nostalgia for the famous and the infamous. We are fascinated - I think it is fair to say, consumed - with celebrity. A recent study cited in The Guardian indicates that in the