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,

Our lenten readings in Genesis have brought us thus far from creation and the Paradise of God, where Adam and Eve dwell with God, through the exile from the garden due to sin, to Cain’s slaying of his brother, the flood, and now to Babel. These first eleven chapters of the Bible are not a disconnected set of stories, but rather a setting of the stage for what will follow in the Pentateuch and, in fact, the Scriptures as a whole. It is a picture of exile and of the continuing

If you want to reign with Christ then overcome passions. There is no other way. What is happening to you now is nothing other than temptation.... Life according to the commandments of Christ is truly Golgotha. He who has set out on this path must overcome all the ever-increasing difficulties through prayer, and if he gives up and turns back, there where he returns to, that is, the world (i.e. life in accordance with the passions) he will not find the joy felt by worldly peopl

The Bible opens with those well known words, “In the beginning God made....” Five more times in the first 25 verses it repeats “And God made....” until we get to verse 26 and we hear, “Let us make man.... And God made man....” Finally, all of this Divine making comes to a grand conclusion with the end of the sixth day and the Sabbath: “And God saw all the things that he had made, and see, they were exceedingly good.... And the heaven and the earth were finished, and all their