Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end. -John 13.1 We have come to the Holy Week of our Lord’s Passion and Resurrection, the Pascha/Passover of the Lord. This week, sometimes called Great Week, is the holiest week in the Church Year precisely because it takes us into the heart of the One Mystery of Christ which is the

This Sunday, the fifth Sunday of the Great Fast, is the Sunday of St Mary of Egypt. During the service of the Great Canon in the fifth week her Life is read in its entirety. A person could delve into the Life of St Mary of Egypt time and time again and come out with clear and clean, pristine new treasures. It is that way with the saints because it is that way with God who, in St Augustine’s famous phrase, is “ever ancient, ever new.” Or, as St Nicholai of Zica puts it, “Thou

The great English poet John Donne lived at the beginning of the modern era, at the turning from the medieval to our modern scientific and technological world. Foreseeing already in the 17th century the changes that would come upon modern people from this empirical and scientific turn, he wrote: For of meridians and parallels Man hath weaved out a net, and this net thrown Upon the Heavens, and now they are his own. Loth to go up the hill, or labour thus To go to heaven, we mak