Greek Orthodox Quotes

Creation is thus God's presence in creatures. The Greek Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard has written that "Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God's hidden Being." This means that we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that is inexpressibly intimate, for to every creature, the gift of life is a portion of the breath and spirit of God. (pg. 308, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)

Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it were created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came to being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old. These dates are incorrect. Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760BC. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508BC. These suggestions are also incorrect. Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004BC. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004BC, at exactly 9.00 a.m., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh. This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour. The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet.

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I’m helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences.

Sergeant Pietro Oliva was a good Catholic. He liked to go into a church and cross himself, genuflect to the alter, and then settle down to a little prayer and contemplation, savouring the coolness, the heavy odours, the darkness, and the sensation of being soaked in the atmosphere of centuries’ worth of devotion that hung in the tenebrous and golden air of churches.

Those were wonderful days, Doc’s childhood, full of strong men whose handshake was their bond and women who knew how to cook and raise children. Nice, clean families. This was before the “new people”—the Jews, the Negroes, the Greeks, the Mennonites, the Russian Orthodox—arrived.

Like most Istanbul Turks I had little interest in Byzantium as a child. I associated the word with spooky, bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priests, with the aqueducts that still ran through the city, with the Hagia Sophia and the red brick walls of old churches. To me, these were remnants of an age so distant there was little need to know about it. Even the Ottomans who conquered Byzantium seemed very far away.

The Greek Orthodox Church, which split from the Latin Church in the A.D. 1054 schism between Rome and Constantinople, “opted,” in Toynbee’s words, “for political submission to the [Muslim] Turk in preference to accepting the Western Christian Pope’s ecclesiastical supremacy.

The characteristics of this kind of reading are perhaps summed up in the word “orthodox,” which is almost always applicable. The word comes from two Greek roots, meaning “right opinion.” These are books for which there is one and only one right reading; any other reading or interpretation is fraught with peril, from the loss of an “A” to the damnation of one’s soul. This characteristic carries with it an obligation. The faithful reader of a canonical book is obliged to make sense out of it and to find it true in one or another sense of “true.” If he cannot do this by himself, he is obliged to go to someone who can. This may be a priest or a rabbi, or it may be his superior in the party hierarchy, or it may be his professor. In any case, he is obliged to accept the resolution of his problem that is offered him. He reads essentially without freedom; but in return for this he gains a kind of satisfaction that is possibly never obtained when reading other books.

Henry Corbin's [inner] teacher, his sheikh, was Suhrawardi: A Persian Sufi from the twelfth century who'd been put to death while still in his thirties for the things he said and did. Suhrawardi claimed he was simply continuing a spiritual lineage which he referred to as the Dawning [ishrāq]. But towards the end of what would be a short life he ran into trouble with orthodox Muslims because he insisted on tracing his lineage a long way back—far beyond even the prophet Muhammed—to the Greeks, and specifically Empedocles.

If you are forgetful of the Lord, you will not pray, and without prayer the soul will not dwell in the love of God, for the grace of the Holy Spirit comes through prayer.

During my first few years as a believer I not only couldn’t shut up about my faith, I was sometimes judgmental toward some of those who didn’t share it. But on the other side of that equation, I remember having powerful feelings of love and empathy toward total strangers, a sense of God’s love for them, and a desire to do anything I could to show them his love, to bless them, to help them. It was all somewhat overwhelming, but I’m happy to say that most of it was on the positive side of this equation. I was often hardest on those who were already in the Christian world but whom I felt were not as zealous as they could be in reaching those who didn’t know God. As is typical, I was hardest on my own—my family and my childhood church, the Greek Orthodox Church.

Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began.

a Greek monk and theologian (today revered as a saint by the Orthodox Church) who was imprisoned for a time by the Turks, remarked trenchantly about Muslims: “These infamous people, hated by God and infamous, boast of having got the better of the Romans [i.e., Byzantines] by their love of God…They live by the bow, the sword, and debauchery, finding pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage, spoil…and not only do they commit these crimes, but even—what an aberration—they believe that God approves of them.”18

Orthodox Greeks, after a few generations of Venetian Catholic rule, frequently welcomed the arrival of the Muslim Turks – who, if they had unappealing weaknesses for mass slaughter, arson and disembowelment, at least did not despise their subjects as bumpkin schismatics.

The Crusaders come to one immediate decision. They decide that the Orthodox Greek Christians, the Georgian Christians, the Armenian Christians and the Jacobite Christians no longer could hold services in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Only the Latin rite could be celebrated in Jerusalem.

*Vladimir had been interested in changing religions for some time. According to legend, he sent ambassadors to the major surrounding religions to help him decide. Islam was rejected for being without joy (especially in its rejection of alcohol and pork!), and Judaism was rejected since the Jews had lost their homeland and therefore seemed abandoned by God. Settling on Christianity, he sent his men to discover if the Latin or the Greek rite was better. It was hardly a fair fight. The ambassadors to the West found rather squat, dark churches, while their compatriots in Constantinople were treated to all the pageantry of a Divine Liturgy in the Hagia Sophia. “We no longer knew,” they breathlessly reported back to Vladimir, “whether we were in heaven or on earth.” The Russian prince was convinced. Within a year, he had been baptized, and Russia officially became Orthodox.

In ancient times, the temple of Delphi proclaimed „Know Thyself“ and the Greek philosophers made it their central theme, because in the knowing of one‘s true Self, we discover not a name or a lineage, but a whole new dimension of what it means to be human. In our very mortality is embedded something of the eternal. Encased within the bones and sinews that are destined to disintegrate is Spirit that comes from beyond and returns home when we are „born into Heaven“ as the Orthodox say, or when we cross that threshold. These ideas cannot be reduced to mere belief systems and dogmas. They have been vividly part of the human experience from the beginning. (p. 8-9)

Sometimes, late at night, the words are only whispers– Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God. The quiet is kindness and gratitude and calm–Have mercy on me, a sinner. And I fall asleep like that, the words of the Jesus Prayer melting from English to Greek– Kyrie Iesou Christe. Floating around me– Yie tou Theou. Swimming apart from me– Eleison me.

Once, when Geronda Joseph underwent a great temptation, he went into the desert to pray, and as he was crying out to God, he saw a vision of a large, beautiful bird singing. In a moment, he found himself in Paradise where there were many birds. The birds were angels, and among them was the large bird, singing and keeping the bass note. Imagine that! He saw it with his own eyes!

The Lord vouchsafed us to be in His likeness, but the Lord is so meek and lowly that wert thou to see Him, from much joy thou wouldst want to exclaim, "O Lord, I melt with Thy grace!" but at that moment thou art unable to utter a single word concerning God, for thy soul is transformed from the abundance of the Holy Spirit. Thus it was with St. Seraphim of Sarov - when he beheld the Lord, he was unable to speak.

The irrational bias of the myth of progress can be seen in the tendency to criticize orthodox church fathers for reading Greek metaphysics into the text, while overlooking Baruch Spinoza's rationalism and Bruno Bauer's Hegelianism on their own biblical interpretation. Is this because "Greek" metaphysics is bad, but "German" metaphysics is good? According to the history of hermeneutics as told from an Enlightenment perspective, if it were not for the pagan Enlightenment, Christians would still be reading Greek metaphysics into the Bible like Augustine and making it say whatever they pleased like Origen. Is it not rather bizarre that this narrative asks us to believe that it took the pagan Epicureanism of the Enlightenment to rescue us from the "subjectivism" of the Nicene fathers, medieval schoolmen, and Protestant Reformers?

In 1846 Easter fell on the same date in the Latin and Greek Orthodox calendars, so the holy shrines were much more crowded than usual, and the mood was very tense. The two religious communities had long been arguing about who should have first right to carry out their Good Friday rituals on the altar of Calvary inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the spot where the cross of Jesus was supposed to have been inserted in the rock. During recent years the rivalry between the Latins and the Greeks had reached such fever pitch that Mehmet Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, had been forced to position soldiers inside and outside the church to preserve order. But even this had not prevented fights from breaking out. On this Good Friday the Latin priests arrived with their white linen altar-cloth to find that the Greeks had got there first with their silk embroidered cloth. The Catholics demanded to see the Greeks’ firman, their decree from the Sultan in Constantinople, empowering them to place their silk cloth on the altar first. The Greeks demanded to see the Latins’ firman allowing them to remove it. A fight broke out between the priests, who were quickly joined by monks and pilgrims on either side. Soon the whole church was a battlefield. The rival groups of worshippers fought not only with their fists, but with crucifixes, candlesticks, chalices, lamps and incense-burners, and even bits of wood which they tore from the sacred shrines. The fighting continued with knives and pistols smuggled into the Holy Sepulchre by worshippers of either side. By the time the church was cleared by Mehmet Pasha’s guards, more than forty people lay dead on the floor.1

To begin with, he was struck by the idea that the comprehension of divine truths is not given to man as an individual but to the totality of men united by love--the church. He was particularly pleased by the thought that it was much easier to believe in an existing, living church embracing all the beliefs of men and having God as its head and, therefore, holy and infallible, and from it to accept belief in God, the creation, the fall and redemption, than to begin with some distant mysterious God, the creation, etc. But on reading afterward the history of the church by a Catholic writer and another by a Greek Orthodox writer and seeing that the two churches, both in their essence infallible, each repudiated the other, he became disappointed also in Khomyakov's doctrine of the church, and that edifice, too, crumbled into dust as the philosophers' edifices had done.

It has frequently been asserted that low Christologies are “Jewish” ones, while high Christologies have come into Christianity from the Greek thought world. Oddly enough, this position has been taken both by Jewish writers seeking to discredit Christianity as a kind of paganism and by orthodox Christian scholars wishing to distinguish the “new religion” from the old one as far and as quickly as possible. This doubly defensive approach can no longer be maintained.

In fact, the term Byzantine Empire was invented in 1557 by the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf, who as a Protestant would not have been sympathetic to Eastern (or Orthodox) Christians, to indicate that these culturally Greek people of the Eastern Roman Empire were not Romans, and somehow not even Greeks. His scholarly decision may also have been influenced by the fact that the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne and his successors had claimed the name Roman for itself.

To me, Chicago was the bar in the twelfth-floor lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, where I drank strawberry daiquiris—sophisticated!—with my visiting parents and with girls I was trying to impress. It was the elegant shops at the new, fancy Water Tower Place. My favorite Chicago spots were primarily restaurants. Dianna’s Opaa, in Greektown on South Halsted Street, with its lanky, serpent-like owner, Petros Kogiones, performing his host duties that were as important as the food—on the nights he wasn’t there, you felt cheated—sliding back his sheet of long black hair to greet his female customers with an overly familiar kiss and their dates with a disarming, arms-flung-wide cry of “cousin!” then conducting his odd 9 p.m. ceremonies, calling up all the engaged couples to be officially blessed by Famous Petros in the name of God, the Greek Orthodox Church, and Dianna’s Opaa! We’d all cheer and raise our juice glasses of Roditis high. Or

What had been a region of model farming became almost a desert, for more than half the population was exiled or sent to concentration camps. The young people left the villages, the boys to go to the factories if they could get jobs, or to become vagabonds if they couldn’t. *** An echo of the tragic fate of Russia’s German Protestant population reached the world when the Mennonites flocked to Moscow and sought permission to leave the country. Some of these Germans had tried to obey the government and had formed collective farms, only to have them liquidated as Kulak collectives. Being first-class farmers, they had committed the crime of making even a Kolkhoz productive and prosperous. Others had quite simply been expropriated from their individual holdings. All were in despair. Few were allowed to leave Russia. They were sent to Siberia to die, or herded into slave labor concentration camps. The crime of being good farmers was unforgivable, and they must suffer for this sin. *** Cheat or be cheated, bully or be bullied, was the law of life. Only the German minority with their strong religious and moral sense—the individual morality of the Protestant as opposed to the mass subservience demanded by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Soviet Government—retained their culture and even some courage under Stalin’s Terror.

Eric Metaxas emerged as a leading voice on Christian masculinity in the Obama era. Metaxas wasn’t new to the world of evangelical publishing, or to evangelical culture more generally. Raised in the Greek Orthodox Church, Metaxas got his start writing children’s books. In 1997 he began working as a writer and editor for Charles Colson’s BreakPoint radio show, and he then worked as a writer for VeggieTales, a children’s video series where anthropomorphic vegetables taught lessons in biblical values and Christian morality. (Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber became household names in 1990s evangelicalism.) Belying his VeggieTales pedigree, Metaxas brought a new sophistication to the literature on evangelical masculinity. As a witty, Yale-educated Manhattanite, Metaxas cut a different profile than many spokesmen of the Christian Right. If Metaxas’s writing wasn’t exactly highbrow, his was higher-brow than most books churned out by Christian presses. More suave in his presentation than the average evangelical firebrand, Metaxas was a rising star in the conservative Christian world of the 2000s. After Colson’s death in 2012 he took over BreakPoint, a program broadcast on 1400 outlets to an audience of eight million. That year he also gave the keynote address at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he relished the opportunity to scold President Obama to his face, castigating those who displayed “phony religiosity” by throwing Bible verses around and claiming to be Christian while denying the exclusivity of the faith and the humanity of the unborn. In 2015 he launched his own nationally syndicated daily radio program, The Eric Metaxas Show.

The Ottomans had taken much of the Christian Orthodox Balkans although they only ruled a small territory in Asia – and this shaped the nascent state. Recruiting his infantry from among these Christian Slavs, Murad annually bought or kidnapped a quota of Christian boys, aged eight to twelve, a practice known as the devshirme, to serve as courtiers and soldiers in his Jeni Ceri – new army – the Janissary corps; the cavalry was still drawn from Turkish levies under Anatolian beys. Those enslaved would number uncountable millions. His harem was simultaneously drawn from girls stolen from Slavic villages or Greek islands, often sold via Mongol khans and Italian slave traders. While Ottomans were Turks from Turkmenistan, Murad’s system meant that the Ottomans were often the sons of Slavic concubines, and viziers were often Slavs too.

Church Fathers on the End Times The Church Fathers taught pre-millennialism in the first three centuries. Here are the pre-millennial teachings from the Fathers in their order:   1.        The Roman Empire would split in two. (This took place in AD 395.) 2.        The Roman Empire would fall apart. (This took place in AD 476.) 3.        Out of what was the Roman Empire, ten nations would spring up. These are the ten toes/horns of Daniel’s prophecies. 4.        A literal demon-possessed man, called the Antichrist, will ascend to power. 5.        The Antichrist’s name, if spelled out in Greek, will add up to 666. 6.        The Antichrist will sign a peace treaty between the Jews in Israel and the local non-believers there. This treaty will last seven years. 7.        This seven-year treaty is the last seven years of the “sets of sevens” prophecy in Daniel 9. 8.        At the end of the seven years, Jesus will return to earth, destroy the Antichrist, and establish reign of peace that will last for a literal 1000 years. 9.        They wrote they were taught these things by the apostles. They also wrote that anyone who rises up in the church and begins to say any of these things are symbolic, are immature Christians that can’t rightly divide the word of God, and should not be listened too. (Today these beliefs are included in the doctrines of most of, but not all of, the Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches!)   Here are some of the references from the early church fathers on the End Times:   “After the resurrection of the dead, Jesus will personally reign for 1000 years. He was taught this by the apostle John himself.” Papias Fragment 6   “The man of Sin, spoken of by Daniel, will rule two (three) times and a half, before the Second Advent… There will be a literal 1000 year reign of Christ… The man of apostasy, who speaks strange things against the Most High, shall venture to do unlawful deeds on the earth against us, the believers.” Justin Martyr Dialogue 32,81,110

Instead of ascending to enlightened states of being that involve the denial of the self, we have discovered that ours is a journey of descent: we look deep within to reclaim forgotten aspects of ourselves. In our descent, many of us rediscover “Sophia,” which is the Greek word for wisdom. She is a feminine aspect of the divine found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Her presence in the male pantheon of gods has been obscured, but not completely eradicated. In the Gnostic writings, considered heretical by the “orthodox” church, Sophia was present at creation and escorted Adam and Eve toward self-awareness. Women are reclaiming Sophia as a representation of their own inner wisdom. No longer is “god's will” imposed from outside of their lives—wisdom unfolds from within them and is in sync with their own natural gifts and capacities. No longer available to turn their lives and wills over to gods, gurus, and experts, they’re refusing to surrender except to Wisdom's urgings. No longer abdicating responsibility for their lives, they are employing their own willfulness in harmony with Wisdom's ways.

William Palmer, a distinguished member of the Anglican Church and of the University of Oxford, wished to join the Orthodox Church. He went to Russia and Turkey to study the contemporary situation in the Christian East and to find out on what conditions he would be admitted to the communion of the Eastern Orthodox. At St. Petersburg and at Moscow he was told that he had only to abjure the errors of Protestantism before a priest, who would thereupon administer to him the sacrament of Holy Chrism or Confirmation. But at Constantinople he found that he must be baptized afresh. As he knew himself to be a Christian and saw no reason to suspect the validity of his baptism (which incidentally was admitted without question by the Orthodox Russian Church), he considered that a second baptism would be a sacrilege. On the other hand, he could not bring himself to accept Orthodoxy according to the local rules of the Russian Church, since he would then become Orthodox only in Russia while remaining a heathen in the eyes of the Greeks; and he had no wish to join a national Church but to join the universal Orthodox Church. No one could solve his dilemma, and so he became a Roman Catholic.

Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he was crucified. The gospel accounts indicate that he was thought to be the king of the Jews. He was said to have predicted the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but also made it clear that it was not of this world. In the literature of the Late Second Temple period, there had been hints that a few people were expecting a righteous king of the House of David to establish an eternal kingdom, and this idea seems to have become more popular during the tense years leading up to the war. Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius all note the importance of revolutionary religiosity, both before and after the rebellion.2 There was now keen expectation in some circles of a meshiah (in Greek, christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be this messiah – the gospels are ambiguous on this point.3 Other people rather than Jesus himself may have made this claim on his behalf.4 But after his death some of his followers had seen him in visions that convinced them that he had been raised from the tomb – an event that heralded the general resurrection of all the righteous when God would inaugurate his rule on earth.5 Jesus and his disciples came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his death they moved to Jerusalem, probably to be on hand when the kingdom arrived, since all the prophecies declared that the temple would be the pivot of the new world order.6 The leaders of their movement were known as ‘the Twelve’: in the kingdom, they would rule the twelve tribes of the reconstituted Israel.7 The members of the Jesus movement worshipped together every day in the temple,8 but they also met for communal meals, in which they affirmed their faith in the kingdom’s imminent arrival.9 They continued to live as devout, orthodox Jews. Like the Essenes, they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and dedicated their lives to the last days.10 It seems that Jesus had recommended voluntary poverty and special care for the poor; that loyalty to the group was to be valued more than family ties; and that evil should be met with non-violence and love.11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle.12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah,13 keep the Sabbath,14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them.15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.

But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

If one could nominate an absolutely tragic day in human history, it would be the occasion that is now commemorated by the vapid and annoying holiday known as “Hannukah.” For once, instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with “Christmas,” which is itself a quasi-Christian annexation, complete with burning logs and holly and mistletoe, of a pagan Northland solstice originally illuminated by the Aurora Borealis. Here is the terminus to which banal “multiculturalism” has brought us. But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

If we do even one extra knot on our prayer rope, our guardian angel will record it; a few prayers or good thoughts will be stored up for later. Christ saves up all these things, and when the time comes for us to depart for the next life, we will take them and go to Christ.

Flee from the papists as you would from a snake and from the flames of a fire. St. Mark Eugenicus, fifteenth-century Greek Orthodox theologian

All Protestants are Crypto-Papists,’ wrote the Russian theologian Alexis Khomiakov to an English friend in the year 1846. ‘ . . . To use the concise language of algebra, all the West knows but one datum a; whether it be preceded by the positive sign +, as with the Romanists, or with the negative − as with the Protestants, the a remains the same. Now a passage to Orthodoxy seems indeed like an apostasy from the past, from its science, creed, and life. It is rushing into a new and unknown world.’ Khomiakov, when he spoke of the datum a, had in mind the fact that western Christians, whether Free Churchmen, Anglicans, or Roman Catholics, have a common background in the past. All alike (although they may not always care to admit it) have been profoundly influenced by the same events: by the Papal centralization and the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, by the Renaissance, by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and by the Enlightenment. But behind members of the Orthodox Church — Greeks, Russians, and the rest — there lies a very different background. They have known no Middle Ages (in the western sense) and have undergone no Reformations or Counter-Reformations; they have only been affected in an oblique way by the cultural and religious upheaval which transformed western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Christians in the west, both Roman and Reformed, generally start by asking the same questions, although they may disagree about the answers. In Orthodoxy, however, it is not merely the answers that are different — the questions themselves are not the same as in the west. (p.1–2)

Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it were created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came into being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the Earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old. These dates are incorrect. Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760 BC. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508 BC. These suggestions are also incorrect. Archbishop James Ussher (1580-1656) published 'Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti' in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 BC. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 BC, at exactly 9.00 a.m., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh. This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour. The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet. This proves two things: Firstly, that God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. Secondly, the Earth's a Libra. The astrological prediction for Libra in the 'Your Stars Today' column of the 'Tadfield Advertiser', on the day this history begins, read as follows:- "LIBRA. 24 September-23 October. You may be feeling run down and always in the same old daily round. Home and family matters are highlighted and are hanging fire. Avoid unnecessary risks. A friend is important to you. Shelve major decisions until the way ahead seems clear. You may be vulnerable to a stomach upset today, so avoid salads. Help could come from an unexpected quarter." This was perfectly correct on every count except for the bit about the salads.

Orthodox theology is a different matter from beginning to end. It does not assert a proposition; it bears witness. It is not contradiction, but confession.

The Kingdom of God is not a Talmud, nor is it a mechanical collection of scriptural or patristic quotations outside our being and our lives. The Kingdom of God is within us, like a dynamic leaven which fundamentally changes man's whole life, his spirit and his body. What is required in patristic study, in order to remain faithful to the Fathers' spirit of freedom and worthy of their spiritual nobility and freshness, is to approach their holy texts with the fear in which we approach and venerate their holy relics and holy icons. This liturgical reverence will soon reveal to us that here is another inexpressible grace. The whole atmosphere is different. There are certain vital passages in the patristic texts which, we feel, demand of us, and work within us, an unaccustomed change. These we must make part of our being and our lives, as truths and as standpoints, to leaven the whole. And at the same time we must put our whole self into studying the Fathers, waiting and marking time. This marriage, this baptism into patristic study brings what we need, which is not an additional load of patristic references and the memorizing of other people's opinions, but the acquisition of a new clear-sighted sense which enables man to see things differently and rightly. If we limit ourselves to learning passages by heart and classifying them mechanically — and teach men likewise — then we fall into a basic error which simply makes us fail to teach and make known the patristic way of life and philosophy.

This theological life and witness is a blessing which sweetens man's life. It is a food which is cut up and given to others; a drink poured out and offered in abundance for man to consume and quench his thirst. In this state one does not talk about life, one gives it. One feeds the hungry and gives drink to the thirsty. By contrast, scholastic theology and intellectual constructions do not resemble the Body of the Lord, the true food, nor His Blood, the true drink; rather they are like a stone one finds in one's food. This is how indigestible and inhumanly hard the mass of scholasticism seems to the taste and the mouth of one accustomed to the liturgy of the Church, and it is rejected as something foreign and unacceptable.

Fortunate is the man who is broken in pieces and offered to others, who is poured out and given to others to drink. When his time of trial comes, he will not be afraid. He will have nothing to fear. He will already have understood that, in the celebration of love, by grace man is broken and not divided, eaten and never consumed. By grace he has become Christ, and so his life gives food and drink to his brother. That is to say, he nourishes the other's very existence and makes it grow.

Seeing Christ externally, objectively, loving Him without repentance, and weeping from sympathy, like the daughters of Jerusalem (Luke 23:28), leads to a delusive emotionalism alien to the Liturgy. By contrast, the quiet celebration of the Liturgy gives guidance for a correct Orthodox attitude and provides an air of devout contrition. Joy does not laugh aloud and wound those who are sorrowful, nor does pain cast gloom and disillusionment over the weak. There reigns everywhere the devout contrition which secretly and inexhaustibly comforts everyone, making them joyful and uniting them as brothers. Human emotionalism is one thing and the devout contrition of the Liturgy quite another. The one causes man skin-deep irritation but torments him physically; the other nails him down but comforts him, revealing our God-like nature in the very depths of our existence. This is something that burdens you with a heavy obligation but at the same time gives you the wings of invincible hope.

The Liturgy is not just a sermon. It is not something to be listened to or watched. The Liturgy never grows old. Its cup does not go dry. No one can say he has got to know it or got used to it because he has understood it once or once been carried away by the attraction of it. The faithful are not like spectators or an audience following something that makes a greater or lesser emotional impression on them. The faithful partake in the Divine Liturgy. The mystery is celebrated in each of the faithful, in the whole of the liturgical community. We do not see Christ externally, we meet Him within us. Christ takes shape in us. The faithful become Christs by grace. What happens is a miraculous interpenetration by grace and an identification without confusion. The whole man, in body and in spirit, enters the unalloyed world of the uncreated grace of the Trinity. And at the same time he receives into himself Christ, with the Father and the Holy Spirit. The whole of God is offered to man, "He makes His home with him" (John 14:23); and the whole man is offered to God: "let us commend ourselves and each other and all our life unto Christ our God." "God united with and known to gods.

I do not wish, I do not desire to live long. I wish to live with You. It is You who are long life, vital and without end, Come and do Your will in me. Come when You wish and as You see fit. Come like a breeze, like a blessing, if You think it right. Come like a thunderbolt to test me and burn up my being, if You think that is how it should be. I know that what will follow Your visitation, in whatever way You come, will be what I desire most deeply and cannot express, and what I cannot find anywhere outside You. That is why it is You that I seek and await. I am disenchanted with myself. Only You remain. And I come to You, the healer, the light and the sanctification of souls and bodies. I come, sick as I am, and abandon to You my whole life and hope.

The elements of the world pass away with a loud noise (II Pet. 3:10): and everything is clothed with light and existence as with a garment. Everything exists and acquires substance. Representing the cherubim in the liturgical singing of the thrice holy hymn, we are caught up into heaven-whether in the body or out of the body we do not know, God knows (cf. II Cor. 12:2) -and we sing the triumphal hymn with the blessed powers. When we are there, beyond space and time, we enter the realm of eschatology. We begin to receive the Lord "invisibly escorted by the hosts of angels." Thus anyone who participates in the Liturgy, who is taken up-"he was caught up into heaven"-acquires new senses. He sees history not from its deceptive side, which is created and passes away, but from the true, eternal and luminous side which is the age to come. Then the believer delights in this world too, because he experiences the relation between it and the other world, the eternal and indestructible: the whole of creation has a trinitarian structure and harmony. The thrice-holy hymn is sung by the "communion of saints," the Church, in the depths of its being. Solemnly sung as part of the Divine Liturgy, the thrice. holy hymn overcomes tumult, and makes everything join in the celebration and sing together in complete silence and stillness, the silence and stillness of the age to come. This is an indication that we have already received the pledge of the life to come and of the Kingdom.

Anything which does not feed everyone, which is not the joy of all-"for all the people"-is not your joy either. A joy of your own--even the greatest joy cannot be other than denial and remorse for you when it is not a joy, nourishment and relief for all. If your joy is divided when it is broken, or consumed when it is eaten, it is hell. Leave it alone and look for something else. For instead of nourishing your inner and true man, it will inevitably consume you and give you nothing in return. It will corrode you, it will devour you. In the Divine Liturgy we find the food, life and joy which is cut up and shared out, and yet is not divided but rather unites; it is partaken of and eaten, and yet is not consumed but is embodied in us and sanctifies us. We come to understand that this organic link we have with everyone else is a great benefit and an assurance of the total and personal salvation of man. It is made perfect in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy and is revealed with complete clarity as a gift of divine grace sent down upon us.

The Author of life has shattered the bonds of purely mechanical existence. You are an organic part of a theanthropic mystery. You have a specific task, a small, minute task, which makes you a partaker in the whole. The mystery of life is summed up and worked out in your being, in your character. You are an image of God. You are of value not for what you have but for what you are; and you are a brother of the Son. Thus we all enter into the feast of the firstborn. God, who is above all, may be recognized in the very texture of your person, in the structure of your being. You see Him dwelling within you. And you discern traces of Him in your insatiable thirst for life and in your love. The struggle to reach Him is the very vision of His face. It is the fundamental principle of your being.

It is not the sun that gives light to the earth, nor imagination that opens heaven- "heaven and earth will pass away" (Matt. 24:35)-but the presence of God that makes earth and heaven new and incorruptible and unites them. "And the city has no need of sun" (Rev. 21:23). The reality of the Liturgy is not illumined by a light which can pass away, "for no visible thing is good." The unseen presence of the Lord lights and reveals everything.

A Christian statesmen serving the Ottoman Empire in 1852 would have had a number of reasons to invoke the career of the Duke of Wellington. The recently deceased Wellington was an Anglo-Irish and yet rose from that disadvantaged background to become a military and diplomatic leader defending the British Empire in India and against Napoleon. Representing Britain at the Congress of Vienna, Wellington was conservative in a time of changes and challenges for England and for the European system of politics. Wellington had apparently managed to reconcile the contradictions and challenges of his position and earn a shining reputation in life and in death as a defender of the British Empire. Stephanos Vogorides, the Ottoman Christian statesman who invokes Wellington here, was almost an exact contemporary of his. [...]. He encountered perhaps even more profound challenges than Wellington, struggling to no avail to reconcile his position as an Orthodox Christian serving not the Russian or even Greek state but the Ottoman state, in the midst of the conflicts growing more intense by the day in the early 1850s.

in the perceptive words of one Orthodox priestly theologian born in post-1917 exile, ‘if there is a feature of “Russian” Orthodoxy which can be seen as a contrast to the Byzantine perception of Christianity, it is the nervous concern of the Russians in preserving the very letter of the tradition received “from the Greeks

The not-so-dirty secret is that Greece is doing the EU’s bidding and working tirelessly to monitor, punish, isolate, and violently repress refugees, stopping most of them from entering the continent. Frontex quietly supports it. Greece has constructed a network of detention centers on the Greek islands and initiated illegal pushbacks at border crossings and on the Mediterranean. More than 41,000 migrants since 2020 were illegally pushed back, according to the Turkey’s Ombudsman Institution report in 2022, with Greece deploying a range of technological innovations to deter new arrivals.37 During the opening of Greece’s “closed controlled access center” in Kos in November 2021, two Greek Orthodox priests blessed the facility while EU politicians looked on.

Where there is love, a person can bear everything - sorrows and worries, temptations and thoughts, even various tragic events like wars, earthquakes, disasters, etc. This is how much grace helps him.

We believe that true freedom means not sinning, in order to love God and one's neighbour with our whole heart and our whole strength. True freedom means constant dwelling in God.

[The Lord] is exceedingly meek and lowly, and when the soul sees Him she is all transformed into love for God and her neighbour...becomes meek and lowly herself. But if a man lose grace, he will weep like Adam cast out of paradise.

Prayer comes with praying, as the Scriptures say; but prayer which is only a habit, prayer without contrition for our sins, is not pleasing to the Lord.

[T]o the man who beseeches the Lord all things are given, not because we are worthy but because the Lord is merciful and loves us.

Humility is the light in which we may behold the Light which is God – in the words of the Psalmist: “In thy light shall we see light.

It is not he who disparages himself who shows humility (for who will not put up with himself?), but he who maintains the same love for the very man who reproaches him.

And the Mother of God - what was her love for the Lord, her Son? No human being can conceive of the nature of her love save the Mother of God herself. But the Spirit of God opens our eyes to love. And in her was and is this same Spirit of God, Which is love, and therefore he who has come to know the Holy Spirit is able in part to conceive of the nature even of her love.

When the soul is full of the love of God, out of infinite joy she sorrows and in tears prays for the whole world, that all men may come to know their Lord and heavenly Father. There is no rest for her, nor does she desire rest, until all mankind delights in the grace of His love.

When I asked Stephen, age two, for a kiss he would say, “I’ll give you a smooch.” He'd put his hands on each side of his face and pucker up, musing contentedly, “What kind shall I give her? […Grandma Joy’s ducky kisses, butterfly kisses, or….]

For use on the first Sunday in Lent, the service books of the Greek Orthodox Church include a special office known as ‘The Synodikon of Orthodoxy’, which contains no less than sixty anathemas against different heresies and heresiarchs. Yet in this comprehensive denunciation there is one unexpected omission: no reference is made to the errors of the Latins, no allusion to the Filioque or the papal claims, even though more than a third of the anathemas date from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, a time when doctrinal disagreements between East and West had emerged clearly into the open. This omission of the Latins is an indication of the curious imprecision which prevails in the relations between Orthodoxy and Rome.

Greek philosophers developed the idea of a certain mode of thinking and limited the word phren to its physical meaning. The philosophers used instead a derivative word, phronesis, to refer to inner thoughts connected to activity. Because phronesis links thought and action, it differs from wisdom (sophia), which is a purely intellectual pursuit.

Lord, grant me to greet the coming day in peace. Help me in all things to rely upon Your holy will. In every hour of the day reveal Your will to me. Bless my dealings with all who surround me. Teach me to treat all that come to me throughout the day with peace of soul and with firm conviction that Your will governs all. In all my deeds and words guide my thoughts and feelings. In unforeseen events let me not forget that all things are under Your care. Teach me to act firmly and wisely, without embittering and embarrassing others. Give me strength to bear the fatigue of the coming day with all that it shall bring. Direct my will, teach me to pray, pray Yourself in me. Amen. A Song of Praise I will extol You, my God and King, and bless Your name forever. Every day I will bless You and praise Your name forever. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall laud Your works to another, and shall declare Your mighty acts. Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and Your dominion endures forever. The Lord is just in all His ways, and kind in all His doings. My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and let all bless His holy name forever and ever! Psalm 145:1-4,13,21 Closing Prayer Through the prayers of our holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.

For Sunday This is the day of the Lord! Let us rejoice and be glad in it! Let us thank the Lord for daily food, health and the blessings of home. Let us love one another in the Lord. Now we live in Christ through the Holy Spirit and we look for the day when we will dwell with Him in His glorious kingdom. Savior, bless these Your gifts which we receive from Your hand. May the light of Your resurrection shine in us and through us to all, for Your honor and glory. Amen.

Amen. The Jesus Prayer Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. or Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. The Jesus Prayer is an invocation to the living Christ. In the Jesus Prayer we confess Christ as Lord and ask Him for His mercy. The Jesus Prayer combines St. Paul’s doxology (Phil 2:11), the tax collector’s spirit of repentance (Lk 18:33), and the blind man’s plea for enlightenment (Mk 10:47,51). “The divine name of Jesus Christ holds in itself the whole gospel truth,” wrote the author of The Way of a Pilgrim. The Jesus Prayer is appropriate for every Christian and may be recited in all circumstances-while kneeling, sitting, standing, walking, eating, traveling, working, or falling asleep. It may be offered at regular prayer times, during breaks at home and office, even in the bustle of commuting to and from work or while shopping and preparing meals. Its brevity makes it useful as a way of centering the inner consciousness on Christ, guarding against temptations and finding ready spiritual strength. The effectiveness of the Jesus Prayer comes from the power and the grace of Christ who hears our fervent invocation, cleanses our heart from evil and comes to dwell in us as personal Lord. The fruits of the Jesus Prayer are repentance, contrition, forgiveness, joy, peace and above all, as the pilgrim put it, “a burning love for Jesus Christ and for all God’s creatures. “Developed to maturity, the Jesus Prayer becomes a mystical prayer of the heart, an unceasing breath of the Holy Spirit praying within the believer, an inner spiritual fire energizing the Christian in all things. From the believer’s side the Jesus Prayer requires a sincere and humble spirit rather than a particular method. In quiet moments of concentrated prayer it may be recited rhythmically in order to establish inner attention. (Pray “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” while breathing in, and “have mercy on me,” while breathing out.) But far more important are the constant attention to the words of the prayer and the fervent personal appeal to Christ for whom the soul yearns. Trust in the love and mercy of God. Seek the presence of Christ in your heart. Pray to Christ calmly and unhurriedly by enclosing your thoughts and feelings in each word of the Jesus Prayer.

The Holy Spirit is love, and He gives the soul strength to love her enemies. And he who does not love his enemies does not know God.

general program of “expressionism” in philosophy. In expressionist thought, being is not essentially substance, but unfolding power and dynamic process. This tradition has its roots in Neoplatonic schemas of emanation and in orthodox accounts of creation. In theological terms, the idea of an ultimate reality that is fundamentally will rather than substance is strongly suggested by scriptural accounts of creation, but was in some ways held back by the influence of classical Greek metaphysics, which tended to obscure the question of cosmogenesis by presuming the eternity of the world, and reality as an eternally perduring substance rather than a singular act of manifestation.

With my sins I am worse than a noisome cur but I began to beseech God for forgiveness, and He granted me not only forgiveness but also the Holy Spirit, and in the Holy Spirit I knew God.

When Sean and Daniel were two and four years old I opened their play kitchen fridge door and found a stack of stuffed bears. "Why are the bears in here?" They replied with authority, “We’ve been huntin’!

With this wealth came arrogance-and resentment. "They came," said a Byzantine chronicler, "in swarms and tribes, exchanging their city for Constantinople, whence they spread out across the empire." The tone of these remarks speaks a familiar language of xenophobia and economic fear of the immigrant. The upstart Italians, with their hats and their beardless faces, stood out sharply, both in manner and appearance, in the city streets. The charges leveled against the Venetians were many: they acted like citizens of a foreign power rather than loyal subjects of the empire; they were fanning out from their allotted quarter and were buying properties across the city; they cohabited with or married Greek women and led them away from the Orthodox faith; they stole the relics of saints; they were wealthy, arrogant, unruly, boorish, out of control. "Morally dissolute, vulgar ... untrustworthy, with all the gross characteristics of seafaring people," spluttered another Byzantine writer. A bishop of Salonika called them "marsh frogs." The Venetians were becoming increasingly unpopular in the Byzantine Empire, and they seemed to be everywhere. In the larger geopolitics of the twelfth century, the relationship between the Byzantines and their errant subjects was marked by ever more violent oscillations between the poles of love and hate: The Venetians were insufferable but indispensable. The Byzantines, who complacently still saw themselves as the center of the world, and for whom landownership was more glorious than vulgar commerce, had given away their trade to the lagoon dwellers and allowed their navy to decline; they became increasingly dependent on Venice for maritime defense.

As Anthony Bloom, a Greek Orthodox writer said, “Abandon all, you will receive heaven.” When you give God your life, he gives you the gift of himself.

My religious friends - and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox - were convinced that God had a "plan" for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don't overintellectualize.

there have been minor flare-ups from the Greek and Bulgarian Orthodox churches as well. One

His conclusions were staggering to those complacent souls who considered themselves safely ensconced in a Christian world: The inhabitants of the world, according to this calculation, amount to about 731 millions: 420 millions of whom are still in pagan darkness; 130 millions the followers of Mahomet; 100 millions Catholics; 44 millions Protestants; 30 millions of the Greek and Armenian (Orthodox Christian) churches, and perhaps 7 millions of Jews. It must undoubtedly strike every considerate mind what a vast proportion of the sons of Adam there are who yet remain in the most deplorable state of heathen darkness, without any means of knowing the true God...and utterly destitute of the knowledge of the Gospel of Christ...[4] So 76 percent of mankind did not know the Gospel! Or 557 million souls!

It is a fallacy that suicide bombers are driven by the promise of a reward of some Islamic paradise with virgins and other entertainment, for, as the anthropologist Scott Atran has pointed out, the first suicide bombers in the Levant were revolutionaries of Greek Orthodox background—my tribe—not Islamists. There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd. You can also feel a different variety of crowd experience during your next street riot, when fear of authorities vanishes completely under group fever.

I know that many people including our President insist that it be called the Christmas Season. I’ll be the first in line to say that it works for me however that’s not what it is. We hint at its coming on Halloween when the little tykes take over wandering the neighborhood begging for candy and coins. In this day and age the idea of children wandering the streets threatening people with “Trick or Treat!” just isn’t a good idea. In most cases parents go with them encouraging their offspring’s to politely ask “Anything for Halloween.” An added layer of security occurs when the children are herded into one room to party with friends. It’s all good, safe fun and usually there is enough candy for all of their teeth to rot before they have a chance to grow new ones. Forgotten is the concept that it is a three day observance of those that have passed before us and are considered saints or martyrs. Next we celebrate Thanksgiving, a national holiday (holly day) formally observed in Canada, Liberia, Germany Japan, some countries in the Caribbean and the United States. Most of these countries observe days other than the fourth Thursday of November and think of it as a secular way of celebrating the harvest and abundance of food. Without a hiccup we slide into Black Friday raiding stores for the loot being sold at discounted prices. The same holds true for Cyber Monday when we burn up the internet looking for bargains that will arrive at our doorsteps, brought by the jolly delivery men and women, of FedEx, UPS and USPS. Of course the big days are Chanukah when the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, regained control of Jerusalem. It is a time to gather the family and talk of history and tell stories. Christmas Eve is a time when my family goes to church, mostly to sing carols and distribute gifts, although this usually continued on Christmas day. This is when the term “Merry Christmas” is justified and correct although it is thought that the actual birthday of Christ is in October. The English squeezed another day out of the season, called Boxing Day, which is when the servants got some scraps from the dinner the day before and received a small gift or a dash of money. I do agree that “Xmas” is inappropriate but that’s just me and I don’t go crazy over it. After all, Christmas is for everyone. On the evening of the last day of the year we celebrate New Year’s Evening followed by New Year’s Day which many people sleep through after New Year’s Eve. The last and final day of the Holiday Season is January 6th which Is Epiphany or Three Kings Day. In Tarpon Springs, the Greek Orthodox Priest starts the celebration with the sanctification of the waters followed by the immersion of the cross. It becomes a scramble when local teenage boys dive for the cross thrown into the Spring Bayou as a remembrance of the baptism of Jesus Christ in the Jordan River. This tradition is now over a century old and was first celebrated by the Episcopal Church by early settlers in 1903.

According to the World Monuments Fund, “The present state of the church is worrying. Many roof timbers are rotting, and have not been replaced since the 19th century. The rainwater that seeps into the building not only accelerates the rotting of the wood and damages the structural integrity of the building, but also damages the 12th-century wall mosaics and paintings. The influx of water also means that there is an ever-present chance of an electrical fire. If another earthquake were to occur on the scale of the one of 1834, the result would most likely be catastrophic. ... It is hoped that the listing will encourage its preservation, including getting the three custodians of the church – the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Orthodox Church, and the Franciscan order – to work together, which has not happened for hundreds of years. The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority would also have to work together to protect it.

We do not force Christianity on the reader and we do not condemn non-Christians. Nevertheless, we do acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the only Son of God, and the Logos of all creation. He is uniquely fully human and fully divine. In Greek, the term for this God-man is Theanthropos. It is Jesus Christ who we acknowledge as the most influential person in our life. He colors everything we do and certainly is an integral part of the dynamic psychology we describe here. In fact, the Greek term, dynamis, means “power,” especially the power of God, and reflects the subject matter of this discourse on psychology. It is a power dressed in the context of Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity, a tradition that traces its origins to the early Greek Church. Despite this Christian viewpoint, it is our conviction that the model of the psyche we offer is truly universal in the sense that it combines the contributions of neuroscience and cognitive-behavioral psychology with the psychodynamic insights of Jung, Freud, and other psychologists and scholars.

Ritual characterizes every aspect of life here, and even mundane, daily activities take on an ageless quality. The daily rhythm begins at dawn, as the fishermen launch boats from countless harbors, an event that has taken place for centuries. The women go to market, exchanging greetings and comments. Ritual rules the care and time taken with every detail of the midday meal, from the hearty seafood appetizers to the strong, syrupy coffee that marks the end of the feast. The day winds down with the evening stroll, a tradition thoroughly ingrained in the culture of the Greek Isles. In villages and towns throughout the islands, sunset brings cooler air and draws people from their homes and the beaches for an enjoyable evening walk through town squares, portside promenades, and narrow streets. Ancient crafts still flourish in the artisans’ studios and in tidy homes of countless mountain villages and ports. Embroidery--traditionally the province of Greek women--is created by hand to adorn the regional costumes worn during festivals. Artists craft delicate silver utensils, engraved gems, blown glass, and gold jewelry. Potters create ceramic pieces featuring some of the same decorative patterns and mythological subjects that captured their ancestors’ imagination. Weddings, festivals, saints’ days. And other celebrations with family and friends provide a backdrop for grave and energetic Greek dancing. For centuries--probably ever since people have lived on the islands--Greek islanders have seized every opportunity to play music, sing, and dance. Dancing in Greece is always a group activity, a way to create and reinforce bonds among families, friends, and communities, and island men have been dancing circle dances like the Kalamatianos and the Tsamikos since antiquity. Musicians accompany revelers on stringed instruments like the bouzouki--the modern equivalent of the lyre. While traditional attire is reserved mainly for festive occasions, on some islands people still sport these garments daily. On Lefkada and Crete, it is not unusual to find men wearing vraka, or baggy trousers, and vests, along with the high boots known as stivania. Women wear long, dark, pleated skirts woven on a traditional loom, and long silk scarves or kerchiefs adorn their heads. All the garments are ornamented by hand with rich brocades and elaborate embroidery. All over the Greek Isles, Orthodox priests dress in long black robes, their shadowy figures contrasting with the bright whites, blues, and greens of Greek village architecture.

I was born to atheism and raised in it, by people who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods or demons. This is what defined my people, my tribe: We did not believe, and what this meant, when I started on the path of metaphysical questioning, was that there were no ready answers at hand. My religious friends—and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox—were convinced that God had a “plan” for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don’t overintellectualize.

The persecution of Jews and of Christians outside the Greek Orthodox community caused great disaffection within the empire and explains in part why many Byzantine subjects welcomed the arrival of the more religiously tolerant Muslim rulers.

When I prayed I was new,” wrote a great theologian of Christian antiquity, “but when I stopped praying I became old.” Prayer is the way to renewal and spiritual life. Prayer is aliveness to God. Prayer is strength, refreshment, and joy.

Akeldama is the one place I have never been to, because of the strange way that I feel when I get near to it. The Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. Onuphrius stands on the exact place where it is believed Judas hanged himself. I should have realized that before. I just didn’t think about it.” “That’s kind of creepy.” Sam grimaced at the thought. “The monastery face, the old city’s walls and Mt. Zion,” she added. “You may find the area quite familiar, Sam. There are burial caves and tombs all over the area.” Sam widened his eyes. “We were there! Thousands of years ago, but we were there! That is so surreal. Do we need the monastery’s permission to go to the burial grounds?” “No,” she said, quickly. “All you need to do is let me know when you wish to go.

The Greek Orthodox bishops made a point of snubbing John Paul. He didn’t complain. They insulted him. He didn’t defend himself. They demanded he apologize for Catholic sins from centuries ago. And John Paul, speaking on behalf of one billion living souls and the untold Catholic dead, apologized.

One episode in the seminar remained vividly in my mind, especially since I was painfully sensitive to antisemitism. Each of us chose a topic for presentation in the framework of our studies, to the group and the professor. There followed a discussion. I chose to deliver a kind of lecture on American Catholic Writers. As an introduction, I underlined the differences between Catholic, Protestant and Greek-Orthodox Christian dogma and on what levels Catholics see life and relations among people in a different way. Then I talked about some of the Catholic writers. There followed a lively discussion and the whole session was animated and interesting.

One of the students, whom I did not know well, approached me afterwards and complimented me on the exposé. He knew little about the Greek-Orthodox branch of Christianity and he thought that life in Romania gave me that background. He then invited me to his house, he and his wife, a young actress, lived close to Columbia. I enjoyed my lunch with them, on that spring day in April, 1948. The two of them invited me to visit them during the Easter vacation, at a prestigious university in New Hampshire, where his father was a professor.

There existed vicious Jew-haters in every land. In Romania, the Greek- Orthodox clergy and many intellectuals were fierce nationalists. Their logical conclusion was hatred of the Jews. The fact that they did not run the government and were not actually in power made life tolerable, for a while. They came to power in 1938.

someone turned our episode into an off-Broadway musical, Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, a story of some postapocalyptic survivors who share only one cultural link: the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons. They recreate the script and perform it as a traveling theater troupe. In act 2 we see their play seventy-five years later: it’s become as ritualized and bizarre as a Greek Orthodox Mass. I’m

Orthodox spirituality recognizes delusion as a genuine danger (plani in Greek, prelest in Russian). The sure sign of someone far gone in delusion is a refusal to consider that she might be wrong.

We lived in the country, I went to school, and - an important detail - I slept in my parents' room. At night it was my father's habit to read aloud to my mother. Though he was a Greek Orthodox priest, he would read anything, doubtless assuming that at my age I wouldn't understand. Usually I didn't even listen and fell asleep, unless the text was some gripping story. One night I pricked up my ears. He was reading the scene from a biography of Rasputin where the father, on his deathbed, calls his son to him and says: 'Go to Saint Petersburg and make yourself master of the city, fear nothing and no one, for God is an old hog.' Such an enormity in my father's mouth, for whom the priesthood was not a joke, impressed me as much as a conflagration or an earthquake. But I also distinctly recall - this was over fifty years ago - that my emotion was followed by a strange, dare I say a perverse pleasure.

Yaroslav died on February 28, 1054, and was buried in the Cathedral of St. Sophia, which he had built. His earthly remains were placed in a white marble sarcophagus decorated with carvings of the Christian cross and Mediterranean plants, including palms, which were by no means native to Kyivan Rus’. According to one theory, the sarcophagus—a stone embodiment of Byzantine cultural imperialism—had once been the final resting place of a Byzantine notable but was brought to Kyiv either by marauding Vikings or by enterprising Greeks. The sarcophagus is still preserved in the cathedral, but the remains of Yaroslav the Wise disappeared from Kyiv in 1943, during the German occupation of the city. By some accounts, they ended up in the hands of Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchs in the United States and were spotted in Manhattan after the war. Some suspect that they may now be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn. What could account for the transfer of Prince Yaroslav’s remains all the way to the Western Hemisphere? The answer has nothing to do with American cultural imperialism but is closely associated with the Ukrainian claim to the legacy of Kyivan Rus’. Ukrainian clergymen leaving their homeland removed the relics so as to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army. Concern that if returned to Kyiv, they might end up in Russia explains enough the continuing refusal of the custodians of the Brooklyn church to discuss the issue of Yaroslav’s remains with representatives of the Ukrainian government. Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era.

Were there even a lot of food trucks around then? I thought the big boom was just a few years ago with that Korean barbecue truck in LA." Lou researches everything. Farfar smiled. "Amir's family ran a popular kebab shop in Mariehamm. It was a pretty easy transition for him---at least as far as the actual work. Me, not so much. I could cook a little bit, but I had never made munkar before in my life. They just made me happy, and I knew that is what I wanted to offer, as strange a combination as it is." "I don't know," Lou said. "If you ever go to the Gyro Fest at the big Greek Orthodox church in York, people eat a huge gyro, then go back for honey puffs. Doesn't seem like that much of a stretch." "Looo, this is why you're my favorite person.

One of Hellenistic Jewry's signature achievements was the Septuagint, the translation of Tanakh into Koine (common) Greek. Compiled between the third and first centuries BCE, it almost certainly represents the work of Alexandrian Jewry, who needed scripture in Greek because they no longer spoke or wrote Hebrew. The Septuagint makes some formal changes, reordering books and including new material. Its existence offers witness to the religious power that Jews in the last centuries BCE were according written texts, a significant moment in the process by which Jewish identity embraced Torah and Judaism became a "religion of the book." Even so, the Septuagint has arguably had a greater abiding significance for Christianity than for Judaism. The Old Testament used it, rather than Tanakh, for a basis; New Testament writers quoted it (rather than Hebrew versions). Catholic and Orthodox Christians would accept its additions as a second set of fully authoritative (deuterocanonical) books. Most Protestants would not, although some printed them in a separate section of their Bibles. The early Church forged its principal doctrines in conversation with it. The legend that seventy-two translators "harmoniously" produced identical copies has a Christian provenance: Epiphanius, a fourth-century bishop who defended the Septuagint's superiority against later Jewish revisions. As its importance for Christians rose, Jews abandoned it to assert the sole legitimacy of the Hebrew text.

A close reading of Leviticus reveals that the apostles were doing the exact opposite of saying that the Torah doesn’t apply to Christians. Rather, they were proclaiming that a very literal reading of the Torah will be the basis for the structure of the life of the Church community just as it was the basis for the formation of the nation of Israel. The Gentiles who come to worship Christ do not become Jewish by virtue of coming to dwell in Israel. They remain Greeks or Romans or Egyptians or Syrians. But in order to be a member of the community of God’s people and not draw the wrath of God down on the community, they must refrain from all idolatry and sexual immorality

Because in Western Christian circles worship is largely regarded as a matter of personal taste, Orthodox worship—indeed, traditional Christian worship—tends to be understood as just one of many preferences for how to worship. “Smells and bells,” as it were. It is assumed to be some form of Greek, Russian, Middle Eastern, or other arcane cultural expression of Christian worship. This, however, is far from the truth. The patterns, and even details, of Orthodox worship are based on a consistent interpretation of God’s commandments in the Torah, now grasped more fully and deeply in Christ. New Testament worship did not start over with a clean slate after abandoning the worship of the Old Testament. The apostles applied the commandments of the Torah regarding worship to the Christian communities they founded. This apostolic worship is continued in the liturgical life of the Orthodox Church. This is the worship that God has given to humanity to allow them to make a pleasing offering to the Father, united to the Son, in the communion of the Holy Spirit.

The godparents give their godchildren their long-awaited Easter gifts. The most special is the lambada, which we light at church on the night of Holy Saturday.

The purpose of judgment must be that the one you are judging should mend his ways, and you must be compassionate with every soul...and in all things preserve a clear conscience yourself. Then deep peace will reign in mind and soul.