Daily Meditations Archives - Page 302 of 332

The Service of the Bridegroom (Part II)

04/30/2013

The Orthros of each of these days is called the Service of the Bridegroom (Akolouthia tou Nimfiou). The name comes from the central figure in the well-known parable of the ten virgins (Matthew 25:1-13). The title Bridegroom suggests the intimacy of love. It is not without significance that the kingdom of God is compared to a bridal feast and a bridal chamber. The Christ of the Passion is the divine Bridegroom of the Church. The

The Service of the Bridegroom (Part I)

04/29/2013

Beginning on the evening of Palm Sunday and continuing through the evening of Holy Tuesday, the Orthodox Church observes a special service known as the Service of the Bridegroom. Each evening service is the Matins or Orthros service of the following day (e.g. the service held on Sunday evening is the Orthros service for Holy Monday). The name of the service is from the figure of the Bridegroom in the parable of the Ten Virgins

The Lord’s Entry into Jerusalem

04/26/2013

In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. [On Palm Sunday] Christ enters the path not only of His sufferings but of that dreadful loneliness which enshrouds Him during all the days of Passion week. The loneliness begins with a misunderstanding; the people expect that the Lord’s entry into Jerusalem will be the triumphant procession of a political leader, of a leader who will free his people from oppression, from slavery, from

The Bridegroom Services

04/25/2013

The three days that open “Great Week” are called “Holy” or “Great” Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday; and they are “Great” precisely because each of them symbolically teaches us something of ourselves, and of God in our life. Most people know what happens on Holy Thursday, Friday and Saturday, but the first three are the least known days–I mean it’s already hard enough going to Church three days in a row. Yet they are theologically significant.

A Brief Meditation on Lent

04/24/2013

All of us lead lives so filled with the demands of work and family that little time is left to us to cultivate the garden of our soul. In our preoccupation with the ceaseless business of life, our spirit, if not completely forgotten, is often sadly neglected. When we do find the time to look at ourselves honestly, we soon discover that the spirit of the world has gradually and imperceptibly eaten away at our

BRIGHT SADNESS (Part II)

04/23/2013

[The “action” of the Lenten service in us] is as if we were reaching a place to which the noises and the fuss of life, of the street, of all that which usually fills our days and even nights, have no access—a place where they have no power. All that which seemed so tremendously important to us as to fill our mind, that state of anxiety which has virtually become our second nature, disappear somewhere

BRIGHT SADNESS (Part I)

04/22/2013

For many, if not for the majority of Orthodox Christians, Lent consists of a limited number of formal, predominantly negative, rules and prescriptions: abstention from certain food, dancing, perhaps movies. Such is the degree of our alienation from the real spirit of the Church that it is almost impossible for us to understand that there is “something else” in Lent—something without which all these prescriptions lose much of their meaning. This “something else” can best

Why Is St. Mary of Egypt Remembered During Lent?

04/19/2013

Each of the Sundays of Great Lent has its own special theme in the Orthodox Church. The First Sunday of Great Lent we celebrate the “Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy” since it was on this day in 843 A.D. that the final great heresy against the person of Christ, that of Iconoclasm, was eradicated and the Orthodox Faith became the standard by which mankind could achieve purification, illumination and glorification. The Second Sunday of

THE TWO MEANINGS OF FASTING (Part II)

04/18/2013

Quite different [from the total fast] are the spiritual connotations of the second type of fasting which we defined as ascetical. Here the purpose for fasting is to liberate man from the unlawful tyranny of the flesh, of that surrender of the spirit to the body and its appetites which is the tragic result of sin and the original fall of man. It is only by a slow and patient effort that man discovers that

THE TWO MEANINGS OF FASTING (Part I)

04/17/2013

At this point, the next question arises: if Eucharist is incompatible with fasting, why then is its celebration still prescribed on Saturdays and Sundays of Lent, and this without “breaking” the fast? The canons of the Church seem here to contradict one another. While some of them forbid fasting on Sundays, some others forbid the breaking of the fast on any of the forty days. This contradiction, however, is only apparent, because the two rules