By Father Leonidas Contos We would agree, I think, that to identify the “one thing” is not difficult for the Christian. To define it, however, is rather less easy. And to achieve that set of the soul that keeps us in steady pursuit of it is not easy at all. To say so is to mock the whole meaning of spiritual discipline and to devalue the lives of those few in each generation who are
By Father Leonidas Contos Walt Whitman, one of our great modern American poets, suggests this inner conflict when he asserts: “There is more to me than is contained between my hat and my shoes!” One of the most celebrated experiments aimed at concentrating on the man between the hat and the shoes was conducted by another American, Henry David Thoreau, who died about a hundred years ago. Thoreau was what you might call a highly
By Father Leonidas Contos During the first fortnight of August, culminating in the Feast of the Dormition, or the Falling Asleep, of the Virgin Mary, there is sung each night in Orthodox churches a very beautiful office of supplication. In this service we alternate between two selections from the Gospel of Luke. In the one we read of the encounter between Mary and her elder cousin Elizabeth who is soon to bear a son in
By Father Leonidas Contos, LOS ANGELES, August 2, 1962 Orthodox theology refuses to see Mary as only the physical instrument of Christ’s birth. She is seen as a cooperating instrument in the work of redemption. Christ did not save the world, so to speak, automatically. He was not on earth as an alien thrust in, but lived as part of humanity, sharing its weakness, knowing its need. The grace He released into the world became
By Father Leonidas Contos There are in the Orthodox tradition three principal periods of fasting during the ecclesiastical year; they are also the ones that are the least neglected. One is the forty-day period of Advent; the second is the forty-day period of Lent; the third is the fifteen-day fast which begins the first of August, and will end on the fifteenth with the commemoration of the Falling Asleep of the Theotokos. Among the three
We have peace when we are with the Lord and His Most Holy Mother; she is always here to help whenever we call upon her. In her we have unshakable support, which remains the same for all ages and which will not change. We cannot find this support anywhere else on earth, not even among our family members, let alone in things like riches, earthly power, and honor. We can be left without all these
I thank the Lord and the Most Holy Mother of God that He has willed to embellish this feast day of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos through the angelic voices of the children who sang so beautifully. When the chanting is as beautiful as this, we are freed from all our cares and our interest for earthly things and we ascend into eternity with the Lord, His angels, and the saints, where our
By Father Stephen Freeman, August 1, 2016 Today (August 1) marks the beginning of the Fast of the Dormition, the annual preparation for the feast of the Falling Asleep of the Virgin Mary. I offer this article as reflection. The most difficult part of my Orthodox experience to discuss with the non-Orthodox is the place and role of the Mother of God in the Church and in my life. It is, on the one hand,
An anthropology which embraces an [Orthodox Christian] notion of sin will deal with good and evil in terms not of moral value, but of being and non-being, life and death, communion and separation, disease and healing. And the Church addresses us in the same terms: we are to be grafted by baptism on to the living Body of the Risen Christ, and thus enabled to receive the power of the resurrection by which our life
Commemorated on March 25 The Feast of the Annunciation is one of the earliest Christian feasts, and was already being celebrated in the fourth century. There is a painting of the Annunciation in the catacombs of Priscilla in Rome dating from the second century. The Council of Toledo in 656 mentions the Feast. In 692 the Council in Trullo celebrated the Annunciation during Great Lent. The Greek and Slavonic names for the Feast may be
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