Prayers Reconciliation from Liturgy of St Cyril

"O Creator of the whole creation, of that which is seen and of that which is not seen, who cares for all things; for Yours they are. O Lover of Souls; I seek Your compassion O Lord Almighty. I, poor, despised, and unprofitable as I am among Thy servants, now drawing near to Your Holy of Holies, and about to touch this holy and mysterious sacrament give me, O Lord, Thy Holy Spirit: that fire immaterial and incomprehensible that devours all infirmity and consumes wicked inventions. Let it kill the earthly senses of the flesh; let it restrain the wanderings of the mind that lead it to imaginations full of aches and passion: And as it is proper for priests, let it make me rise above all mortal thoughts, and grant me the sanctifying words in order to fulfill this offering now laid on the altar which is the mystery of mysteries; in the fellowship and communion of Your Christ. To whom with You and the Holy Spirit, the Giver-of-Life, and of one essence with You, belongs glory now and unto the of ages, Amen."

+ Prayer of Reconciliation, Divine Liturgy of St Cyril, Coptic Rite.

"O Prince of Life and King of Ages, God unto whom every knee bows, of those in heaven, of those on earth, and of those under the earth; to whom everything is subject and in the bond of servitude, bowing their heads to the scepter of Thy kingdom: Unto whom the armies of angels give glory together with the heavenly hosts, and all logical natures, with an unsilenced voice that utters Your divinity. And as You have taken pleasure in us, the poor inhabitants of the earth, that we should service to You, not because of the purity of our hands, for we have not done good upon the earth; but You are willing to grant us, the unfortunate and unworthy, of Your purity: accept us unto You O Good [God] and Lover of Mankind, as we approach Your holy altar according to the multitude of Your mercies. And make us worthy of the heavenly peace that suits Your divinity and is full of salvation that we may give it to one another in perfect love and that we may greet one another with a holy kiss."

+ Prayer before the Deacon Entreats Congregation to Exchange the Holy Kiss, Divine Liturgy of St Cyril, Coptic Rite.

The Church's Life

The importance of Lex Orandi in the Orthodox Church...

"...as long as they are free to participate in the worship of their local church, the Eastern Christians can survive...As long as the mysteries can be celebrated the Church lives, held together not by organization nor authority nor education, but by communion year after year in the regular cycle of feast and fast."

+ Fr Robert F. Taft, "Beyond East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding." 2nd Rev. Ed. (Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute Press, 2001) 146

What we can learn from Orthodoxy in India?

"...The church must stress the need to go back to a simple, frugal life as against the flamboyant exhibitionism wealth tempts. The church’s mission should include propaganda against consumerism. Jesus Christ went in search of the oppressed and marginalized, and the church’s mission should also include the empowerment of the powerless and the marginalized. Tribals, women and children all need the special attention of the church, and mission today has a calling to concentrate on programmes for the benefit of these groups.

The churches while pursuing mission work had, on many occasions, gone away from God’s mission. The conquest, colonizing and destroying of other cultures were all done with a view to do mission in a militant manner. But God’s mission must achieved by respecting each individual’s intrinsic worth, the right to freedom and independence, and respecting differences among peoples. Seeing the divine in the midst of a plurality of experiences is the need of the hour. God’s mission has to be sought in new and varied ways by the churches in the rapidly changing life situations we see in our own time. Rather than the militant missions of yester years, it will be the peace-building, soothing, sustaining activities of Christian mission that will be welcomed as the work of God in the present communally torn Indian situation, and indeed throughout the world."

+ Fr. Thomas Varghese Chavadyel, On Orthodox Mission in India, http://malankaraorthodoxchurch.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=234

On the Education of our Children

HG Bishop Thomas of Charleston, Oakland and the Mid-Atlantic of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese has written a wonderful article on various education options. 

"Whatever teaching method you choose, Christ must be at the head of the classroom. The icon of Christ is what your children must view in you, in their teachers, on the screens of their computers, and in the faces of their peers." + HG Bishop Thomas of Mid-Atlantic Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese.

"You may, being teachers, be interested to know how we teach our faith. Well, I could put it in a nut-shell by saying, badly, because if what I have said in the beginning makes any sense to you, it is not by making children to learn doctrinal formularies or formal prayers or any such thing that you make a person into a Christian or an Orthodox. He must be introduced into an experience. And an experience can be caught as one catches the flu, it is an infection, it’s not something which can be conveyed in a sterile manner. So that what we expect is that in the family people should have a sense of worship. I do not mean, do special things. It’s not by praying before a meal or not praying before a meal that one conveys a sense of a sacredness of the event, but I remember one of our young theologians saying, “Everything in life is an act of love divine even the food, which we eat, is divine love that has become edible.” And if the food is prepared with love, if it is served with beauty, if it is shared with reverence, if it is treated as a gift of God, a miracle, and for people of my generation and that of my parents this attitude is easy because we have gone so often without any food and in hunger, that really a peace of bread or any form of food is an act of God or an act of human love. So that is an example. The same could be applied to everything which is the life of the home — the way parents treat children and children treat parents."

+ Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1900-00-00-0-E-E-T-EN05-023Othodoxy.html

Also available is the Catechesis of the Good Sheppherd which has also been adapted to Orthodox Theology  (http://www.stathanasius.org/ministries/youth-education/catechesis/ ) and can be implemented as part of a child's liturgical life and their experience of the Holy Trinity.

Here's the letter by HG Bishop Thomas...

Training Up a Child: Educational Options for Orthodox Christians

by His Grace Bishop THOMAS

http://www.antiochian.org/christianeducation/TrainingUpAChild

http://byztex.blogspot.ae/2013/06/survey-on-orthodox-homeschooling.html

What can keep us together?

"What is the tremendous power which can keep people together under those circumstances? I think certainly not in a minimum of faith or a minimum of anything, but in a maximum of experience. An experience which is at the very heart and the root of everything that is. A personal knowledge and commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the only thing that can keep us together and this must be a commitment to Him personally, to Him in His uniqueness, to Him who is committed in a way that no one of us is committed. The image that fits here is that of the story of the storm in the Gospel. The Lord is at the heart of the storm and the disciples edging towards the shore, but Christ caused Peter to walk and come to where he is in the eye of the cyclone. That is where we should be for it is where Christ is. Only then can we be committed to one another.

I wonder whether this question of culture, polarisation and so on is not, like everything human, equivocal. The early disciples had nothing in common except the Lord Jesus Christ and the knowledge of Him crucified and risen. Now we have got too much in common, and the more we have in common according to nature the less we perceive we have according to grace. The more we insist on the cultural aspect the more we risk to lose the only one who is the Lord Jesus Christ and our God."

+ Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1972-10-00-1-E-E-T-EM02-039IsFellowshipPossible(Ecumenism).html

What is Orthodox?

"Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.

Almost daily, at least once, I get this question: what is Orthodox? what is Orthodoxy? What is the difference between Orthodox and Catholic? Or Orthodox and you name it? What is the Orthodox faith? What is the difference?

Occasionally some person will engage me, whether it's some person with a Ph.D who is working on some thesis, or someone who is writing an article in the newspaper, or someone who is often literally is living on the street, will ask, what is Orthodox? What's the difference? What's it about?

What is the difference between Orthodoxy and buddhism? What is the liturgy? What is prayer? Why do people have icons? Why do you have candles? Why fasting?

There are many answers of course one can give to this question. I'm sure many if not all of you at some point in your life have been asked this question by neighbours, friends and family. Certainly as I said it's almost a daily question here.

On Antinomy

"Now, this term antinomy seems first to have been used in classical Roman law to describe the circumstance of every jury trial: one side completely prosecutes while the other side entirely defends. According to all legal assumption, the truth can arise only through such jarring antinomical interaction. The philosophic use of the term begins with Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781); and from Kant's work forward, the word exhibits a powerful and complex life.

Antinomicalness is, above everything else, an experience. It is the experience of disjunction, the experience wherein human discursive rationality breaks helplessly apart in the face of - better, in the teeth of - dissonant, often harsh realities. Such realities are the very ground of all biblical (indeed, all human) experience. The agony of forced exile is, at the same moment the way of redemptive joy; the created world is simultaneously completely good, completely fallen, and completely redeemed; Christ is at once fully divine and fully human. There is no direct way wherein human reason alone can reconcile the disjunctive elements in these expereinces; equally, there is no way whereby any element can be eliminated without radically falsifying the experience. Our fallen rationality simply breaks down when it directly confronts such antinomies as these."

+ Dr Donald Sheehan, Excerpt from the Introduction of "The Psalms of David: Translated from the Septuagint Greek." (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013)

"Christianity is, in fact, a complexio oppositorum, which asserts in one breath two truths that at first might seem very difficult to reconcile: on the one hand, all Christian confessions grant that God truly gives Himself to man, and that He alone can do this, because His creature is in this respect utterly powerless; on the other hand, this gift would be a sham if God did not in reality make man live by His own divine life. There is a paradox here: in one sense, everything comes from God, and in another, everything comes from man, because no one is saved or damned who has not willed it. St. John’s phrase expresses this two-sided aspect of grace—that we should be called and should be the sons of God [1 John 3:1]. In other words, any theology of grace must insist both on the primacy of God who justifies and sanctifies man, and at the same time on the reality of regeneration."

+ From article "Grace Oecumenical" posted by Fr Aidan Kimel, http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/grace-oecumenical/

A Word to Married Couples

A Word to Married Couples
by Father Matthew the Poor
Source: "Words for our Time" (Chesterton: Concilliar Press 2013) 99-105.

Marriage: Partaking In The Mystery of the Infinite

"When we fall in love, even in a broken and sinful world, we sense a deep truth. Contrary to popular opinion, love is not blind. When we love another person, we see the other as they truly are. We see the dizzying depths that lie within this other person. Intuitively – not often articulated, but intuitively – we are drawn to the potential infinity that is within this other person. That is why we have a belief that the one we fall in love with is enough for us. "You are all I need," says the lover to the beloved, and that is true.

The experience of love reveals how, in each person, there lies within them – and I will submit you now a word, dense with meaning, from a  theologian… from the words of St. Simeon the new theologian… there is within each person the reason of things and the nature and the knowledge of beings within themselves, but this experience of the reason of things, that the other is infinitely great and there is depth in them that summarizes all that is created by God.

The unfathomable depth of this mystery that the other is, and that love opens us up to see in another, can also become the place of the greatest suffering in our life. The other – for the other, like us, is greater than heaven, yet, as the fathers remind us, it is even easier to understand heaven than ourselves. When love in this world is not lived in God, then sin will distort it. For rather than receiving the loved one as the image of God, we will force the other to become in our own image, to possess, to control, and to use.

Eucharist and Marriage

"In order that we might be one with Him not just in spirit but in body, flesh of His flesh and bone of His bones (cf Gen. 2:23), He granted us union with Himself through this bread. Every love finds fulfilment through unity and starts from likeness. The popular adage “Like attracts like” is an ancient one. The love associated with the married state seems somehow superior to other forms of love. “For this cause”, it says, “shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh” (Matt. 19:5). “This is a great mystery”, says the divine Paul, “but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:32). It says in that same passage that a man shall cleave and become one flesh, but not one spirit. We, by contrast, shall not only be joined to Christ’s body but mingled with it through partaking in this divine bread, and we shall not just become one body, but also one spirit. Do you see that the surpassing greatness of God’s love towards us comes about, and is manifested, through sharing this bread and this cup? For this reason “Burnt offering and sin offering hath he not required”, according to the Psalms, “But he hath prepared a body for us” (cf Ps. 40:6 Lxx)."

+ St Gregory Palamas