Христос посеред нас! Christ is amongst us!
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
As we are now beginning our Great Lenten Journey, I want to share with you the prayer of St. Ephraim. You may or may not be familiar with it, but either way it is a prayer that we all should begin to incorporate into our daily prayers during Lent. The Prayer is as follows (for the sake of explanation I have broken the prayer into three parts and italicized the font):
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February Pastoral Message
Христос посеред нас! Christ is amongst us!
I want to talk a little about Orthodox saints in this month’s article because I am often approached with questions about who our saints are and why they are so important. Orthodox saints can be found in many different cultures, areas, and times. The one thing that unites them all is that every saint achieves a lifestyle that is a reflection of Christ’s teachings. What makes them so special is that while achieving this they remain unique individuals. Following Christ does not mean that we lose our free will, and the saints of our church understood this and gave themselves up freely.
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January Pastoral Message
Христос Родився! Славімо Його!
As we draw nearer to the celebration of the Birth of Christ I wanted to examine in this month’s article the Natures of Christ, how He fits into the Holy Trinity, and the heresies that have come up in our history. When we call Jesus, “Christ”, we are recognizing that he is of two generations, or two births, the birth from “His eternal Father, an eternal generation, begotten before time, cause and reason”[1] and from the “Virgin Mary, in time and for our sakes”[2]. However, through history not everyone had the same point of view in regards to the understanding of how we now see the Natures of Christ. These heresies were formulated by different people at different times and many if not all these heresies was eventually disproved.
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