Orthodoxy for all

From the very beginning there were two different ideas about Christianity and the Christian community. The Jewish view is now called rationalistic. Christianity is reduced to a personal, inner connection between each individual and the Divine Person and to faith in Him and His work. At the same time, the Person Himself, as being in heaven, "conceals" everything. The concept of Him becomes obscure, and His teaching is substituted. And man "binds himself" not to the Divine Person, but to His teaching. Gnosticism degenerated into mystical sects. Mystics base their understanding of Christianity on principles of the heart, on love for the Person of Christ. They affirm the necessity of knowing the living, visible, and tangible Christ. And in this they are right, for the Gospel of Christ contains precisely this concept. But the mystics are wrong when they seek and find the living, tangible and visible Christ where they seek and find Him. Rationalists don't lie; they me...

1. We pray to You, Lord, Lead each of our deeds before it begins with Your Holy Spirit, and, assisting us, guide us in its completion. May each of our prayers and deeds always receive its beginning from You, and that what was begun may be perfected by You, and successfully reach its end or destination. - (Author unknown) ----------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Lord, I do not know what to ask of You. You alone know what I need. You love me more than I know how to love myself. Father, give Your servant what I do not know how to ask for myself. I dare not ask for a cross or consolation: I only stand before You. My heart is open to You; You see needs that I do not know. Look and do according to Your mercy. Strike and heal, cast me down and raise me up. I revere and remain silent before Your holy will and Your laws, incomprehensible to me. I offer myself as a sacrifice to You. I have no other desire than the desire to fulfill Your will. Teach me to pray. Pray wi...

Orthodoxy is the preparation of souls for this Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven. The schismatic Churches have, in lesser or greater measure, forgotten this truth and compromised with the world; Orthodoxy alone has remained other-worldly. The aim of the Orthodox life (of which we all fall miserably short) is to live in this life in constant remembrance of the next life, in fact to see even in this life, through the Grace of our Lord, the beginning of that life. This is the meaning of the “joy” of which I just spoke, and which to me is the strongest proof of the truth of Orthodoxy. The saint lives always in this joy—I will tell you later some wonderful stories of some of our modern Russian saints and how this joy was expressed in them. And Orthodoxy alone continues to produce saints—I mean real saints, not just “good men.” The present Archbishop of San Francisco (he came here recently from Paris) is such a man. He leads a life of real crucifixion—the strictest asceticism (he never even lie...

His life: Fr. Nicetas Lekhan - was born in 1893 in the Poltava district. In 1923 he was ordained to the priesthood in the Dnepropetrovsk diocese and served in the village of Ovsyuki, Cherkassky province. In this village there lived some True Orthodox nuns, who had come there from various closed monasteries. They told him about sergianism - the way in which the official Russian Church under Metropolitan Sergius had surrendered to the communists. But he was young then and did not listen to them particularly. But then, as he himself related, the Lord sent him a penance for his service in the "sergianist church" - he was arrested. Throughout his years in prison he considered it a punishment, and not an exploit. He thought the same with regard to those convinced sergianist bishops and priests who were arrested in spite of their agreement with the atheists. When Fr. Nicetas had worked out the real church situation, he even wrote a book about it. After the end of the Second World W...

Part 1: After the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917, an open campaign of terror was launched against all religions, and particularly against the Russian Orthodox Church. One of the targeted groups was the clergy, especially those of the Russian Orthodox Church. Priests, monks and nuns were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, drowned in holes in the ice, given Communion with melted lead. In the summer of 1918 in one diocese, 47 clergymen were shot, drowned, or axed to death. An estimated 3,000 were put to death in that year alone. Seven decades later, the situation was different. Soviet communism, unable to compete with the West economically and ideologically bankrupt, was in crisis. In 1991, under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. The Soviet Union disbanded, but did it disappear, or did it take on a new form? As described by Charles Glover in his book, Black Wind White Snow, in 1987 the Moscow Communis...

Live of Apostle Bartholomew: Saint Bartholomew the Apostle is one and the same person as Nathanael , mentioned in the Gospel of Saint John the Theologian ( John 1:45ff ; John 21:2 ). Nathanael was from the Galilean city of Cana. The Lord called him among the first to follow Him. Here is how it happened. When the Lord called Philip, he was filled with great joy, and his heart longed to share this joy with others. Then he went to his friend Nathanael. “We have found Him,” he hastened to convey the greatest news to Nathanael with a joyful face, “we have found Him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote: this is Jesus, the son of Joseph, of Nazareth.” But Nathanael doubted: Philip’s words seemed strange to him. Nazareth was a city in Galilee, and Galilee was home to many pagans, with whom the native Jews who inhabited Galilee maintained close relationships. For this reason, they were held in contempt by the other Jews , and Nathanael shared this general prejudice against the Galil...

  The Axion Estin ("It is Truly Meet") Icon of the Mother of God is in the high place of the altar (synthronon) of the cathedral church of the Karyes monastery on Mount Athos. During the reign of the emperors Basil and Constantine Porphyrogenitos, and the patriarchate of St Nicholas Chrysoberges (984-995), a certain Elder and his disciple lived near Karyes, the administrative center of the Holy Mountain. One Saturday night the Elder went to Karyes for the all-night vigil. He left, instructing his disciple to remain behind and read the service in their cell. As it grew dark, the disciple heard a knock on the door. When he opened the door, he saw an unknown monk who called himself Gabriel, and he invited him to come in. They stood before the icon of the Mother of God and read the service together with reverence and compunction. During the Ninth Ode of the Canon, the disciple began to sing "My soul magnifies the Lord…" with the Irmos of St Cosmas the Hymnographer (Octo...

  Chinese Martyrs According to tradition, the first to bring the good news of the Son of God to China were the so-called Thomists, Christians from India, where the Apostle Thomas preached. But the Thomists' preaching was not successful. Somewhat more successful, though not by much, were the Nestorians—heretics who, as exiles from the Byzantine Empire, traveled far to the East and reached the Chinese Kingdom. The Roman Catholic Church later sent some of its missionaries to China, including the Jesuits. Their most famous missionary was Xavier. But the Jesuits' internecine strife provoked the Chinese, who killed some and expelled others. After the Roman missionaries, Protestant missionaries from England and America came to China. Finally, an Orthodox mission appeared – a Russian one. The Chinese Orthodox Brotherhood in Shanghai consists of many members, both Chinese and Russian. At the end of the 19th century, Europe held all nations on Earth under its sway, with a few exceptions....

Our goal is to die to this world and live for God, I will quote the New Testament and Saints:

Valeriu Gafencu (1921–1952), known as “the Saint of the Prisons,” was born on January 24, 1921, in Sângera, near Bălți, in Bessarabia. He was the son of Vasile and Elena Gafencu, wealthy and pious peasants. His father, a man of integrity and national spirit, had participated in the 1918 union of Bessarabia with Romania and later returned to farm and teach in the village. Valeriu grew up in a harmonious Christian family marked by love, purity, and faithfulness. A gifted and sensitive student, Valeriu excelled in school, loved literature, and showed strong moral character. After graduating high school in Bălți in 1940, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law in Iași. Following the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia, the family took refuge in Romania. As a young man of idealistic and enthusiastic nature, Valeriu joined the Brotherhood of the Cross (Frăția de Cruce) during high school and later became a leader of high school students in Iași within the Legionnaire movement. In autumn 1941, at the...

Excerpt from the work of St.John Maximovich , Archbishop of Chernigov (1697–1712) and Metropolitan of Tobolsk and All Siberia (1712–1715), who died on June 10, 1715, and was canonized in 1916. The work itself, first written by the saint in Latin for students of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy and later translated by him into Slavonic-Russian, bears the following title: “ Heliotropion , that is, a sunflower representing the conformity of human will with the Divine will.” The full book can be read here in PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NVIwJFx1JPtIfIPO58jgJgfDEqRijhRw/view?usp=drive_link Or online: https://azbyka-org.translate.goog/otechnik/Ioann_Tobolskij/iliotropion/?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Saint Righteous Alexy Mechev was born on March 17, 1859, into the pious family of the choirmaster of the Chudov Cathedral Choir. His father, Alexei Ivanovich Mechev, the son of an archpriest from the Kolomna district, was saved from death by freezing temperatures as a child on a cold winter's night by Saint Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna. Among the boys from the clergy families of the Moscow diocese, selected for their musicality, he was brought late that evening to the metropolitan's metochion on Troitsky Lane. While the children were eating dinner, the Metropolitan suddenly became alarmed, quickly dressed, and went out to inspect the arriving convoy. In one of the sleds, he discovered a sleeping boy, left there through oversight. Seeing this as Divine Providence, Metropolitan Philaret showed special attention and care to the child he had saved, constantly caring for him and, later, for his family.

A great teacher of the Church, Saint Cyril of Alexandria was born in Alexandria itself. He was descended from noble Christian parents and, on his mother's side, was the nephew of the renowned Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria. Cyril received a very brilliant education for his time: he thoroughly mastered all the secular wisdom of the Hellenic faith, as well as the Divine Scriptures and Christian doctrine. Cyril's uncle, Patriarch Theophilus, seeing his nephew's brilliant abilities and chaste lifestyle, enrolled him in his clergy, ordaining the young Cyril as an archdeacon. And so Saint Cyril became like a fragrant flower planted in the church's vineyard, blossoming with sublime purity and fragrant with the divinely wise teachings of Christ's Church.

  The impious Emperor Licinius , having assumed the scepter after the impious Maximian and imitating him in everything, immediately launched a great persecution against those distinguished for their piety. He sent a decree concerning this impious decree to all cities and countries. During this time, many brave soldiers of Christ were killed: Licinius slew the forty martyrs of Sebaste , as well as renowned warriors and princes of his own court, and finally, he killed three hundred men from Macedonia.

Righteous Paul of Taganrog was born on November 8, 1792, to Pavel Stozhkov, a nobleman in the Krolevetsky district of Chernigov province. At baptism, he was named in honor of St. Paul the Confessor. His parents wanted to provide their son with an education and a good social position, but the young man strove for salvation and a God-pleasing life through prayer and pilgrimage to holy places. At age 25, following the Lord's words: "...sell all that thou hast and distribute to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven" ( Luke 18:22 ), blessed Paul distributed his inherited estate, freed the peasants, and, with his father's blessing, set out on his cherished pilgrimage to the holy monasteries, hoping to find rest for his soul under their protection.

The sacred memories of the Lord's suffering, to which the Holy Forty Days of Lent lead us, must inevitably renew, both in our consciousness and in our inner state of heart, those great Christian principles of love and humility that should permeate our entire lives. For if we are Christians not only in name but truly desire to be so, then, of course, we cannot help but feel, we cannot help but experience a special uplift of spirit, a special spiritual joy, when we again see the love of Christ triumphant even on the cross, the love of Christ conquering the malice of enemies, the treachery of the traitor, and the horror of mortal suffering. We cannot help but feel spiritual joy when we again hear that love and humility—these great covenants of Christ—conquer or have already conquered the world (John 16:33). So, if anyone recognizes himself as a Christian, and if anyone recognizes the task of his Christian life, in the complete internal spiritual rebirth and renewal of his entire life,...

Discourse of St. Vincent of Lerins, priest and monk of the monastery of Lerins, written in 434. In view of the Scriptures which teach, "Ask your father, and he will tell you; your elders, and they will tell you" ( Deut. 32:7 ), and also, "Incline your ear, and hear the words of the wise" ( Proverbs 22:17 ), and again, "My son, do not forget my teaching, and let your heart keep my commandments" ( Proverbs 3:1 ), it seems to me, the least of all God's servants, that with God's help it will not be at all useless if I set down in writing what I have reverently received from the Holy Fathers. I will begin this in the name of God, and will write down the tradition bequeathed to me by my ancestors, not with the arrogance of some author, but rather with the accuracy of a faithful copyist. Two sources of Orthodox dogma Often, with all diligence and the greatest attention, I addressed the question to many men adorned with holiness and the gift of teaching: i...

Beginning in the 13th century, the doctrine of God’s Church was progressively obscured in the West. Instead of being the mystical unity of the faithful in the Body of Christ, the Church was defined in purely external terms: to be in the Church one needed to be subject to the authority of the Bishop of Rome. The first official dogmatic statement to this effect came at the Fourth Lateran Council (1213-15) which claimed that the Roman church “through the Lord’s disposition has a primacy of ordinary power over all other churches inasmuch as it is the mother and mistress of all Christ’s faithful.” In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII issued his famous bull Unam Sanctam which stated: “We declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” In 1327, Pope John XXII declared that anyone who rejected the divine primacy of the Pope was a heretic: “That blessed Peter the Apostle had no more authority than the other Apostl...

What is God's permission? What mysterious and painful aspect of human existence does it touch? God's permission is those very moments when it seems He turns away from us, leaving us alone with our suffering, misfortune, and sin. More than one generation has asked: why does God, the Almighty and Merciful, allow evil, sorrow, torment, tragedy, and suffering in the world? Why doesn't He intervene when man falls into the abyss of lawlessness? This question is perhaps one of the most tormenting in human spiritual life. And if we consider the meaning of permission, it reveals, first and foremost, the tragedy of freedom. God, having created man in His own image and likeness, gave him the greatest gift—freedom. But this freedom also carries with it a terrible burden: responsibility for one's choices. And so, man, endowed with this gift, often becomes hostage to his passions, desires, and mistakes. And God allows this to happen. Why? Is He indifferent to our suffering? No, it...

Archimandrite Tikhon (Nevidimov) As the Lord continues to instruct the disciples before their dispatch into the world, His words become especially serious and almost alarming. He does not conceal the difficulties ahead or portray the path of faith as an easy one. On the contrary, He speaks directly: "Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves." This image reveals the real situation of a person living according to the Gospel. A sheep among wolves is a defenseless creature, lacking the strength to fight. Christ does not arm His disciples with swords or promise them external dominion. He sends them with other weapons—truth, love, and inner freedom. But precisely for this reason He adds: "Be wise as serpents and simple as doves." These words connect two qualities that at first glance seem contradictory. The serpent's wisdom signifies sobriety and prudence. A disciple of Christ must not be naive and thoughtless. He must recognize danger, understand human ...

  The divine apostle commands: Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you, and considering the outcome of their life, imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever ( Heb. 13:7–8 ). And truly the Lord Jesus Christ , the eternal Word of God—the Logos of God, and the eternal Wisdom of God—is the same yesterday and today and forever, the same from eternity to eternity, the unchanging Only-begotten Son of God and God our Savior. As the eternal Love of God and the eternal Lover of Mankind, He created the human race in the beginning, called it from nothingness into being, and in the last times He, the same and unchanging, abounding in love and love for mankind, became incarnate of the Holy Theotokos "for us men and for our salvation." He, as the wise Solomon says, created both small and great, and cares equally for all ( Wisdom of Solomon 6:7 ), and therefore He gave prophets and righteous men in the Old Testament to teach and instruct the ...

 1.The Kyiv Pechersk Lavra caught fire in Kyiv after a Russian attack. On the night of June 15, Russia launched a massive air strike on Ukraine. According to rescuers, four people were killed and 25 injured in Kyiv. Following the attack, a fire broke out on the roof of the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. The fire covered approximately 800 square meters. The Art Arsenal museum complex also caught fire, engulfing approximately 1,000 square meters. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha stated ( https://t.me/Ukraine_MFA/9309 ) that Kyiv will initiate procedures within UNESCO and other international mechanisms due to the attack on the heritage site. In case readers will start to blame NATO and CIA for this, here is what the Russian Department of Defense itself states: The Russian Ministry of Defense commented ( https://t.me/mod_russia/64548 ) on the massive airstrikes in Ukraine on the night of June 15, which included damage to the Dormition Cathedral ( https://t.me/s...

  For the mind, this immaterial nature and light, akin, one might say, to that first supreme light, from which everything is and which is above everything, is wholly directed towards that existential light, in an immaterial persistent and sincere prayer recklessly rushing towards God, transformed in this impulse even to angelic dignity and, like an angel, illuminated by the First Light [St. Gregory the Theologian. Conversation 40, 5: PG 36, 364 B. ] (Quoted from: St. Gregory Palamas. Triads in Defense of Those Who Practice Sacred Hesychia. Part 3 of the Triad I. Answer 3, 39)