In English

The moment comes for Holy Communion and you’re about to approach the altar. Believe firmly that Christ is present, the king of all. When you see the priest offering you the body and blood of the Lord, don’t think that it’s the priest doing so but believe rather that the hand outstretched is that of Christ. Saint John Chrysostom

The prayer eases the soul, makes it love everyone. Everybody seems good to the soul and nothing bothers it. Abbess Theosemni, Holy Monastery of Chrysopiyi, Hania, Crete

If we want to please God and, through faith, become his heirs, and be called his children, begotten by the Holy Spirit, we have to acquire, above all else forbearance and patience. We have to bear bravely the sorrows, the afflictions, and all the vicissitudes that find us. That is to say, we have to bear the bodily ills, all the different forms of suffering, the ridicule and the insults that befall us. Saint Efraim the Syrian

Stop concerning yourself with the sins of others.  Examine yourself and see if you’re living the way God wants you to. Because, in the Lord’s own words, many people ‘see the mote in the eye of their brother but do not feel the beam in their own’. So don’t judge externally, trying to find fault with others, or you’ll be like that arrogant Pharisee who justified himself and mocked the publican. Elder Cleopa Ilie

When people are ill, they face bodily weaknesses or they’re tried in a variety of ways. In the beginning, they can’t feel their heart burning with love for God. In sickness and trials, the heart suffers. Faith and love demand a healthy and calm heart. Saint John Kronstadtskij

In humanism, the aim of education is to humanize people. But the aim of a Christian training is different. The ‘archetype’ at which our educational progress aims is Christ, as God and human, and the deified person in Christ. Elder Efraim Vatopaidinos

What God wants is for us to do good to others, both in this life and the next. If he didn’t see this as the right thing, he wouldn’t have given us the right to remember the dead in the divine liturgy, nor to have memorial services on the third, ninth and fortieth days, and after a year, which is something which devout people most certainly do. In other words, if this were a travesty, without profit and benefit, surely one of the many earlier, God-bearing saints, patriarchs, fathers and teachers would have been enlightened to put a stop to the delusion. But none of them ever tried to abolish memorial services. On the contrary, in fact, they all approved, ...

As far as possible we should have great kindness, great love so as to get through the trials and tribulations that come upon us. Abbess Makrina, Holy Monastery of the Odigitria, Portaria

When we fall, let’s fight above all against the demon of despair. Saint John the Sinaite

With joy, exultation and jubilation, the Church celebrates the mystery of the Incarnation of our Savior, Jesus Christ, in the lowly cave, in the manger of dumb beasts in Bethlehem. This is a ‘great and strange mystery’ but also an event of world-wide, spiritual and true importance. This event marks the first-fruits of the new creation, of the new world which God offers humankind. In doing so, he reveals the true knowledge both about the Triune God and about the free human person. The nativity of our Lord is a unique, unparalleled event: ‘Our Savior has visited us from on high, since God has appeared in the flesh. As a child he was born to us, a son who was given ...

Christ is the gift of God to man and the gift of man to God, but Christ is also the perfect gift of each man to his fellow. In Paradise, God was presenting Himself before man as an example for imitation and man lived thereby. Through the fall, however, he lost this direct contemplation of God’s Face. He hid himself ‘from the presence of the Lord God’ and became afraid that he would die if he saw His Creator. In the Book of Judges, we read that Manoah said to his wife, ‘We shall surely die, because we have seen God.’ When Christ came and assumed the humble human nature from the Holy Virgin, He was able to approach men without ...

In Church hymnography, which in essence is a commentary on the Biblical message concerning the salvation of the world, the loveliness of creation is described in a clear and poetic manner, as is its participation in all the wondrous events of the divine incarnation. The natural environment exists for humankind and draws us to the Creator ‘The heavens declare the glory of the Lord; the firmament proclaims the works of his hands’ (Ps. 18, 1), writes the psalmist, while the Nobel Laureate Odysseas Elytis writes about ‘The Maker of the clouds and waves who sleeps within us’ (AxionEsti, The Passion, reading 2, 6). But for there to be a path from the perceptible beauty of created things to him who is ...

The incarnation of God is the most important event in human history. It was the second intervention by the divine Creator in the universe he made. The incarnation of the Word occurred for the re-creation of the world, its Christification  and, in the end, its deification. God created a world that was ‘very good’ (Gen. 1, 31) with humankind as the outstanding work, the crown and pinacle of his creatures. According to the Fathers of the Church, creation wasn’t the result of any need on the part of God, who is entirely dispassionate, but in order that he could share his bliss with other beings, in particular with the immaterial angels and with human beings. The created cosmos is the supreme ...

The essence of  Christmas is God’s love, the compliant nature of divine love, God’s sacrifice, the riches of God’s loving condescension towards us. ‘God’ does not mean some indifferent ruler sitting high up in the clouds, as some ancient people depicted him, but means him who comes to us, close to us, wraps us in his embrace, sets us on his shoulders. He comes to redeem lost people, to bring them close to him, to place them in a new life, to make for them a new state of grace, love and unity with himself. This is the great issue for us, not all the other things with which we concern ourselves. This is where the essence is, this is where everything ...

‘In your swaddling-clothes you have loosed the bonds of transgressions And by great poverty have filled everyone with riches, merciful one. Laid in the manger of dumb beasts, pre-eternal Word of God, You free mortals of irrational evil’. (Troparion Ode 9, Sunday of the Forefathers) The shackles fastened by the innumerable transgressions and crimes in which human history is swathed are loosed by a babe in swaddling-clothes. Real riches, which people generally look for in the wrong places and in the wrong way, are freely granted through extreme poverty. Absurd and destructive evil is not rooted out by rules of criminal justice, nor by seeking enemies in the faces of other people, but through the extreme humility of a manger, which prefigures the tomb of God the ...

I was once part of a group of pilgrims and we were talking to a great Elder, Saint Sophrony in Essex, who asked us which we thought was the greatest virtue. One said: ‘The virtue of love’. ‘No’, replied the Elder. ‘Although it’s the first and great commandment from God himself to us, it’s not the greatest virtue. Even love itself, which is rightly held to be the  crown, since God is love, is just a caricature of a kind of egotism unless we have what I asked about’. ‘Then perhaps faith’, the same person said. ‘Not that, either’, said the Elder, smiling kindly. ‘Because if you think about it, even faith can be an “attribute” of the devil. Scripture tells us ...

+ B A R T H O L O M E W BY GOD’S MERCY ARCHBISHOP OF CONSTANTINOPLE-NEW ROME AND ECUMENICAL PATRIARCH TO ALL THE PLENITUDE OF THE CHURCH GRACE, MERCY AND PEACE FROM THE SAVIOR CHRIST BORN IN BETHLEHEM * * * Brother concelebrants and blessed children, Having once again arrived at the splendid feast of the Nativity in the flesh of our Savior Christ , who visited us from the heights, we glorify with psalms and hymns His all-heavenly name. The Incarnation of the pre-eternal Word of God is “the crowning of our salvation,” the “eternal mystery” of divine-human communion that transcends all reason. As St. Maximus the Confessor says so eloquently, “as a loving God, He truly became human assuming the essence of humankind, although ...