May 19, 2012

On Attending Church and Receiving Communion

Monks of St. Bishoy Celebrating the Divine Liturgy

When the time comes, and espe­cially the time put aside for God and His tem­ple, a feast day or the hour of Divine Ser­vices, hurry to tear your­self away from busi­ness and worldly cares and vol­un­tar­ily and zeal­ously offer your­self to God in His church. When you enter the church bring to mind the promise of […]

The Conversion of Egypt Prophesied by the Prophet Isaiah

Icon of the Flight to Egypt by Dr. Stephane Renè

And the Lord shall be known to Egypt and the Egyp­tians shall know the Lord in that day and shall do sac­ri­fice and obla­tion; yes, they shall vow a vow unto the Lord and per­form it” (Isa­iah 19:21). O how change­able is the heart of man! But, of all of his changes, one is more shame­ful than […]

Three Hermits by Leo Tolstoy

Sketch of Ascetics

A BISHOP was sail­ing from Archangel to the Solovétsk Monastery; and on the same ves­sel were a num­ber of pil­grims on their way to visit the shrines at that place. The voy­age was a smooth one. The wind favourable, and the weather fair. The pil­grims lay on deck, eat­ing, or sat in groups talk­ing to one another. […]

The Faithful Husband and the Unfaithful Wife

St. Joakim and St. Anna

I will tell you of another char­ac­ter­is­tic of a proper spouse, which is extremely dif­fi­cult to find in our day. But we did encounter one such per­son. He was in every way a per­fect char­ac­ter, a Chris­t­ian, and com­pletely social. He mar­ried late, around thirty years old, not because he was averse to mar­riage, but because he thought […]

To My Soul” by St. Gregory the Theologian

Gregory_the_Theologian - La_Martorana_Palermo

You have a job to do, soul, and a great one, if you like: exam­ine your­self, what it is you are and how you act, where you come from, and where you’re going to end, and whether to live is this very life you’re liv­ing, or some­thing else besides. You have a job to do, soul; by these […]

The Responsibility of Being a Temple of the Holy Spirit

Pentecost, the Descent of the Holy Spirit

Do you not know that your body is the tem­ple of the Holy Spirit Who is in you, Whom you have from God and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price” (1 Corinthi­ans 6: 19–20). For what, brethren, did our bod­ies become the tem­ple of the Holy Spirit? Because, we are purchased […]

An Image of Faith from Imbaba

A Coptic Christian priest attends service prayer at the Saint Mary Church in Cairo

On Sat­ur­day, May 5, an upris­ing of Mus­lims against Cop­tic Chris­tians in west­ern Cairo left 12 Chris­tians dead and the Church of St. Mary gut­ted by fire. When we heard of this most recent vio­lence against Chris­tians in Egypt, we were all under­stand­ably sad­dened and angered. In the midst of this tribu­la­tion, God grants us […]

The Prayers of Preparation for the Divine Liturgy with Recordings

Monks of St. Bishoy Celebrating the Divine Liturgy

The Divine Liturgy is the great­est expres­sion of our wor­ship as Ortho­dox Chris­tians. When we wor­ship God in the Divine Liturgy, the heav­enly and the earthly are united through our par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Divine Grace of the Mys­tery. The Liturgy is not sim­ply some­thing sym­bolic or a grand play for spec­ta­tors to observe, but rather, it […]

Psalm 135 in the Coptic and Byzantine Rites

Greek Orthodox icon depicting King David

I recently came across a record­ing of Psalm 135 accord­ing to the Byzan­tine rite. This psalm is also chanted in Cop­tic Ortho­dox wor­ship as the Sec­ond Can­ti­cle of the Mid­night Praise. It is inter­est­ing to lis­ten to both and see the sim­i­lar­i­ties in the spirit of wor­ship between the Ori­en­tal Ortho­dox and East­ern Ortho­dox Churches. Psalm […]

On the Use of the Septuagint (LXX) in the New Testament

Septuagint

Stu­dents of the Patris­tic Ortho­dox Bible Study on Tues­day night are undoubt­edly famil­iar with the dif­fer­ences between the Sep­tu­agint (abbre­vi­ated “LXX”), the offi­cial text of the Old Tes­ta­ment used by the Ortho­dox Church, and the Masoretic (some­times called “Hebrew”) text, which is found in vir­tu­ally all mod­ern Bibles. Essen­tially, the Sep­tu­agint is a much older and […]