Icon of Saint Mary of Egypt and Saint Zosimas
The Fifth Sunday of Lent:
The Sunday of Saint Mary of Egypt
On the Fifth Sunday of Lent the Orthodox Church commemorates our Righteous Mother Mary of Egypt. Learn More »
Listen to the hymns of the Sunday of Saint Mary of Egypt Listen »
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On the Fifth Saturday of Great Lent, the Saturday of the Akathist, we commemorate the “Laudation of the Virgin” Icon of the Most Holy Theotokos. In 625, when the emperor Heraclius was fighting the Persians, the Khan sent forces to attack Constantinople by land and by sea. Patriarch Sergius urged the people not to lose heart, but to trust in God. A procession was made around the city with the Cross of the Lord, the robe of the Virgin, the Icon of the Savior not made by hands, and the Hodigitria Icon of the Mother of God. The Patriarch dipped the Virgin’s robe in the sea, and the city’s defenders beat back the Khan’s sea forces. The sea became very rough, and many boats sank. The invaders retreated, and the people of Constantinople gave thanks to God and to His Most Pure Mother. On two other occasions, in 655 and 705, the Theotokos protected the city from Saracen invaders. A feastday dedicated to the Laudation of the Virgin was established to commemorate these victories. The Akathist to the Mother of God is believed to originate from this period, and its use has spread from Constantinople to other Orthodox lands. The icon before which the Akathist was sung was given to the Dionysiou Monastery on Mt. Athos by Emperor Alexius Comnenos. There, it began to flow with myrrh. There were at least three wonderworking copies of this icon in Russia before the Revolution. This icon shows the Mother of God seated on a throne, and surrounded by Prophets with scrolls. |
After the obligatory pot-luck reception, the ethnic Orthodox packed-up their “Lenten cheese-pies” and climbed into their luxury sedans and SUV’s so that they could go out for some “real food.” Some converts wondered why they gave up Amazing Grace for the Dismissal Hymn of St. Mark (aren’t they both in third tone, after all?). Other converts dutifully wrapped-up their head coverings before scarfing down the remaining strawberries dipped in dairy-free chocolate. Everyone felt a little-bit better about the “Triumph of Orthodoxy”, the prospects for Orthodox unity, and the inevitability of “Making America Orthodox.”
But what is it all for?
Over two centuries after the first Orthodox came to America and four generations after the immigration of the Great Unwashed who established the majority of this country’s parishes, the prospects for an indigenous American Orthodoxy seem more incense-clouded than ever. People on both side of the argument are still pumping out opinion pieces and quasi-academic articles about the role of language and culture in American Orthodoxy (yawn!). The secularists among us are still trying to convince us that God is pro-choice (huh?). The most visible sign of an emerging American Orthodoxy is that another major jurisdiction now has its own set of controversies and accompanying scandal-mongering website (this is the faith of the Apostles?)
Those of us who pray for a unified American Orthodoxy and who are truly convicted that America needs a powerful Orthodox witness need not lose heart. We’ve been beating the wind for so long debating the role of language and the respective virtues of beeswax versus paraffin candles that we have made ourselves raw and more than a little-bit seasick.
I propose that if we want to make it to the distant shores of American Orthodoxy that we change the tack of the Ark of Salvation in the following three ways.
Our Mission
No matter how many times I try to convince myself otherwise, I can only find two biblical reasons for the Church’s existence: The Great Commission and helping the “Least of our brethren.” If we were to read the gazillions of words our jurisdictional headquarters and parishes churn out daily, we would be hard pressed to conclude that the Church’s divine vocation is to make new Christians and to help those in need. This is not to imply that our clergy and lay-leaders are not faithful, intelligent and well-intentioned. We’ve just forgotten why we set sail in the first place.
Everyone is guilty of this mission creep. Some Orthodox want to preserve their ethnic identity, others the glory of Byzantium or Mother Russia. There is the pietism of prostrating super-Orthodox and the petulance of the president of the parish organization who has been told by the priest that there really is a Nativity Fast. We produce DVD’s, CD-ROM’s and Websites with ease. In all of our busyness, we forget that Jesus Christ called us to “make disciples of all nations” and to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.
Some might argue that the Church exists to impart God’s grace through the sacraments. Obviously! But what are we to do with that grace? Feel really good about ourselves so that the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” can become the “Triumphalism of Orthodoxy?”
Please do not think that I am advocating the abolition of parish basketball leagues or that I am denigrating the importance of the sacraments. My plea is this: Can’t we all agree that every Orthodox jurisdiction in America, every diocese, archdiocese, metropolis and every parish exists principally to convert people to Jesus Christ and to help the needy? The day that we adopt this biblical vision of Church is the day when we will find ourselves less than a generation away from Orthodoxy unity.
Sheep and Goats
Ask a priest the following: “Father, how many families are there in your parish?” You’ll probably get an answer like this: “We have 525 families on our mailing list, 350 that participate in the parish, and 325 that support the Church.” These aren’t useless numbers; we just don’t know how to use them.
This hypothetical parish is probably wasting a lot of time going after the 175 “lost sheep” families (525-350=175) Every year there will be phone campaigns, adjustments in schedules, and linguistic concessions made specifically with the hopes of bringing home the “lost sheep.” If we were honest with ourselves, we’d recognize that these 175 aren’t lost sheep. They are goats.
Sheep are part of a flock that follows the Shepherd. Goats are cranky loners that eat garbage and want to do their own thing. Those 175 families know where the church is; they choose not to be one of the flock. So why not just say, “My parish has 350 families, and we’re trying to get them all as involved as possible. There are another 175 Orthodox families out there whom we visit if they’re in the hospital, but they have chosen not to be members of the Church.”
Why is this shift in perspectives so important? Once we know the real membership of a parish, we can get a better handle on that community’s make-up. Not all churches are the same. Some are composed principally of recent immigrants, others of American-born. Some are mainly college-educated, others blue-collar. Some think that non-dairy coffee creamer is “Pharisee powder,” others think that chicken is “Lenten” because it’s not beef or pork.
Now that the parish knows who it is, that flock can go out and do what God has called it to do: Make disciples and help people. An ethnic blue-collar parish will approach evangelism and outreach differently than a suburban convert church. But both must be engaged in this activity. Regardless of a community’s demographics, once her members make a commitment to adhering to the Great Commission and helping the least among us, God will bless that church greatly.
This paring down of membership lists would provide as much clarity for national jurisdictional offices as it would for local parishes. Count the number of Orthodox parishes in the US and do some multiplication. It is mathematically impossible for there to be more than a few hundred thousand faithful Orthodox Christians in America. If we would stop saying that there are 3 million or 5 million (or whatever the number du jour is) American Orthodox, then we could begin to shape a Church that serves her members and that is dedicated to meeting the needs of Americans.
The Priests
While the future of American Orthodoxy is up to God, He has entrusted that future to His Priests. The prospect for an American Orthodoxy’s success depends greatly upon the way that our priests do Church, and the way that our people treat their priests.
Most everyone would agree that it is a blessing that we are seeing the end of the “professional” cleric: the hale and hearty good-fellow that chomps cigars, hits golf-balls, and sips Courvoisier with the boys. At the same time, the new model of priest being churned out of our seminaries might need to go back to the drawing board.
There is an emerging perception among young clergy that if we only did more vespers and parakleses that we would “save the Church.” First, the Church doesn’t need saving, Jesus already did that. Second, anyone who thinks that a plentitude of long services is a panacea need only look at the plight of Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe and the Balkans: by following exclusively this paradigm in parish life, the Church is slowly bleeding to death at the hands of the Evangelicals and secularists.
The Church in America needs priests who are themselves repenting; Priests that know that the sacraments and the services are the beginning and the end of what we do, but that in between that Alpha and Omega, there is a whole lot of visiting, teaching, and developing of programs and strategies aimed at proclaiming the Good News; Priests that remember that Jesus spent more time with harlots and tax-collectors than He did in the Temple.
American Orthodoxy needs mission priests, not married monastics.
For their own part, when it comes to the way priests in America are treated, the laity needs to wake up and smell the incense. During the course of his ministry, every priest will suffer withering attacks from people who “do not like him.” These assaults will take the form of phone calls to hierarchs, anonymous letter-writing campaigns, and petition drives.
To anyone among our laity that wants a unified American Orthodox Church but insists on using your parish priest to play out your unresolved feelings about your own father, please ask yourself the following before calling your next “secret” meeting. Is your priest essentially moral (not an adulterer, drunk, or child-molester)? Has he followed the teachings of Scripture and the mandates of the Canons? Does he foster a liturgical and sacramental life in the parish? Does he preach and teach? Does he visit the sick?
If the answer to all of the above is “yes”, then instead of calling a secret meeting, why not sit down with your priest and resolve your problems like two Christians? After all, don’t you both want the same things: to make new Christians and to help the afflicted? (If the two of you don’t want these things, don’t waste your time sitting down together, just go to the driving range and then have a brandy and a smoke.)
The next Sunday of Orthodoxy is a year away. What will be the subtext of next year’s icon procession? Will the clergy be looking forward to Pan-Orthodox vespers about as much as they look forward to removal of polyps from their lower alimentary canal? Will the laity be judging their sisters and brothers by the length of their head coverings or the depth of their prostrations?
More importantly, what will Sunday of Orthodoxy 2057 be like? If we can all agree to a common biblical vision for the Church based on the Great Commission and the care of “the least of our brethren”; if we can stop wasting our time going after the goats; if we can get the parish clergy to stop playing monk and start being mission priests, while convincing the laity that “pinata” is not Spanish for priest, then maybe future generations will celebrate the triumphs of Third Millennium America Orthodoxy with the same vigor that we rejoice in Byzantine Orthodoxy’s victories during the First Millennium.
Rev. Aris P. Metrakos is a Greek Orthodox priest and pastor of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Columbia, SC. A former Naval Aviator, he spent seven years on active duty prior to attending seminary.
This summer Basil is old enough to attend our diocese summer camp; Fr. is going to take a group of children from our Church and stay at camp the whole week. I ran across this shirt tonight on line and I think I will buy a few for Fr. to wear at camp; it gets REALLY hot there (hard to be in clergy clothes all week). The shirt says “Jesus Christ Conquers” Pretty neat! 
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I like the polo shirt and the hat too.
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In a previous post Kelly asked what it means to be tonsured at baptism. That is a GREAT question so I decided to blog about it. Thank you Kelly.
The sacrament of baptism restores the image and likeness of
God with the child. When we anoint with oil, we reconcile
the child to God. When we immerse the child, God, through
the Church, “gives” a new life – a personal resurrection.
When we chrismate, the child receives the additional gift
of the Holy Spirit – a personal Pentecost. The next step
or movement in the baptismal service is the rite of tonsure.
Tonsuring, the cutting of the hair, is a symbol of obedience
and sacrifice. It is seen as furthering the restoration of
the child away from the fallen world. To do this, we must
always be willing to obey God and be ready to sacrifice for
Him. By offering a piece of hair, the child can offer his
first free and joyful sacrifice to God. In addition, the
tonsuring continues the theme of the entire baptism service:
the rejection of the world with its pleasures and cares.
This is all the child has to offer and yet the offering is
done to offer the child fully to God.The priest asks God to bless the child as God blessed David
the King by the hand of the prophet Samuel. When he cuts the
baby’s hair, he says: “The servant of God______, is tonsured
in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.”
We have had a really lovely day today. The weather has been beautiful! The children and I enjoyed lunch out with our friends and a walk in the park around the pond. The baby is so cute in her little pram ; when the wind blows she catches her breath. Basil is on running team and we have been going to the park after school so he can run a laps around the pond. Yesterday Jonah moved up a level in swimming , earning his orange ribbon; he is thrilled! Nicholas began Orthography this week and learns two new spelling words a day. Maria~Angelica is getting her first tooth and she is enjoying learning to crawl. Fr. is busy with Church and his OCF ministry at the University in the college town not far from here.
~CONGRATULATIONS Tamara, Cade and Mara!!!~
I would like to wish Many Years to my dear friend Tamara and her family that were baptized and Chrismated on Sunday . Click HERE to read the their whole story and HERE to see all the photos.
May God grant you all MANY YEARS!
“For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27)
~Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. ~
Today was a really trying day. See those little demons in the icon in my last post? Well they are hard at work. If you could please pray for us, our children who have to endure being in a clergy family and for the people that we serve. Pray that we do God’s will and pray for us to have strength and patience. Pray for all our souls that we may grow in our relationship with God and attach our hearts to Christ this Lent and Easter. ~St. Philaret of Moscow
4th Sunday of Great Lent St John Climacus (of the Ladder) St John Climacus of Sinai accepted the ascetical life from the age of about sixteen and was tonsured as a monk three or four years later. Then, at the age of 35, he isolated himself from the world and lived as a hermit for 40 years at a monastery church called Thola, about 10 kilometres from the Mount Sinai monastery. While living an ascetical life he is reported to have received the gift of tears and the grace of continual prayer. Fellow monks in large numbers began to seek him out for spiritual guidance. When criticized for making a mockery of his hermitage by entertaining so many people there, he decided to keep total silence. After a year or so of this, those who had criticized him pleaded with him to resume guiding others. Experienced both in the solitary life of the hermit and in the communal life of cenobitic monasticism, he was appointed Abbot of the Monastery at Mount Sinai (built at the site of the burning bush where Moses spoke to God). The day he was made Abbot of Sinai, the Prophet Moses was seen giving commands to those who served at the table. St John wrote a book containing thirty homilies. Each homily deals with one virtue, and progressing from those that deal with holy and righteous activity (praxis) unto those that deal with divine vision (theoria), they raise a man up as though by means of steps unto the height of Heaven; thus the book is called “The Ladder of Divine Ascent”, and the saint is know as “Climacus”. “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” is so greatly is this God-inspired book esteemed in the Orthodox Christian Church that its author, St. John Climacus, is celebrated twice a year – on 30th March (the day of his repose), and the Fourth Sunday of the Great Lent. Each monastic community of the Orthodox Church reads “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” during each day of the Great Lent, in their common dining hall (or refectory) during the daily meal. This is a period of strict fasting, struggle, prostration and extensive prayers; when only one meal is eaten in the day and after 3 pm, and water is only consumed during 3-6pm. The book, by means of thirty steps (or logoi), calls us to the spiritual life; it inspires, instructs, speeds the reader towards the “things on high”, and points-out the dangers and pitfalls. Each step describes the origin of a certain virtue or passion and the path it can take us. The Ladder does not offer us a formula to accomplish salvation, for “the life you have is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3), but: “Let us try to learn Divine truth more by toil and sweat than by mere word, for at the time of our departure it is not words but deeds that will have to be shown” (Step 26:36). Saint John reposed in 603 AD, at eighty years of age.
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Thank you Marsha and Dama for your the thread on www.orthodoxchat.com
“You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the heart of him who receives. All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other… Instead of condemning others, strive to reach inner peace. Keep silent, refrain from judgment. This will raise you above the deadly arrows of slander, insult, and outrage and will shield your glowing hearts against all evil.” ~St. Seraphim of Sarov
~Thank you God for another year!~
Every year I look forward to today. Not for the reasons you might think. Today for me and my family has great significance. I have been keeping this blog for over a year now and It is a joy to repeat last year’s post today as well! With a few modifications. I will forever be grateful for all the good care I received and the prayers of St. John the Baptist Monastery in Essex, England and St. Mary of Egypt!
Today most people think of April fool’s day. For me however it has great significance. It was on this day, the feast day of St. Mary of Egypt that I found the lump in my neck and went to the doctor. That was 13 years ago today. The story of Mary of Egypt (read her story below it is worth the few minutes!) is amazing and always moves me, along with her icon. I remember so clearly that day 13 years ago. We had just became engaged two days earlier, in London, on March 30th . Thank God I listened to that little voice telling me to skip the manicure after my 8 am Germany History lecture and go to the family doctor instead. Divine Providence! The doc insisted on a x-ray and a biopsy. To make a long story short it was stage IIa Hodgkin’s disease. I had a 8 cm tumor in my neck and a 13 cm collection of tumors in my chest. After a year of chemo and radio and a few surgeries we were married in Athens and 12 years later are the parents of 4 healthy little miracles. Three lovely little boys and one sweet little girl .
Glory be to God for All Things!
| From Beth’s blog! Thank you Beth! | |
Venerable Mary of Egypt When Mary was only twelve years old, she left her parents and departed to Alexandria, where she lived a depraved life for seventeen years. Then, moved by curiosity, she went with many pilgrims to Jerusalem, that she might see the Exaltation of the venerable Cross. Even in the Holy City she gave herself over to every kind of licentiousness and drew many into the depth of perdition. Desiring to go into the church on the day of the Exaltation of the Cross, time and again she perceived a certain invisible power preventing her entrance, whereas the multitude of people about her entered unhindered. Therefore, wounded in heart by this, she decided to change her way of life and reconcile herself to God by means of repentance. Invoking our Lady the Theotokos as her protectress, she asked her to open the way for her to worship the Cross, and vowed that she would renounce the world. And thus, returning once again to the church, she entered easily. When she had worshipped the precious Wood, she departed that same day from Jerusalem and passed over the Jordan. She went into the inner wilderness and for forty-seven years lived a most harsh manner of life, surpassing human strength; alone, she prayed to God alone. Toward the end of her life, she met a certain hermit named Zosimas, and she related to him her life from the beginning. She requested of him to bring her the immaculate Mysteries that she might partake of them. According to her request, he did this the following year on Holy and Great Thursday. One year after this, Zosimas again went thither and found her dead, laid upon the ground, and letters written in the sand near her which said: “Abba Zosimas, bury here the body of wretched Mary. I died on the very day I partook of the immaculate Mysteries. Pray for me.” Her death is reckoned by some to have taken Place in 378, by some, in 437, and by others, in 522. She is commemorated also on the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent. Her life was recorded by Saint Sophronius of Jerusalem.
Read the complete Life of St. Mary of Egypt, by St.Sophronius.
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