7/29/2019
Archpriest Andrew Lemeshonok
Love is the greatest gift of God that man can receive in this temporary world.
You know, the Kingdom of Heaven is joy, it is eternal gratitude, eternal love for God. Perhaps we’ll live more than just one more year, so let’s try to rehearse, so that the joy of God might be with us for thirty-nine days.
How can we change ourselves, when we repeat the same sin again and again? How can a good thought help in the battle with sin? Fr. Andrei Lemeshonok answers these and other questions in a talk with the monastics of St. Elisabeth Convent in Minsk.
This wondrous service should strengthen us. The soul should continually receive grace-filled help in order to wage war with the world of sin and temptation.
That’s the thing—God is near, but we are far away! And that’s why the drops of spiritual dew that the Church offers us today—the full reading of the penitential canon of St. Andrew of Crete and the life of St. Mary of Egypt—are so important for us.
The drama of this world, which has decided to live without God, is unfolding before our very eyes.
We learn to be silent before God; we learn to control our thoughts and feelings; we learn to keep the words we read or hear in church from flying away, but to keep them within, in our hearts.
On July 17th, the Orthodox Church commemorates the Holy Royal Martyrs of Russia. Here at Saint Elisabeth Convent we have a church in honor of the Royal Martyrs, so it is also that church's Patron Feast day.
The light is life, darkness is death. When light is seen in a man, everything around him is bright. Everything a man amasses in his heart, everything he collects at the crossroads of this world, is reflected in his life, in his words, in his look.
Fr. Andrew Lemeshonok
Man will be alone in hell. He won’t see anyone anymore, because sin closes both God and neighbor off from them. But in Paradise we will all see one another, and we will all be glad because of the others, because we will see God in every person. Today we communed—look at one another and feed upon this love.
Rating: 8.4|Votes: 5
When the Lord's grace touches a person and he understands that it is his personal meeting with God, it is just impossible to express with words what is going on in his soul at this moment. This event outperforms any human feeling.
Rating: 8.7|Votes: 10
Fr. Andrew Lemeshonok, the spiritual father of St. Elisabeth Convent, speaks about the Paschal joy and the reasons why we often are not able to feel this joy.
Rating: 10|Votes: 1
A church becomes the place where we receive a blessing and the hospital where we recover. What else do we need in this life? Can we say that something is missing in our lives, or that we have not received enough? Our salary is low, our house is too small, our health is poor… What do we need? We have everything we need!
Rating: 5.5|Votes: 2
Christ is Risen! Pascha is ongoing, and we continue fighting for joy and hope, which we can hear in these words: “Christ is Risen!” We want to be sure in this truth about God and that He has defeated death. If we are with God then we can prevail over our sick, lame, deaf, blind and foolish nature, and live with God forever.
On the one hand, the Lord voluntarily accepts sufferings, which means His death. On the other hand, His steps towards Golgotha is a feast for us. We partake of Holy Communion, we take His love and thus we can live. The majority of people do not live today, but simply exist. They try to do their best to live in comfort, they build and collect something, they try to make their life more interesting and entertaining, to make it be more diverse. However, they just cannot admit that all these things are unreal, that everything will end sooner or later, and people will be separated from their loved ones.
The forthcoming week is devoted to a great ascetic – Saint John Climacus. Spiritual life is a ladder, which leads to the Heavenly Kingdom. We climb it, we fall down, we hit the ground, we stand up and we fall again. The thing is, we need to stand up over and over again. The ascetics, who devoted their lives to studying spiritual laws and struggling against sin have left to us a number of works for edification. However, we need to be prudent.
Rating: 8.3|Votes: 4
Without doing anything we receive limitless love, which allows us to keep our head above the water. This love brings us to the Church and to the chalice. Our God is so great that we can speak about holiness, about Pascha and Resurrection. Our God is so great that we are allowed to attend His Great Supper, where everything is transfigured and becomes God-like. Maybe it lasts for just a second, but this second is so precious…
Rating: 7.7|Votes: 3
The Mother of God takes a scepter in her arms, which is exactly what a queen is supposed to do. The earthly kingdoms fall, and She offers us to come to the Kingdom which Her Son has told us about: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John, 18:36). No matter how good and fair are the laws of the earthly kingdoms, they are still imperfect, and this is why these kingdoms are temporary.
With God’s help we are beginning Great Lent. We have to start to work on ourselves, to set our thoughts in order. Our inner man should be restored. All our thoughts and feelings are devastated, tangled and crushed by sin. How can we live in such a condition and say that we are Christians?
We have to struggle with ourselves, with our “old self”, with our mercenariness, and with our primitive and limited views on what is happening to us and around us. And the holy Church teaches us how we should live. The Gospel tells about the two people who entered the temple. One of them was a zealous adherent of the law, who did everything right. But what did that lead to? To his arrogance and self-admiration.
Rating: 9.2|Votes: 5
The Orthodox Christians have the Nativity Fast from November 28 to January 6. Fasting is voluntary. However, people are terrified and think, “How can I read all prayers and abstain from food when my health is so poor?” The person does not trust God...
Rating: 10|Votes: 2
Prayer means shedding one's blood. When one prays, he struggles with the entire world. We break up the bonds of this world through prayer and follow Christ, whereas the world distracts, blinds, deafens us, makes everything possible to stop us.
