2/10/2021
Priest Ioannis Fortomas
Christ is the one who holds the checks and balances, and that without His express permission nothing can come upon us. Great things can occur when we trust in Him and accept His presence. Great things can occur when we recognize the truth that our existence is rooted in Him.
Many remain within the Church yet are never transformed by the grace-saving work of the Church due to a lack of regard: a disregard for Christ and the Gospels and the general precepts that the Church demands of her children.
He spoke truths uncomfortable and eternal to a perishing world and conveyed God’s living judgment to an erring people in the spirit and power of Elijah, who convicted apostate Israel of idolatry and sin.
In our lifetime perhaps, there has never been a time such as now when many—clergy and laity alike—have displayed such a zeal not according to knowledge.
To believe sincerely in Christ, with child-like simplicity, abandoned whole-heartedly to God’s unfathomable will—this is the challenge of our Christian life.
So, it is imperative that we seek a life worthy of this road being open to us upon our death.
Now, more than ever, we need to invest our time, our energy, and our financial resources in building healthy, organic Christian communities.
Fr. Ioannis Fortomas
Having such a cloud of witnesses invisibly surrounding us, unsleeping as they are in their intercessions on our behalf, what could we fear on this perilous journey through the times and in the world?
This attack iconifies in itself the unresolved issues and questions surrounding the clergy and their formation or lack thereof. This attack, like COVID-19, forces the Greek Church to face these serious questions and to find solutions and answers to them.
This is the final, saving day of Pentecost. The Holy Church sings at the Vespers of Pentecost: We celebrate Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit, and the time appointed for the promise, and the fulfillment of hope. These are the first words from the first hymn of Pentecost heard by the faithful. These words are a succinct, almost text-book-like definition of this feast. T
Having celebrated Christ’s saving Ascension, we find ourselves one Sunday before the Feast of Holy Pentecost. The Holy Fathers ordained that on this, the Seventh Sunday after Pascha, a commemoration should be held of the Fathers who gathered at the First Ecumenical Council in Nicea, in the year 325. The Church experienced wave upon wave of relentless and fierce persecutions in the first centuries of its existence.
Christ showed us a different way; a way of the heart wherein man ascends to God and is united to Him by love and sincerity. This is the love and sincerity which we have towards those weaker than us whom we are called to defend.
We beheld the Truth of Christ, His victory over death in the glorious Resurrection, and our own immortality bestowed by Christ when we looked into each other’s eyes and exclaimed Christ is Risen!
We are men and women born blind from birth: blind in our spiritual ignorance, our spiritual inactivity, our fallen nature, and consequently, our passions. The account of Christ’s healing of the Blind Man in the Gospel of John offers us a blueprint of how to obtain healing of our spiritual blindness.
Perhaps this is the most provocative encounter in the Holy Gospels. The God-Man thirsts and asks a Samaritan woman for a drink?
The Holy Church with her solemnities, fasts, and feasts gives the proper tone and occasion for human joy and happiness.
Paralysis is the inability of the body’s members to have their properly ordained mobility. This is a succinct definition of the term paralysis. And today is the Sunday of the Paralytic.
We too are commissioned in Christ’s service to proclaim the Resurrection through living a Resurrected, fearless life.
Peace be unto you. This peace which Jesus transfers to the Apostles is the power and operation of the Holy Spirit by which they themselves become participants and partake of the Resurrection, and through which they preach the Resurrection and proclaim the Resurrection’s encompassing power and might throughout the world.
If we accept this divine invitation from the depths of our heart, we shall hear His pure voice when we commune of the Holy Mysteries on this sacred and solemn Holy Thursday: "Enter thou My servant into the joy of Thy Lord!"
There are two things the woman did that we do not practice.
Perhaps we have, like the five foolish virgins, been lazy and slothful? Ah, how the Holy Church rouses the slothful sinner with the deeply moving, profound, hymnody of these greatest of days!
The days are called Great not because more hours are added to them but because eternal, cosmic, altering events took place within them that had an impact on the fate of mankind.
Now, we must make clear a certain distinction: The Lord’s Resurrection which we celebrate in one week—Holy Pascha—will be incorruptible in the sense that Christ was not subject to corruption. Yet, Lazarus’ Resurrection is from corruption: Lazarus was decaying in the tomb already four days.
Could we possibly find the smallest desire to repent—even in these last hours of Great Lent prior to Holy Week—as we turn our spiritual gaze inwardly?
St. Andrew has composed his Great Canon as a mighty sailing ship on which he has sailed us through salvation’s history in the world.
Before my end, I should imitate the profound, heart-wrenching repentance of Manasseh.
St. Andrew calls us to explore the mystery of the Church, to delve into the mystery of piety. The Church is the Promised Land; it is the fullest expression of the heavenly realities of the Age to Come in this shadow-of-a-world, as represented in our time, space, and reality.
I encourage everyone to take two hours on Wednesday or Thursday of this week as may be convenient to read the Great Canon if we cannot make it to church due to limited availability.
We could not possibly exhaust the well of wisdom which is the "Ladder of Divine Ascent."
“She is the pure treasure of virginity, the intended paradise of the Second Adam, the place where the union of natures (divine and human) was accomplished, and the Counsel of salvific reconciliation was affirmed,” in the words of St. Proklus of Constantinople.
Here we have a crisis of European survival. Europe must return to its roots. Europe must return to the Cross! Christian, you are called to actively return European and Western society to the Cross.
The Church is Liturgy and Liturgy is the incarnation of Christ and His Kingdom in the world. In the Liturgy, Christ is manifest in the Eucharistic elements.
The holy icons are evidence of the intimate connection between our world and the immaterial, noetic world.
After the melancholy days of the first week of the Lenten fast, a joyous celebration radiates. A day of gladness hath dawned in the season of mourning, and with its light it hath dispersed the gloominess thereof.
Our aim at things lower blinds us. These inclinations do not allow us to perceive the Heavenly truth and realities.
Such a “Lenten outlook” will not assist one’s spiritual growth during this Great Lent. One’s perception of the Heavenly realities will not improve, in fact, the opposite will occur: It will fade and wither.
If one wants to feel Great Lent, one must make an effort to participate in the Presanctified Liturgy, to confess one’s sins and to commune of Christ’s Body and Blood on this occasion.
The reading of the psalms and the singing of the hymns found in Great Compline should be a nightly Lenten family affair.
Each Great Lent remains with us to eternity.
Adam and Eve listened to the Serpent’s poison and this, combined with their idle curiosity—the desire to know the unknowable—ate at them. And how many of our own sins and passions began in such a fashion?
Here is a fact we must all reckon with: The fact that ninety percent of those who identify as Greek Americans are not Orthodox Christians—a fact that the Greek Archdiocese of America ignores.
There is no judge at this judgement. There is no jury and no courtroom. These are all emblems of earthly justice.
We seem to repeatedly flow from one pattern into the other. These are the passions—they nag at us, they work within us, they pull us in a certain direction; and we must not think that repentance is a magical affair. Of course, the Father accepts us into the former glory, but does this preclude our return to that far off country of sin and death?
