5/25/2010
Archpriest Andrei Tkachev
Your attitude towards fasting is one of the criteria for evaluating your faith.
Our people love monastic church services, they live just as St. John Climacus said—the angels are a light to monks, and monks are a light to laypeople.
In the years when Archpriest John Ilyich Sergiyev was already well known in Russia, and the St. Andrew Cathedral in Kronstadt was filled at every Liturgy with thousands of people from all over the country, there was an outrageous incident.
Peter the Great subordinated the Church to the Tsar; he overlooked the mystical aspect of the Church, and in fact belittled the Church hierarchy. The Soviet Union changed Christian principles into an atheistic ideal and strove to do away with the Church, but God did not allow this, proving the Divine nature of the Church. Now we have already rebuilt most of the churches and we need to return to the Church, which is essentially Eucharistic and rests on the Word of God.
Those who visited Europe on occasion, or have had the opportunity to compare how the things were in the 1970s or 1980s with Europe of the twenty-first century, can tell you how the Europe they knew has become a different place.
It is unlikely that a solution to the problem of Serbs in Kosovo will be found in the near future, but efforts should be made to prevent it from spreading all over Serbia.
If we are to return to normal life, it should be a better life. Not the one we had before—partying, clubs, restaurants, drinking, having fun, leading a carefree lifestyle. There should be no place for that lifestyle anymore.
I want people to understand for whom they are fasting. The Dormition of the Mother of God is the Pascha of the Theotokos, and the fast is preparation for this Theotokion Pascha.
Here we have a kind of answer to our frequent questions and perplexities.
Sinners, let us bow down and straighten up. Let us all straighten our spines, we who are redeemed by the blood of the Son of God; all who have not forgotten about this great price of redemption; all who say to Christ, Even so, come Lord Jesus (Rev. 22:20).
A ladder, though seemingly simple, is a clever invention that speaks volumes.
Yes, God has come to visit us. It would be extremely disrespectful not to show Him hospitality, not to tidy the “inner chamber” (Mt 6.6) of our soul, not to prepare for Him something tasty, however simple. Not to open the door to Him would be utterly appalling.
Angels know more than humans do, yet even they do not know everything. The future is not revealed to them and, in the same way as humans, they are amazed by God’s mysteries.
My knees bent by themselves, and I bowed down, touching the floor with my forehead. “You did the right thing,” I heard in my right ear after a minute. “There’s no need to ponder. You need to worship!”
Who would have thought that people from countries that were recently characterised by militant atheism would come to these places in order to light candles on Sundays?
And he himself, a former fisherman, by a gift from above became worthy of confessing Jesus as “Christ, the Son of the living God”. But Peter renounced all of this. When days of unthinkable tribulation came, the “rock” cracked.
God can accomplish great things through any person, using him or her as an instrument. Just as in the hands of a true master a cheap fiddle can be made to sound almost like a Stradivarius, or a brand new outfit can be sewn from scraps of material, even so the Lord can create something important and wonderful through everyone and through anyone. He can, but He is not in a hurry to do so.
Human beings tend to seek out other human beings. But, if they look deep into their souls, they will realize that they are in search of God even more so.
Christ was never in danger of becoming old. An elderly Christ would have been an impossibility. He is a sacrificial Lamb—and such a lamb, by definition, can neither be old, lame, or sick. That is why He is young, perfect and sinless.
Our Lord Jesus Christ is without question God above all creatures. Yet, all the same, Jesus was a real person and not a spirit.
Christ’s Resurrection justifies human life and at the same time gives meaning to it.
This is not about the Liturgy that will be celebrated in the last hours of world history, and it’s not about the one that will be celebrated on the top of Mt. Athos in the last times, but about the Liturgy that is celebrated in the majority of Orthodox churches on Holy Wednesday.
Doing this, such people as if hurry the Lord towards His Last Judgment, as if saying: “Hasten! Come here! Fulfil what Thou Thyself promised right away!” As if they were ready for the Judgment!
Someone who believes in God is inevitably faced with a choice: either to follow the narrow path of true faith which leads to life; or to go down the wide, easy, well-trodden road of superstition. It is impossible to have no faith at all.
What is Holy Rus’? Is it some historical/geographical concept that belongs to past eras or an ideal we are expected to strive for? Does Holy Rus’ exist today?
Our faith must first of all renew the inner person. Then, the inner peace that results from this correction and purification will inevitably manifest itself externally, healing and shaping the outer world aright.
Rating: 9.3|Votes: 29
So, I was thinking: why don’t we all write a summary of the life we lived at some point? I bet without a doubt it’ll scare us; some will break out into a cold sweat, and from this, good life changes will be born. Mortal memory, after all, is so… creative.
Rating: 9.1|Votes: 29
This assessment and comparison of persecutions against the Church in Ukraine by the Poroshenko government today and its persecution by the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth after the Brest Unia in the sixteenth century was offered by an Archpriest Andrei Tkachev, who was born and raised in Lvov, the center of Western Ukraine and the stronghold of Greek Catholicism (Uniatism).
Rating: 8.7|Votes: 49
The question is: Where is there room for Christ in all this self-importance?
Rating: 9.7|Votes: 24
Few people like to live in their own time period. “I was born in the past,” they say, “in those times with refinement in a royal court, with long dresses sweeping the floor during a candle-lit minuet.” Of course, few imagine themselves as a serf in the barn.
Rating: 9.3|Votes: 31
The Tsar rises above the age-old lies, appearing before our contemporaries in his human greatness and martyric crown. The question is not in the restoration of the monarchy, but first in the awareness of our past and the improvement of the present.
Rating: 9.9|Votes: 51
Pravoslavie.ru asked several pastors to give a few words about what is the main thing, in their view, that should fill a Christian’s life in the days of Great Lent, to offer something from personal experience, to help those Christians engulfed by cares to determine their spiritual program—the maximum and minimum—during this time.
Rating: 9.4|Votes: 19
If we read the story in the gospel according to St. Luke about the events that we now call the Meeting of the Lord, we notice that the divine promise of the 90th psalm was fulfilled in the elder Simeon.
Rating: 10|Votes: 6
Did you know, my beloved, that the Psalter contains psalms of repentance, wisdom, praise, and historical psalms? Also, I hasten to inform you that in the psalms there is even found mention of the much hectic and complicated political life.
Rating: 6|Votes: 2
The Ladder is not the Typikon; it has a different value. There are no prayer rules written there, no defined number of prostrations or amount of food to partake of. More important things are disclosed there, the effect of which is not revealed to the superficial gaze. In fact, the reading of such books is healing from blindness. And we ourselves, no matter how many years the Lord metes out to us, will never understand our inner life with such depth and clarity as did Abbot John of Mt. Sinai.
Friends and foes, our times, in my humble opinion, are the best times. They don’t pay us for Orthodoxy, but they don’t knock our teeth out for it either. What more could we want? After all, the churches are full—full with those who are not threatened for praying in a holy place, and, at the same time, who have nothing to gain from it. Is this not grace? Truly it is the best of times.
Rating: 10|Votes: 3
The Taboric light is not created, St. Gregory said, but it is the light and grace of God Himself, manifested so that those communing of this light would not die, but be sanctified. Christ was not so much transfigured, says the Church, as Christ transfigured the vision and senses of the disciples, that they would be able to see Christ, as He is. This contemplation is a foretaste of the future Kingdom
Rating: 7|Votes: 3
Basil, Gregory, and John are so often remembered together that it’s difficult to think of them separately. However, they, like Peter and Paul, are strikingly different in many respects. Elucidating these contrasts does not destroy, but, on the contrary, underscores the unity which they were given in the Holy Spirit and which has organically entered into the consciousness of the Church.
Rating: 10|Votes: 2
God is the highest, purest, and most undoubtable reality. I can doubt that you see me, or that I see you. Maybe we’re sleeping, perhaps it’s a dream. We can have doubts about this. But about whether God is a reality—it’s impossible to doubt. He is life, and truth, and the way, and He is reality, clouded for man because the devil played an evil trick on us—and we went along with this trick and called life that which is not life.
Rating: 9.2|Votes: 26
The day is not far off when Arabs and Africans will want to live not in refugee camps and migration centers but in the apartments of the current owners. They will want to live like the formers owners lived, and not near them but in their place.
After several centuries people can get used to any mistake, or come to love any distortion. But objectively speaking, the nature of this distortion does not change. It only grows into the consciousness of those who are used to it. However, the threat it carries has not gone anywhere.
Rating: 6|Votes: 8
What do the differences between the two apostles, celebrated on the same, day tell us? They tell us that in the Church, everyone is different. And this difference is a true blessing, if there is oneness of faith and a unity of love. If for dictators “no one is irreplaceable,” then for God all are unique and all irreplaceable. The main thing is that there be common faith.
Our people, who have experienced not a motion picture but the real press of a totalitarian government, should have cultivated in themselves a certain feeling of fear in their bones, a kind of defensive reaction against attempts directed at fooling them, controlling their consciousness, at crawling into their souls with dirty boots on. Not in the least. Many still have memories of live, real surveillance, and some still have nightmares of authentic interrogations; meanwhile a television show, called by the name of an imaginary concentration camp, is shown on the screen.
The history of the Christian world is the history of dramatic interrelationships between God and His new people. The Lord chose and raised up a hitherto unknown people who were sitting in historical darkness. The Lord gave them Himself, and it was good for them, as long as He was their main wealth.
