11/21/2010
Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh
Of all the Russian saints, St. Sergius is perhaps the most unfathomable and mysterious.
St. Seraphim believed in Christ to the point of blood, to the point of readiness to shed his blood and empty his life.
How simple and how restrained are the words in which the Gospel describes his cruel rejection of his father, and prepares his departure into the far, the strange country! “Father, give me my part of thy inheritance!” Do these words not mean, “Father, I can’t wait until your death! You are still strong, and I am young; it is now that I want to reap the fruits of thy life, of thy labors; later they will be stale.
The light has shone, we must be its beams.
Each of us must think about how he has spent the day—simply put, did he consider his life, or did he rend the curtain that separates our repentant consciousness from the depths of our life?
Hope beyond hope—not because we have good reason to hope, but because we can possess a passionate certainty that not only divine love also but human love can bring what was lost back to life.
We can be heretics, violators and tramplers of the faith if nothing in our lives witnesses that the God of Love has ignited our souls with a new, supra-earthly love.
Poverty does not mean destitution. It means freedom from enslavement to an illusion that we are self-sufficient, self-contained, the creator of what we are and what we possess. It is also freedom from enslavement to what is given us, to make us stewards of God.
Let us now, now that the beginning has come, and in a way the end is already in our midst, let us do it: overcome all that is unworthy of ourselves and allow God victoriously to transfigure our lives!
Today's feast of the Transfiguration is supremely important for Orthodox Christians, for they interpret it as pointing towards the eventual fate of us all.
Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
We will have to journey together, and we must not be in any delusion: we will be difficult for one another as companions on the journey; but we will depend on one another if we want to achieve to come to an end, — in the same way in which the Israelites were in the desert: not always obedient to God, not always loyal to one another, and yet, needing each other in order to reach the promised goal.
Archpriest Oleg Vrona
Nevertheless there was one important revelation for me: I saw that the preacher had attained such spiritual maturity that every word he uttered was an expression of his innermost experience of communion with God, and therefore, always powerful, meaningful and new to the listeners.
Rating: 8.6|Votes: 9
Who of us, in dire, agonizing pain is capable of turning to the Lord, presenting Him a request, asking Him to show mercy and to manifest His power, and when the Lord says to us, in our hearts, “I shall come, I shall work this miracle for you”—who of us would have the courage to say, “No, Lord! Thy word is enough!...”
Rating: 9|Votes: 20
We are responsible, mutually, for one another—because when we look right and left at the people who stand by us, what do we know about them? Do we know how broken they are? How much pain there is in their hearts? How much agony there has been in their lives?
Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Surozh
Rating: 9.9|Votes: 19
Isn’t that what happens so often to us? We feel that we are in danger, we are in need, we turn to God, we claim His attention, we want things to be the way we choose—and there is silence; God seems to be asleep; and we suspect that He does not care, that He is like Christ, sleeping peacefully with His head on a cushion, while we, His creatures, cry, wail in our agony…
Rating: 7.3|Votes: 12
The Lord is stronger than death, the Lord has overcome it; not only in the obvious sense in which it is manifested in the bodily raising of Lazarus, but in another sense that concerns us from day to day even more directly.
Rating: 5.1|Votes: 21
And then the time comes for us to deeply and closely reflect upon ourselves, and understand that we have sinned against Heaven, sinned against our father, against our brother, against our loved ones, against our sister—against everyone around us. We have sinned—meaning we severed the tie, desiring to be free of them… And then the time comes to return: back home, there to where they fed us, gave generously to us, cared for us, and in the end, to God, the Font of all blessings.
Rating: 7.9|Votes: 22
I would like to direct your attention to only one event in his life.
Rating: 10|Votes: 1
The day of the Theophany is the day when the whole world is being renewed and becomes a partaker of the sanctity of God. But at the same time, it is the day when Christ enters on the way to Calvary.
Rating: 8.2|Votes: 5
Probably none of you has experience of being in the street; I had it when I was a child and a youth, and it’s a very unpleasant feeling to know that you have nowhere to go and that you are totally unwanted in any of the places that shine with light, which obviously speak of warmth to you.
Rating: 10|Votes: 2
Lent is a time of renewal when like spring, everything become new again; when our life that had gone into a twilight becomes alive with all the intensity that God can communicate to us, humans, by making us partakers of His Holy Spirit, by making us partakers, through the Holy Sacraments and the direct gift of God, of the Divine nature.
To forgive does not mean to forget what has happened between us, but to shoulder the weight of another person's frailty, or at times of another person's evil.
Today, on our preparation journey towards Lent, we have come to the ultimate stage: we are confronted with judgment. If we pay attention to it, next week our spiritual destiny will be in our own hands, because next week is the Sunday of Forgiveness.
Rating: 10|Votes: 3
Now, we turn away, carrying with us the gifts of God; and we live in a country that is also alien; we live in a world that is man-made, but not God-made, or rather made by God and distorted by man. What kind of hunger comes to us?
But then, the question is before us: how can we learn anything about humility if that is the absolute condition to be not like the barren fig tree, but fruitful, to be a rich harvest which people may be fed.
Rating: 5.1|Votes: 16
“There is no one like God”—in this is expressed all of the great Archangel’s knowledge of his God. He doesn’t describe Him, nor does he explain—he stands and witnesses.
We also are called to learn the joy, the exhilarating, the wonderful joy of giving, of turning away from ourselves to be free to give, and of giving on all levels, the smallest things and the greatest things.
Rating: 5.8|Votes: 6
The Gospel, all the Gospel is a gift of God to us, and although we are not continuously reminded of the need to be grateful, how can we not respond with gratitude to what the Gospel brings to us? God has so loved the world that He has given His only begotten Son that the world may be saved; and the Son has given Himself freely, in the sovereign freedom of His Divinity to us; no-one has taken His life from Him—these are His own words; He gave His life willingly, freely, that we may live.
There is a passage in the Gospel in which the Lord says to us, Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (Jn. 15:13). These words resolve the antinomy between the horror of the Cross and the glory of it, between death and the Resurrection.
We don't murder, we don’t stone, but we turn a deaf ear to Christ speaking in the Gospel, to the testimony of Saints. Or we accept them with joy for one moment, but then, we do not carry it out long enough, with enough determination. And when we hear Christ speak, we don't murder Him as the Jews did in the days of His flesh. Rather, we turn away, and we go our own way.
How can we celebrate the Dormition? As a day of death? Only if we remember two things: First, that for us who remain on earth, death is the bitter, painful separation from our loved ones. But for the one who dies, death, dormition (falling asleep) is a triumphant, magnificent meeting of a living soul with the living God.
Rating: 8.4|Votes: 10
When he was asked one day, in what does a perishing sinner differ from a righteous man who is saving his soul, a saint, St. Seraphim answered: Only in his resolve…
Like the man born blind we live most of our lives on alms, we sit like beggars at the roadside holding out a hand in the hope that someone will notice, if not us at least our hand, and give us something to sustain us for the next few hours at any rate.
Rating: 4.8|Votes: 5
Nothing embitters a person so much as a lost, a disappointed hope; and that explains why people who could receive Him like that, who witnessed the raising of Lazarus, who saw Christ’s miracles and heard His teaching, admired every word, who were ready to become His disciples as long as He brought victory, broke away from Him, turned their backs on Him and a few days later shouted, “Crucify Him, crucify Him.”
The word ‘angel’ comes from the Greek ‘angelos’, which means ‘a messenger’. As far as we are concerned, in the way in which we are related to the angels, they enter into our life as messengers of God. This does not mean that there is not in the angels an essence of their own, their own essential being, and that they are nothing but messengers.
Rating: 8.6|Votes: 39
After the death of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, cassettes were found among his things, with talks on selected parts of the Gospel of St. Mark. We present to your attention one such talk, dedicated to the healing of the Gadarene demoniac.
I am convinced that God concerns Himself with the fate of mankind. Second, I think that if there is freedom in man that was given by God, God no longer has the right to stand in the way of this freedom and destroy it. Otherwise it would look like this: God makes you free, but the moment you use that freedom in a way that He doesn’t like He flattens you and you are no more.
Rating: 10|Votes: 13
Ten years ago today, the outstanding missionary, Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Surouzh, reposed in the Lord. Metropolitan Anthony was a prolific writer and preacher, and left volume of inspiration for the Christian life. In honor of his repose day, we present one of his many powerful homilies.
How tragic today's story of the life of Christ is. A man had been paralysed for years. He had lain at a short distance from healing, but he himself had no strength to merge into the waters of ablution. And no one - no one in the course of all these years - had had compassion on him.
Archpriest Victor Potapov, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
Rating: 2.6|Votes: 10
We are entering into difficult days today: days when we recall the Passion of Christ; days when it will be difficult for us to come to church and endure long services, to pray. Many ask themselves: is there any point in coming to services when we are so physically tired, when our thoughts are flying here and there, when we have no inner concentration and true participation in what is going on? Remember what happened during the days of Christ’s Passion: how many people there were—both good and terrible people, who would have given anything to break away from the horror and exhaustion of those days.
Rating: 9.4|Votes: 7
And she was so profoundly shaken by this experience that she left all that had been her life, retired into the desert, and with a life which the service books define as ‘extreme’, fought to conquer her flesh, her soul, her memories - everything that was sin, but also everything that could lead her away from God. And we know how glorious her life was, the kind of person she became.
Rating: 10|Votes: 5
And to her also occurred what we read today in the Gospel passage appointed for her commemoration day; about what will happen when the end of time approaches: There will be wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, people will rise up against people, nations against nations; hatred will possess thousands of people…
Rating: 7.5|Votes: 4
Since early days the Church has given to the Mother of God titles of holiness greater than those which are given to any saint. She is called the All-holy, Panagia. We venerate Her as One who is greater and holier than the Cherubim and the Seraphim, greater than the angels of God who, endowed with vision, can see, contemplate and adore, greater than the angels of God who are, as it were, the throne of the Most High.
Rating: 6|Votes: 13
If we think about the Latin roots of the word humility, we see that it comes from the word humus, which indicates fruitful earth. St. Theophan writes about this. Just think about what earth is. It lies there in silence, open, defenseless, vulnerable before the face of the sky. From the sky it receives scorching heat, the sun’s rays, rain, and dew. It also receives what we call fertilizer, that is, manure—everything that we throw into it. And what happens? It brings forth fruit. And the more it bears what we emotionally call humiliation and insult, the more fruit it yields.
The word ‘angel’ comes from the Greek ‘angelos’, which means ‘a messenger’. As far as we are concerned, in the way in which we are related to the angels, they enter into our life as messengers of God. This does not mean that there is not in the angels an essence of their own, their own essential being, and that they are nothing but messengers. They are related as messengers to us; they are related to God as his own creatures which have already attained a measure of perfection and which grow eternally, endlessly into a deeper and more perfect communion with their Maker.
