Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov)
Rating: 10|Votes: 7
First of all, Fr. Seraphim spoke of the monastery with enormous, inexpressible love, as of a most great treasure: "You cannot even imagine what a monastery is! It is a… pearl, a wondrous diamond in our world! You will only appreciate and understand this later." Then he told me about the main problem with monasticism these days: "The trouble with our monasteries today is that people come to them with a weak will." Only now do I have an increasingly greater understanding of how deep Fr. Seraphim's remark was.
St. John of Damascus
Rating: 10|Votes: 1
Today the life-giving treasury and abyss of charity (I know not how to trust my lips to speak of it) is hidden in immortal death. She meets it without fear, who conceived death’s destroyer, if indeed we may call her holy and vivifying departure by the name of death.
St. John of Shanghai
Rating: 9,5|Votes: 4
The Apostles gave Her most pure body over to burial with sacred hymns, and on the third day they opened the tomb so as once more to venerate the remains of the Mother of God together with the Apostle Thomas, who had arrived then in Jerusalem. But they did not find the body in the tomb and in perplexity they returned to their own place; and then, during their meal, the Mother of God Herself appeared to them in the air, shining with heavenly light, and informed them that Her Son had glorified Her body also, and She, resurrected, stood before His Throne. At the same time She promised to be with them always.
On August 13, 2010, after a long and difficult illness, a monk of the Sretensky Stavropegic Monastery in Moscow, Hierodeacon Makary (in the world, Ivan Stanislavovich Lobodiuk) reposed in the Lord. Fr. Markary was fluent in English, and often served at the Moscow Podvorye of the Orthodox Church in America, the rector of which—Archimandrite Zacchaeus (Wood)—was Fr. Markary’s close friend. Memory eternal!
Hieromonk Job (Gumerov)
For Biblical man, raised on the Divinely-revealed holy books, the thought that weather could exist independently from God would have made no sense. In chapter 14 of the book of the Prophet Jeremiah is found the Lord’s word to the prophet about drought. The Prophet says to the Lord, Are there any among the vanities of the Gentiles that can cause rain? or can the heavens give showers? art not thou he, O LORD our God? therefore we will wait upon thee: for thou hast made all these things (Jer. 14:22).