Fr. Andrei Chizhenko
Rating: 7.5|Votes: 26
In an Orthodox church there is no thing or action which does not carry meaning of spiritual weight. Even the iconostasis and curtain over the Royal Doors are full-fledged “participants” in the Divine services.
Jesse Dominick
Rating: 8|Votes: 25
The theology of creation and salvation in Orthodox Christianity upholds the centrality and kingship of mankind while simultaneously embracing a cosmological vision that is largely absent in western Christendom. A common characteristic of all creation is corruption and death, and yet we are told that God is not the author of death, and that all of creation awaits its redemption through the revealing of the saints, when all of heaven and earth will be united to God. Within this framework, St. Maximus the Confessor is recognized as a theological and spiritual giant by the Orthodox Church. In his two troparia he is hailed as an “enlightener of the universe” and a “herald of the faith.”
Rating: 7.4|Votes: 5
Before the fall of our first ancestors, mankind was happy: living in Paradise in close union with God and showing child-like devotion and obedience to Him, they were in need of nothing, suffered from nothing, and were fully satisfied with life. Living in happiness, man openly poured out his soul before God with childlike love, receiving Divine help from Him for his development. Man knew neither sickness nor death. All of man's happiness was because he was close to God and God was with him. As a loving father, God appeared in Paradise and conversed with man, as with good, obedient children. All of the surrounding nature was subject to man, as to its king, as the image of the Creator Himself.
Archpriest Artemy Vladimirov
Rating: 5.3|Votes: 8
The priests, one after the other read prayers that the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, invisibly serving this Mystery by the hands of the clerics, according to our faith might touch His healing finger to the soul and body of those afflicted, deliver from all sorts of ailments spiritual and bodily, raise up in us a spirit of peace, vigor, joy, and strength, make our bodies into instruments of the creative will of God, sanctify our consciences and make peaceful our hearts.
Georgios I. Mantzaridis
Rating: 7.6|Votes: 18
The problem constantly faced by man is how to achieve fulfilment as an individual in a peaceful and united world: how to make room in his heart for all other men, and how to rejoice in the presence of others. Christ reveals the solution to this problem. Man, however, usually makes a mess of his life and loses it, without realizing the strength that lies hidden within him.