Today the Church of God rejoices and exults, commemorating the holy Slavic Equals-to-the-Apostles, Brothers Cyril and Methodius. In their love for the Resurrected God and service to our Orthodox faith, they created the Slavic script and gave spiritual sight to our once blind ancestors, imparting to them the Gospel of God’s love. This Gospel continues to save and enliven our souls to this day. There is no greater gift than to open the eyes of the blind, to bring light to those engulfed in darkness, to preach love to the coarse and hardened, and to offer eternity to the mortal. This is the gift of the holy testament entrusted to us by these glorious Enlighteners and Teachers of the Slavic people. To enlighten means not only to educate the uneducated or to literate the illiterate but above all, to bring light into the entire human existence, transforming all its faculties and nature in that purifying fire. This light, this cleansing fire, is the Word given to us by our Lord Christ, and in it lies the power of Christian enlightenment: it questions and answers all inquiries of the mind in its existential search for meaning. And therein, in this life philosophy as a path to the Word, lies the precious gift of Christian heritage left to us by Constantine-Cyril the Philosopher and his brother Methodius, the Holy Slavic Enlighteners.
In this spirit, our elder and abbot, Bishop Mr. Partenij, a humble imitator of the apostolic work of the Holy Brothers in our region, delivered a beautiful, thankful, instructive, and sobering sermon during the holy archbishop’s Liturgy in the Bigorski skete dedicated to Saints Cyril and Methodius, above the Mijak village of Bitushe.
