† B A R T H O L O M E W By God’s Mercy Archbishop of Constantinople-New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch To the plenitude of the Church Grace, mercy and peace from the newborn Savior Christ in Bethlehem Beloved brothers and sisters in the Lord, Having once again arrived at the great feast of…
What sort of work will occupy us in paradise? What sort of work did Adam and Eve do? As Scripture says, the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Delight to cultivate and keep it (Gen 2.15), in other words, to protect and cultivate the plants there. Those plants were…
What, then, my dear friends, should our stance be in view of this paradise, which is both within us, and of which we are a part? How does one live in paradise? Naked, but not ashamed (Gen 2.25). And what does it mean to stand nuked before God? It means to approach God in simplicity,…
The hymns that we chant just before the start of Great Lent lament the loss of paradise. They present us with the figure of Adam, who was stripped of the garments of glory woven for him by God. In one of these hymns, Adam, exiled from paradise, strikes up a lament, and cries: “I shall…
Often know what is good for us and yet we don’t do it cause it’s hard, we’re lazy. All right, people are weak, inconsistent, we all fall; we should just beware not to drown into the sin. Did you fall in a sin? Stand up right away and run with repentance to Christ. We all…
The Most Holy Theotokos will never forget us, because She became the Mother of the eternal Love. An amazing and inexplicable mystery which should be accepted with faith, just like Theotokos accepted with faith the mystery of our Lord’s incarnation. Namely, when Archangel Gabriel revealed this great mystery to Her that She was to give…
