Confessions of a Former Halloween Junkie
Earlier this week, I got a phone call from my sister. We live three hours apart, and with eight young children between us, phone conversations are tricky and limited. Even with a 3 day old infant, though, my sister sounds chipper as she reflected on this summer-to-fall transition we find...
Bright Sadness: Learning Who We Are
During the summer I’ve had the bright sadness of experiencing the deaths of five people close to me who I respected. In many cases, some of us didn’t learn significant details about the reposed until after their death. Peter, a longtime member of our parish, had been a rocket scientist...
To die a perfect death
Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica Unless you sacrifice your self for the sake of the slightest virtue or shed blood in order to receive the Spirit, you’ll never achieve virtue. This is how God arranged things, with his providential power: that we should gain eternal life through our voluntary death....
What is the memory of death and what does it mean?
Archimandrite Georgios Kapsanis, Abbot of the Holy Monastery of Gregoriou † The memory of death (memento mori) helps us to overcome the old person because it brings humility to our soul. When we forget death, we have the illusion that we’re never going to die and this increases our...
Finishing the Race: A Daughter’s Tribute
My mother died recently. My sisters and I ordered the marker, and I was confronted with the dash between the dates, the dash in place of 84 years of living. We gave up trying to write an obituary for mom. She did so much in her life, it would never...
I Await the Resurrection of the Dead (part 2)
Holy Monastery of St John the Vaptist, Kareas Attikis The resurrection of the dead, then, will certainly take place. The angel’s trumpet will definitely sound (Rev. 11, 15-18). What is important for us, however, is that we should have accomplished something in our life on earth towards the sanctification...
I Await the Resurrection of the Dead (part 1)
Holy Monastery of St John the Vaptist, Kareas Attikis It’s the event that each and every one of us can be absolutely sure of: sooner or later death will come to us. Yet, for most people, the end of life remains greatly undesirable and is to be firmly resisted....
Christ’s Passion Overcomes Death
Archimandrite Ephraim, Abbot of the Vatopaidi Monastery When Christians talk about death, they don’t do so with pessimism, they aren’t resigned to it, they don’t think it natural. They see it principally as an enemy which must be defeated through Christ. ‘The last enemy to be destroyed is death,...
In Honour and Memory of Archimandrite Placide (Deseille) Simonopetritis
On 11 January, the funeral was held for Archimandrite Placide Deseille at the Holy Monastery of Saint Anthony the Great in Saint Laurent en Royans, France, a dependency of the Holy Monastery of Simonos Petras on the Holy Mountain, where Père Placide had been tonsured as an Orthodox monk. He...
Transplants and brain death
George Mantzarides, Professor Emeritus of the Theological School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Transplants have become part of everyday life in modern society. The positive and negative positions which have been expressed on them in ecclesiastical and theological circles have usually been of a fragmentary nature. The Orthodox Church...
