Our Faith : Fasting
Preparing for the Coming of Christ
Unfortunately, that seems to be the highlight of this holiday – actually, we should say, “holy day,” which is the origin of the word, “holiday”: feasting, parties, decorations, presents – and let me say that there is nothing wrong with any of these things. But it is easy for us to lose sight of what we are celebrating, and lose our connection to the holy with our focus on the earthly side of the holiday.
Jan 2, 2011, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
The Sunday of the Holy Forefathers
'Many are called but few are chosen'. So says Christ in today's Gospel. If we think of the knowledge of God conserved among different peoples in the world before Christ, these words have a special significance.


Dec 26, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Waiting for the Lord to Come
In these days of fasting as we approach the festival of the Incarnation, the Church gives us in the words of Christ Himself, a stern and clear warning. Are we going to be like the guests called to the bridal feast of the king’s son? One refused to come because he had acquired a plot of land. He wanted to possess the earth and instead became a slave to it. The others could not come because they were too busy—there was no time for God.
Dec 23, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
The Inconvenient Commandment
Millions of people throughout history have given their lives as martyrs to defend this very Truth. And today we are content, it seems, to be comfy cozy in our new slippers and sip cider around the tree, enjoying our own "personal religious practices" at the appropriate service times - practices which don't "infringe" on our neighbor.
Nov 30, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
The Nativity Fast
One of the perpetual questions that is always asked at this time of year is, "when is it proper to sing Christmas Carols or decorate for Christmas." Unlike the Fast of Lent, which is really a preparation for Holy Week, the Nativity Fast is one of joyful expectation.
Nov 29, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Oriental Christmas in November
Essentially, during Christ’s advent, we are preparing a path to re-orient our hearts, to clear away all the exhausting clutter, so that we can experience the birth of Christ with the same irrepressible joy that the shepherds and the wise men and the angels experienced. The mystery of God’s birth as human flesh is a revolution that brings about the transformation of the world, but starts with each of our hearts--as the mystery of Love.
Nov 26, 2010, 06:07

Our Faith : Fasting
Dispelling Confusion About Fasting During Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving Day is also called a Turkey day because it usually involves a meal with turkey or at least a more elaborate meal. Most American Orthodox Christians started the Nativity Fast on November, 15. How can an Orthodox Christian navigate these family gatherings, often with family who are not Orthodox, and still keep the Nativity fast?
Nov 23, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
"It's Just Another Day For You and Me In Paradise"
I'll never forget what I heard one cold winter day on the radio while attending seminary over twenty years ago. . . A man was found frozen to death this morning just outside Fenway Park. Perhaps, loneliness and indifference are the greatest of sins that plague our present time.
Nov 15, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Preparation of the Soul & Joy in the Mystery
Make plans now to enter in, increase our spiritual discipline, set goals, see to our earthly responsibilities without total spiritual distraction, and prepare for a joyous celebration.


Nov 13, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Dormition Fast Begins
Several years ago, I was sharing with an Orthodox pilgrim the thought that the Dormition fast, though short, was very intense spiritually and that hardships seemed to befall people more in those two weeks than in the long Apostles’ fast. Without hesitation he responded, “Of course! Lent is the hardest, but after Christ, who does the devil hate the most? The holy Mother of God!”
Aug 14, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Why do We Fast?
When you fast, do you ever feel sorely challenged, irritated and impatient; annoyed with the lack of food? Sometimes the fasting experience seems negative. “Why do I put myself through this?” I sometimes ask. What keeps us fasting, attending services, observing a daily rule of prayer and following the ascetical practices of the Church?


Aug 10, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Why a Fast for Dormition?
There is a perception that we should fast when we want something, as though the act of fasting somehow appeases God, and seeing us “suffer” gets Him to grant our request. Nothing can be further from the truth.

Aug 7, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
What Does It Mean to Be a Christian?
2000 years of Christianity are going to be noted everywhere. The most discussed question, both within the Church and outside it, is what 2000 years of Christianity mean and how to relate to them.

Jun 22, 2010, 03:22

Our Faith : Fasting
The Apostles Fast
The Great Commission is a huge undertaking. Each one of us participates in it to our abilities and using our God-given talents. Some of us will take the message of Christ far and wide; others to neighbors and family nearby. Some will provide the support and logistics for the people in the mission field. Some will provide a God-filled welcome to visitors who come to our churches. But we are all called to ‘grow the garden’ and to bring the Good News to a dark and fallen world.


Jun 3, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Sermon for Great Saturday
It is in consideration of this that the Church calls this Saturday "Great". It gives our mourning a calm and peaceful expression. Here, at this tomb, it grants the soul to sigh with quiet compunction, which opens up onto sacred contemplation of the mysteries of the Redemption and Resurrection. Christ Himself, in the person of His Mother, forbids weeping and despondency. The tears of the myrrh-bearers are now appropriate, tears which grow into joy...
Apr 3, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Sermon for Great Friday
Passion Week. It is the only time of the year when we forget ourselves, our duties, and our requests. In the Church’s hymnody of the Passion services from Thursday to Saturday you will not find any mention of us sinners, of our downtrodden souls, of our petitions. The contemplation of Christ engrosses everything. Our attention is focused upon Him alone.
Apr 2, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Before the Epitaphios
For it is dreadful to be abandoned by neighbors and friends, but it is even more dreadful to think that God has left you, when an insuperable wall has been raised between you and God, and He seems neither to hear, nor see, nor notice you.
Apr 2, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Sermon for Holy Thursday
In the Eucharist we receive not only some abstract life, but the joy of authentic life. One may even say that the taste for joy is given back to us. And for us as Christians this is very important, because the Lord has entrusted us with a special service in this world: to learn to love the people He brought to this place and at this time, and this is a very difficult task, and sometimes it is just intolerable.
Apr 1, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Fault and Crime
What is the difference between the actions of Peter and Judas? Why did Judas Iscariot, a former Apostle, become a symbol of the ultimate fall from grace, while St. Peter not only dwells in God's love but is also acknowledged as the chief Apostle?


Apr 1, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Sermon for Great Wednesday
You are fortunate if you find someone capable of understanding you and of sympathizing. In Christ, man finds such understanding and sympathy. In the encounter with Christ, sin begins to seem not so absolute and dominating, and man at last understands what he was actually looking for all his life: holiness and purity -- that is, true life, which Christ gives abundantly.
Mar 31, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Holy Tuesday: A Hymn of Invitation
As more and more people attend and thoughtfully follow the services of Holy Week, many are struck by the incomparably rich hymnography, often sung in unique and evocative melodies. Many of us have favorite hymns, which we greet as friends when they come along each year. There are the landmark hymns of the Bridegroom services, repeated for several nights running. There are, of course, the unforgettable moments of Holy Thursday: “Of ThyMystical Supper!” The Twelve Gospels! Then Friday: the Burial Shroud! The Lamentations!…
Mar 30, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Matins of Great Monday
Unfortunately, many people’s thoughts and entire souls are never more filled with daily concerns than during this coming week. Concern for finishing various affairs before the feast, for the preparation of various items for the feast, distracts the mind on all sides and diverts the senses towards vain objects. For this reason the Divine Services of Passion Week are not attended in full; much of what is read in church -- most importantly, the Evangelists’ narratives about the life of Jesus Christ -- pass by without proper attention.
Mar 29, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Following Christ
The time of the Holy Forty Days was precisely the time to turn to ourselves, to try to master our own ungovernable selfishness. However, the Holy Forty Days have passed, and many of us did not even have a chance to notice it. It is very easy to spend the fast in vain: you ate neither milk nor meat, but you did not acquire anything for your soul. Glory be to God, we still have the the time of Passion Week.
Mar 26, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
5th Sunday of Great Lent
Memory of St Mary of Egypt
We Christians serve. We serve Christ. We serve each other. We serve strangers.We serve the needy. We serve whomever the Lord gives us to serve because we love Jesus Christ. His love propels us into serving in our daily life. It is the second nature of the Christian, you could say, to serve, to try to be of service.

Mar 21, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Mary of Egypt, Facebook, and Dreams
Belief no longer bonds people together, so friendship and community can acceptably be maintained on the most peripheral levels of social contact. Friendship and community are defined by the amount of information exchanged, not by bonds of emotion, commitment, or experience. And God? He’s just out of the picture until He learns to text.

Mar 20, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Reflections on the Fourth and the Fifth Sundays of Great Lent
An important part of understanding our spiritual lives as an ascent, is the possibility of falling down a few rungs, or even completely off the ladder, which is the reality that we constantly face. In fact, the classic icon of St. John and his ladder clearly depicts the successful ascent of those truly holy and spiritually advanced monks, versus those who have succumb to various passions, causing them to fall into the pit of hell.
Mar 14, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
The Veneration of the Holy Cross
You for example, you chose to come to this church you could save someone else's soul. I call that a sacrifice. I am hoping that you are concerned about preserving the Orthodox faith. The faith that we hold so dearly. I am also hoping that your major concern, coming in the Church, is to save people who are lost, give food to the hungry, give cloth to the naked, visit the sick. You sacrifice yourselves trying to make this world a better place to live. You choose to fight evil. And you know this fight will not be easy, but you do it anyway.


Mar 7, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Why Spin the Pedals?
But the years went by, and the neophyte ardor cooled down imperceptibly. I learnt much about fasting, read intelligent, profound books, was no longer afraid of labels with egg powder, and my mother no longer referred to fasting as “starvation” -- but something had changed. I had gotten used to fasting.
Mar 6, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Why do we keep the Great Fast?
Everything we do in the Church (and by ‘in the Church’, I don’t just mean the building but in communion with one another) is predicated on the goal of our salvation and what we understand by that. The keeping of the Great Fast is no different: it’s part of our journey, not an end in itself but a means towards our common goal.
Mar 5, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
What's the Point?
What exactly are we trying to accomplish during Great Lent? Is it simply to attend services and change our diet? Or are these a means to an end? If so, what is that end? 'Orthodoxy and the World' has posed these questions to several priests.
Mar 4, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
St. Gregory & Deification (Theosis)
Time and time again, over the centuries, it is to the writings of St. Gregory that the Church has turned in order to correctly understand how monastics and married, monasteries and parishes, are all called to the same goal of union with God, albeit by spiritual paths that vary in their specific experience by each person.
Feb 28, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
How Holy Week Called Teen to Ministry
Despite the fact that services were in English and most members of my parish were converts, the culture shock of becoming Orthodox involved more than a new name and calendar. The factor that most caused this shock is also the factor I most loved about Orthodoxy, and love still: its ancientness.


Feb 27, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Great Lent - On Money
During this Lenten season it is common to talk about spiritual matters: how to fast, what to eat and what not to eat, how to pray, how many prostration to make... And this is fine and should really be of genuine concern for all of us.However, today I would like to bring to your attention a matter which is less popular and which is very rarely seen and understood as the spiritual problem it is. Money. Money as a commodity we use as a donation in church on Sunday mornings.


Feb 22, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Getting Our Robes Dirty
We are called to get our robes dirty, not only by the themes of the Sunday of Orthodoxy, but by the Lenten season itself. There are three traditional aspects of Lenten practice, three pillars of Lenten spirituality: fasting, prayer, and works of mercy. We often talk a great deal about fasting during Lent, and some about prayer as well. But we often don’t talk very much about the third category: acts of mercy.
Feb 21, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
How to Win the Virtues
The season of Great Lent for us as Orthodox Christians is for one thing only, the “winning” of the virtues. These are the 40 days given to us, (the “tithe” of the year according to Dorotheus of Gaza,) in which we acquire the virtues that come through the grace of the Holy Spirit.


Feb 20, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Rules of Fasting: How to Read Labels
Back in the day, there were no canned foods, chemically cloned flavors, hermetically sealed wrappers, governmentally required labelling, the FDA, Food Police and trace ingredients that bind, harden, smooth and flavor our food. If you got a fish or a loaf of bread or something made of corn, it pretty much was a fish, bread or made of corn. Technology has made fasting a science and the playground of Phariseeism and obsessive compulsive attention to details.
Feb 19, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
What Should I Do During Great Lent?
Most of us realize that prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are the three basic Christian and lenten necessities, but we often realize as well that we cannot keep the strictest lenten regulations of the Church which are, in fact, monastic rules. We know that we will not make a maximum effort and so we sometimes feel frustrated, lost, and without guidance.
Feb 18, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Lent is the Time to Change Yourselves
Here is another fasting related story. An acquaintance of mine was having some very serious problems and she frequently travelled to see a spiritual person to seek advice. Once she said to him, ‘I have voluntarily undertaken the obedience of reading two kathismas every day. Do you think I have chosen wisely?’


Feb 17, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Repent, For the Kingdom of Heaven Is Near. The Beginning of Great Lent.
Penitential Canon of St Andrew of Crete

Life has been given to each of us to come to God and see Him face to face, but we have not seen Him. And who knows how many Lents we still have in store ahead of us, how many opportunities to repent. For some of the people standing here now this Great Lent can be the last chance to reconsider their lives and turn to God.

Feb 15, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Journey Into Orthodox Christian Lent
I had to apologize to someone Sunday night. In fact, I had to apologize to about a hundred people--one at a time, face to face. It was great. For Orthodox Christians, Lent begins differently than it does for Protestants and Catholics.
Feb 15, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Forgiveness Sunday
Tomorrow we enter the holy days of Great Lent, and the Church calls us to ask forgiveness of one another with repentance and humility in our hearts. We will enter a holy place and time. In the time of the Law, God’s people travelled every year to the Holy City of Jerusalem and entered the Temple to offer a cleansing sacrifice. In the weeks leading up to Great Lent, we hear wondrous words chanted in church: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning” (Ps. 137). It is now time for us to remember the Heavenly Jerusalem, our Fatherland.
Feb 14, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Forgiveness Sunday
When we come to one another and say, 'Forgive me' it will not mean, if you answer 'Yes I do' that nothing that was wrong between us is annihilated, exists no more. But it means 'I accept you as you are, sinful, a wound in my flesh, a wound in my heart, a problem in my life — but I accept you and I will carry this acceptance, and you, throughout life, and pray for God's blessing to be on you and pray for God to heal both of us, that I should become such that I do not lead you into temptation, be the cause of your own fall.

Feb 13, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Sunday of the Last Judgment
If Christ is really the Son of God, then death, judgment, Paradise, and hell are real as well. If we accept these realities, our acceptance is the first act of faith. Faith is the first step on the path to salvation, and fear of God is the second step.


Feb 7, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Lost and Found
There is a story told about another "prodigal" who left his home and led a dissolute life, which was a disgrace to his parents. He too decided to go home, but he was uncertain what the response would be. So he wrote to his parents to tell them what he was intending to do. And he asked them to put a small white handkerchief in the top left corner of a window as a sign that he would be accepted back.


Jan 31, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
A Time to Feast and a Time to Fast
This year, because Great Lent begins so early, we feel that cycle perhaps more intensely than at other times. Having just finished the great twin feasts of our Lord’s Nativity and Baptism (Christmas and Theophany) we enter almost immediately it seems on the preparation for Great Lent. And so we swing from one of the greatest festal seasons of the year, directly into the greatest fasting season of the year. A time to feast, a time to fast.

Jan 25, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Preparing for Great Lent
We usually think of this preparatory time as the period of Great Lent, but in fact it begins three weeks earlier with the Sundays of the Publican and Pharisee, the Prodigal Son and the Last Judgment. Since we are not fasting yet, we tend to pay less attention to these preparatory Sundays than we do to the Sundays of Great Lent, and yet they are very important, as they give us a map, as it were, of our lenten journey.


Jan 24, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee
In our mentality we tend to oppose glory and humility because we have identified humility with deficiency or weakness. Our ignorance, our incompetence, ought to make us feel humble. It seems almost impossible to "put across" to modern man, fed on publicity, self - affirmation and endless self - praise, that all which is genuinely perfect, beautiful and good, is at the same time naturally humble. Precisely because it is perfect and good, it does not need "publicity" and external glory of any kind.


Jan 24, 2010, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Justice as Asceticism
Fasting is meant to lead to something more. The question is, what more does this lead to? Fasting saves money, and makes us conscious of the ¾ (no longer 2/3) world which is malnourished; fasting reminds us of our dependence on God; fasting gives time for prayer. We do one thing, which leads to another. Hopefully. I say hopefully, because often fasting may lead us nowhere.

Dec 10, 2009, 10:00

Our Faith : Fasting
Questions and Answers About the Nativity Fast
Fasting is not difficult if we live in an Orthodox family. In fact the external act of fasting from animal products is not difficult, for this is part of our daily liturgical life. On a spiritual level it is more challenging, especially with the demands that are made on us at this time of the year. I am referring to our ‘obligation’ to join in office parties or socialize with non-Orthodox friends. For those of us whose immediate family is not Orthodox, this poses a challenge on the physical level as well.


Dec 9, 2009, 10:00