This gallery contains 8 photos.
Seeing lots of signs of Christmas around our home and satisfied with the first round of decorations, we thought we could share some of our best loved treasures with you. Enjoy!
Waiting for Christmas
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Category Archives: Holidays (Holy Days)
The North Pole is a City
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December 6/19, St. Nicholas
Archbishop of Myra in Lycia, the Wonderworker
Whose Relics Lie Principally in Bari, Italy
And Whose Legendary Brother Santa Claus Lives in the North Pole
It was unthinkable. Several years ago, we were celebrating the annual feast of St. Nicholas, and our priest confessed that there was not a single person in our parish whom we could wish a happy name’s day. My wife, who was pregnant at the time, turned to me and we decided then and there to start a trend that is all too common in other Orthodox and Eastern European Churches. Now, including my son, there are at least two boys named Nicholas in our parish. We are now more like the Greek family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding with every other person named Nick, Nikko, Nikki, or Nikolaki.
Continue readingA Sobering Christmas Ghost Story
Every year faithful Christians struggle with the rush and distraction of holiday preparations and long to take a moment to slow down and reflect on the real meaning of the season. It is an especially difficult struggle for Orthodox Christians as we are prescribed by Mother Church to fast in our preparation to meet the newborn King in his Nativity. The Lenten Fast by comparison is somewhat easier in the sense that the season is already more austere in the wider culture (everyone fasting in the springtime, if for no other religious reason, so that they can fit into summertime bathing suits). The weeks leading up to Christmas in America are anything but austere. Between Christmas parties at work, holiday concerts galore, and the extra latte at Starbucks to keep up our shopping stamina, few things in the broader culture give us pause to stop and reflect on our eternal destiny with one amazing exception, Charles Dicken’s classic Christmas ghost story, A Christmas Carol. Continue reading
Our Thanksgiving Celebration
Here’s my middle daughter also getting in on the blogging action with a piece about today’s celebration of the great American holiday of Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is about pilgrims. They gathered food and had a feast with the Indians. Today we celebrate thanksgiving by making a puppet show for our guests. Continue reading
Pews Stink
September 14/27, Feast of the Universal Exaltation of the Precious, Life-Giving Cross of the Lord
On this precious feast of the church, one of the few feasts in which we honor the day by fasting, I feel it is time to post something that has been percolating for some time in my mind and heart. It is the importance of sacrifice that the cross represents in our life as Christians and how antithetical that sacrifice is to us comfort-loving Americans.
The quite provocative title of this post may lead the reader to conclude that I have strayed too far into the dangerous waters of conservative fundamentalism, that view of the world that constrains truth and limits people to operate within the confines of an overly rigorous ideology. While I do believe that church pews encourage laziness and lack of rigor in our worship, I also believe, paradoxically, that they limit our freedom of worship, a belief that I have tested and found true on my own children.
Continue readingThe Tsar’s Car
July 4/17, 2013
Feast of the Royal Martyrs: Tsar-Martyr Nicholas, Tsaritsa-Martyr Alexandra, the Royal Crown Prince Alexis, the Grand-Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and those martyred with them.
On this family feast day of ours, I thought it fitting to share a few words of what the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas has meant to me personally. His heavenly intercessions have brought me from spiritual rags to heavenly riches and now I owe every breath to his pleading for me and my family before the throne of God. Continue reading
Invitation to Breakfast
Reminds me of a quote from G.K. Chesterton, also about having breakfast (tangentially about the resurrection and a living church):
Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast.
– From “Authority and the Adventurer” in Orthodoxy the Romance of Faith
CHRIST IS RISEN!!
I love eating breakfast out at restaurants. Perhaps it’s because I rarely do it, but when I do, it’s always a vacation feel – a sense of the unexpected.
So it was with new eyes that I read the line “Come have breakfast” in the gospel of John.
The verse comes after Jesus has been crucified and has risen, appearing to different people. First he is seen by Mary, then by the disciples and finally by others. He’s on the banks of the Sea of Galilee watching the disciples fishing in a boat on the sea. They have fished the entire night and they’ve caught nothing. Their nets and stomachs are empty. But this man on the banks of the sea tells them “Just try it one more time.”
Just one more time.
So they do it. Weary, frustrated, hungry – they still try one more time. And the result does…
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The Morning After Easter – Sham el Nessim (a Repost)
Seems we are not the first to think of a Bright (Easter) Monday pinic.
Orthodox Easter, otherwise known as Pascha, was this weekend. This means that much of Christendom celebrated Easter after a Holy Week that led us to a final, triumphant service, beginning just before midnight on Saturday and ending around three in the morning. While this may seem daunting, I assure you – staying awake is not an issue. How can you doze off when a priest periodically comes into the congregation and with joy shouts “Christ is Risen!” to which you respond “Indeed, He is Risen!”.
As is the duty of those who call themselves Christians, the challenge is moving from Pascha into the week after. From celebration into the ordinary. From Sunday into Monday. It is easier to do this in some places than in others, and Egypt is one of those places where the Monday after Easter is Sham el Nessim – a national holiday.
So today I am…
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The Never Ending Day
Great & Holy Pascha 2013
Time in this fallen world is often experienced as something we need to use up or even kill in our never-ending pursuit of pleasure and cessation from work. But the irony is that for however long or hard we work, leisure time, that supposed reward at the end of a day’s labor, ever seeks to elude us. Especially in America, we can never seem to work long enough or hard enough to reach it, if pleasure really is the goal we should be seeking at all.
The Epicurean philosophers and their modern Madison Avenue ad agencies bid us to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. The Lord Jesus Christ bids us, rather paradoxically, to take up our cross and die with him. And no one in the history of the world who has taken the Lord’s advice over the Epicureans has ever been sorry for it, for our crucifixion always ends, as His, in resurrection. Continue reading
A Church that Sings
Great and Holy Friday, 2013
One of the struggles I had when I first became Orthodox was discovering within the Church a tradition of congregational singing not unlike what I grew up with in the Protestant Church. What one often finds in a typical Orthodox Church either here or abroad is that the entire service is sung by a choir, either amateur or professional, that performs pieces from a place removed, either in a choir loft or off to the side. The unconscious message this sends, especially if they are singing from the loft, is that the rest of the people in the nave are off the hook, and that their work consists merely of silent prayer in their respective place. Continue reading
Like Mendicant Monks... 