Wanted to publish this rather excellent apologetic for smaller parishes made by one of our favorite pastors, Fr. Marc Vranes, on the 100th anniversary of his parish’s existence today. It is the parish church where my wife and I were engaged in the spring of 2003. We join in the chorus to wish Holy Trinity Orthodox Church in Willimantic, Connecticut many, many, many more blessed years of ministry.
9 October 2016
Feast of St Tikhon, Apostle to America
Your Eminence, Reverend Fathers, My Beloved Community at Holy Trinity, Students from the UConn OCF, Both Current & All Alumni, Honored Guests, & Friends of HTOC in Willimantic, Connecticut-
As we hear in the Orthodox Church throughout the year, “O Lord, how manifold are Thy works, in wisdom hast Thou made them all” (Psalm 103).
Several years ago as I was about to embark on a long discourse with a friend about a subject that required detailed explanation – it was no doubt an opportunity for me to set the record straight on some baseball related matter – I rhetorically asked my friend the time-honored question, “I don’t know where to start?” He responded by suggesting, “How about at the very beginning? It always works for me.” Continue reading
Many parents have felt the wonder of the moment when their child was old enough to utter his first word. Perhaps, equal to excitement is the moment when he begins to read. He sounds out everything in his path All goes well until he decides to exercise his phonics skills on a supermarket tabloid. Words “scandal” and the easier monosyllable “sex” send his impressionable mind reeling as he asks parents a barrage of troubling questions.
August 6/19, 2016
I remember so well the first time I stayed overnight in an Orthodox Christian monastery. I dreamed of every Christian camp and conference I had attended up to that point in my life, for they represented the highest and deepest of my spiritual experience. After just one day in the concentrated prayers of the monastic daily cycle, those previous experiences of prayer became as mere foretastes of reality. 
From a small city church in Russian Siberia to one of America’s largest cathedrals in San Francisco, our batiushka (endearing term for priest) is about to finally complete his mission and strengthen a Cross-Pacific relationship that began in the middle of this past century. The story is bound up with one of America’s most beloved saints, 
Like Mendicant Monks... 