Материалы 4 января 2011 г.

Воздаяние за прощение обид превосходит воздаяние всякой иной добродетели.

Летом 2010 года в польских городах Гданьск и Сопот проходили XIII Международные литературно-образовательные чтения «Литература в борьбе за духовность и чистоту русского языка», организованные российскими центрами науки и культуры в Варшаве и Гданьске, Институтом славистики Гданьского университета и Союзом писателей Москвы. Чтения в Гданьске завершились принятием обращения к современникам, в первую очередь, литераторам и журналистам.

His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia has addressed his traditional Christmas Epistle to the archpastors, pastors, monastics, and all the faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Bethlehem this day resembles heaven; hearing from the stars the singing of angelic voices; and in place of the sun, enfolds within itself on every side, the Sun of justice. And ask not how: for where God wills, the order of nature yields. For He willed; He had the power; He descended; He redeemed; all things yielded in obedience to God. This day He Who is, is Born; and He Who is, becomes what He was not. For when He was God, He became man; yet not departing from the Godhead that is His. Nor yet by any loss of divinity became He man, nor through increase became He God from man; but being the Word He became flesh, His nature, because of impassability, remaining unchanged.

It doesn’t take much for a parent to understand that children don’t hear very well. It may take me telling the children three times (very Orthodox ?) that their shoes belong in the shoe basket before they understand what to do with their footwear. For a child, going to a church where hearing is the only sense they can use in worship is flat out boring.