On the occasion of the glorious feast of our Lord's Pascha, our primates and hierarchs from around the world sent epistles of joy to their faithful flocks.
Elena Alexandrova
Rating: 10|Votes: 12
Here is the last turn of the queue, and I already see the wonderworking icon of St. Matrona straight ahead. All I had in my mind was an entreaty to God—to give health to my mother and to save her life!
Fr. Stephen Freeman
Rating: 10|Votes: 2
In Orthodoxy, this imagery is the coin of the realm in the hymns surrounding Pascha. All of Holy Week is predicated on the notion of Christ descent into hell and radical actions of destroying death and setting free those held in captivity. St. John Chrysostom’s great Paschal Homily, read in every Orthodox Church on the night of Pascha, is an “alley, alley, in come free!” of salvation.
Christ, ‘the first fruits of them that slept’, has shown us the only possible way of overcoming sin and death. This is the way of love. And it is to this love that we are called to bear witness before the whole world. And we are called in the first instance by the example of our own lives, for ‘by this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another’.