Dear Brothers and Friends of the Orthodox Mission, I greet you and embrace you in the Lord from South Madagascar, this beautiful island, the earthly paradise of travel guides and at the same time the harsh reality, marginally unsustainable for the indigenous population culminating in the catastrophic onslaught of two fierce typhoons. Houses were leveled,…
Just a few decades ago, the famous Jean Paul Sartre, immersed in the latent Western tradition rooted in himself, exclaimed: “l’enfer, c’est les autres” (hell is other people). Whoever they are, known and unknown; the face of every person whom I will encounter. In the process of relating to the others, something steals my time,…
Dear friends of the Mission, Honestly, every time I write a piece for your publication, I hope and pray that it will be the last time I fill the page with human pain. After an unprecedentedly arid four years, for the entire territory of Southern Madagascar, the majority of the indigenous people are facing the…
The sun once again began its cycle in the sky. Warm, almost bearable. Window open, a peculiar insect with long slender legs climbs onto the desk and approaches me unconcernedly. In the corridor of the clinic I hear voices. People come and go, apparently carrying X-rays, which make an almost eerie sound with every movement….
What unspeakable joy for one to be called “my child” by the great apostle who claimed divine adoption and rapture to heaven, Paul, the Apostle to the nations! Timothy, my child, the beginning, the address, the literal love of the Epistle to Timothy, of the text that said it all to all of us like…
I will never get tired of confessing, because first of all, it relaxes me to experience things myself, that the life of the Gospel takes on flesh and blood every day, in every step of our Church Mission. I myself used to be an indifferent reader of the Bible; emotional, moderately faithful, or of course,…
Everytime I listen the objection “But is this what the Mission stands for? Charities?” –and it is not rare–, I fee like something cracks inside me, something like what we vaguely call “the conscience”, which we, monks, willingly put to martyrdom. It is actually an act of martyrdom not to respond hotly to this question….
Fifteen years! Five thousand four hundred and seventy-five days! Countless hours, numberless minutes, an ocean of seconds; and yet, all this time, all this measurement with its subdivisions, which is desperately trying to put some order in the chaotic space between events is an act so subjective! The fluid time itself, as the Holy Fathers…
The vigilant concern of His Beatitude Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria Theodore II for the flock of the African continent led the Holy Synod of the Ancient Patriarchate of Alexandria to the partition of the Metropolis of Madagascar and to the establishment of the Holy Diocese of Toliara and South Madagascar with my unworthiness as…
