By the Grace of God, one hundred and ten people have been incorporated into our Holy Orthodox Church. Before converting to Orthodoxy, they belonged either to other Christian denominations or to traditional African religions of Kananga, Congo. On Holy Saturday morning, the hymn» As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put…
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….
A poem dedicated to the 15 years of patriarchate of His Beatitude Pope Theodore II of Alexandria
It was after the Blessing Service that we conducted for the new borehole drilled in Sasha Mambo village just outside the National Park of Ruaha when we were approached by the village President, who was holding a piece of paper. We are used to the whole ritual since every time after a charitable activity of…
On July 12, at the church under construction, the first Hierarchical Divine Liturgy was held on the day our Church commemorates the memory of Holy Elder Paisios. It was at the crack of dawn that we left our Mission Center in Kindamali, Iringa, in order to arrive at the unfinished church early enough to make the necessary preparations for the Divine Liturgy. Despite the adverse weather conditions and the low temperature (3 degrees Celsius due to the winter season), the faithful came to the Divine Liturgy to honor the Holy Elder…
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, Greetings in the Lord from faraway Uganda and the Diocese of Gulu and Eastern Uganda. With the help of God and the blessings of His Beatitude, we strive to establish a Coordination Center in the newly established Diocese of Gulu of Eastern and Northern Uganda, so that the work…
On July 16, 2019, with the blessings of His Eminence Metropolitan Athenagoras of Mexico and Central America, I left the USA on secondment from the Metropolis of New Jersey, and at my own expense, I landed in Jamaica to explore the possibility of establishing and developing the Orthodox Mission in this country under the regular…
On a downhill road we met a family that was crushing stones into gravel… All its members were working… The grandfather, the grandmother, the son, the daughter-in-law… The latter, named Tajine, had her baby in a basket next to her… It was just one month old and was sleeping despite the hammerings. One meter away was her four-year-old son Michael. He also had a hammer and was breaking stones!…
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…
When one first sets foot in Calcutta, one seems to have been transported to another planet, to a parallel universe. It is not just the appalling poverty that is present all around; it is not the heaps of garbage that are spread everywhere; it is not the crowds of people of all ages that are…
