Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head.
The stars in the bright sky looked down where he lay,
The little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.

The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,
But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.
I love thee, Lord Jesus! look down from the sky,
And stay by my cradle till morning is nigh.

Be near me, Lord Jesus; I ask thee to stay
Close by me forever, and love me I pray.
Bless all the dear children in thy tender care,
And take us to heaven to live with thee there.

This old Anglo-American carol is also a kind of traditional prayer in the English-speaking world. As American converts to Orthodoxy, we may hear its familiar verse while looking more deeply at the Orthodox icon of Christmas before us. Our Nativity icon in the center of our Church today is a holy image that is also a kind of family picture for us on this very family holiday of Christmas. In it we can find the head of our family Jesus Christ as a baby, our Mother in the Church the Most Holy Virgin Mary, our animal friends, even the temptation by the devil of the Righteous Joseph, and the angels speaking to the shepherds, the everyday people with whom we can identify. It is at night, our God is hidden in a cave, in a harsh world where the villain Herod hunts for him, a star shines down.

We can imagine the ox lowing and the ass braying, and both helping to keep the baby warm Who is also the hidden God in the cave, sheltered from both the harsh rocks of the world and the vicious attacks of Herod and the Devil, both hunting for Him as He fulfills prophecy. In the icon, the ox and the ass also are symbolic representations of two peoples: the ox symbolizes the Jews, a “clean” animal under Mosaic Law, and a people guided by the Law of Moses to remain faithful and obedient to God. The ass an “unclean” animal according to dietary laws, represents the Gentiles who did not have the Law of Moses directing them. This pairing reflects the unity between Jews and Gentiles in Christ. The presence of both clean and unclean animals in the icon symbolizes the unity wrought by Christmas, typing the birth of Jesus Christ as fully God and fully man, two natures in one person, unconfused and undivided, as understood in Orthodox Christianity.

Other animals present in the icon represent the redemption of the fallen Creation as a whole. The tree often in the Nativity icons represents the Tree of Jesse, the genealogy of Christ’s human nature back to Creation. The harsh rocks symbolize a harsh world subject to the newborn King. The angels with the shepherds sing “glory to God in the highest” and the star that led the three pagan wise men who later became Orthodox Saints is understood by the Church Fathers as an angelic being lighting humanity’s darkness.

Mysterious dimensions of life about which we are often clueless come together on earth at Christmas, a bending of space and time in this humble and stark setting of the cave. “The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not,” as Scripture tells us of Christ.  Christ said I am the light of the world, and he gave us as the greatest Christmas gift the uncreated light of God in our hearts, so that we can let our light shine.

The Orthodox Church highlights the full spectrum of redemption refracted in Jesus’ life, from His birth at Bethlehem to the Crucifixion and Resurrection and Ascension, and even His sending down the Holy Spirit to His Church. Our Lord brought His human form to heaven, but the Church is also the continuing Body of Christ on earth. One special event also came in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the Gospels tell us he sweated as blood . His sorrow there was from compassion for us, from awareness of our sins and how He would die for them. He still gives His Body and Blood to each of us at every Eucharist.

Yet this, too, goes back to Bethlehem as shown in the Christmas icon in the center of Church today. The manger with the swaddling clothes prefigures the tomb with the graveclothes. Such joy with such prefiguring of sorrow, this is the model for the joyful sorrow of our faith. Even the three wise men bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the first two symbolizing the royalty and divinity of Jesus Christ, but also the myrrh indicating the sacrifice of His death to come.

This is all about the love of God for us, the helpless baby Who would come forth to change history at large and our own. But it comes with suffering, too. Hieromonk Seraphim Rose, spiritual son of our patron St. John, offered principles of Orthodox life that grow in us from the babe in the cave, that we may keep the spirit of Christmas each day throughout the year. According to his student Hieromonk Ambrose (Young), there are three principles of Orthodox living given by Father Seraphim, which combined can suggest to us the true Christmas spirit.

Three Principles of the Christmas Spirit in Orthodox Christianity

First, Hieromonk Seraphim noted, “We are pilgrims on this earth and there is nothing permanent for us here.” “We tend to treat it as though it’s permanent and awfully important in terms of careers and education and getting ahead and all those things. But all of that will die with us when the body dies; none of it will go with us into the next world.” The babe in the manger and His gift to us reminds us of this.

Second, he said, “our faith is not an academic ‘thing.‘” “Don’t let anyone ever take your books away from you. But don’t mistake the reading of books for the real thing, which is the living of Orthodoxy,” Father Seraphim said. “I found in Chinese philosophy the noblest view of man, until I encountered Orthodoxy and the Orthodox Lives of Saints. Then, shortly after I was received into the Orthodox Church, I met Archbishop [Saint] John, who was the noblest man I had ever met.” St. John personified the faith for Father Seraphim. Jesus Christ personified Truth for all of us. He was born here on earth for us. Because of Christmas, Truth is a Who and not a What.

Third: “If you do not find Christ in this life, you will not find Him in the next.”  Jesus Christ came to us on earth, and continues with us in His Church, to save us here and now, not in the next life. This is why our missionary work is so important for ourselves and others. Following the example of our Lord, we need to go forth from our cave. That’s why even in our little town of Winfield, in these country fields, we nonetheless are a mission by God’s grace.

Fr. Seraphim used to say to Hieromonk Ambrose, “if we dwell in love and God is love, then God is dwelling in us. And that is one of the ways by which we become closer and closer to Christ in this world.” And less fearful of the world. The fear of God (not of the world) is a love for God, because we appreciate how awesome He is, how loving, how humble yet mysterious, how infinitely powerful, how He cares for us in spite of our worst selves, as seen in the original Christmas.

Brothers and sisters let us start living loving and fearlessly in Christ this Christmas season, remembering the baby born in Bethlehem. Between Nativity today and Theophany in about two weeks, let us double down with prayer, with worship, digital detox, and seeking God’s peace in our hearts by His divine grace. In this way we remember and honor the child at Bethlehem. The cave that contained the whole world because it contained its Creator, the virgin birth, and all that is depicted in the icon before us–these are so wonderful yet so simple, that we should rest our hearts and memories in them today and every day. As Scrooge said finally when he had awakened and repented, let the spirit of Christmas be in our hearts every day throughout the year. For the love of our Lord for us offers the truest gift that keeps on giving, a gift we unwrap today here with our Church family in our hearts, whether we are new or old to Orthodoxy.

Christ is Born! Glorify Him! Merry Christmas!

Today we commemorate the eve of the birth of Jesus Christ with Royal Hours and Vespers and Liturgy, looking toward the celebration of our Lord’s birth tonight and tomorrow morning for Christmas Day.

As the Gospel of John tells us, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehends it not. Jesus Christ tells us that I Am the light of the world, even as he tells us to let our light shine in Him. His birth is a great bringing of the uncreated light or grace of God to the world, so that His light may shine forth from each of our hearts in Him.. The Christmas star is often depicted in our iconography as coming down from a dark aureola, signifying that divine grace of God that comes to us through Christ’s birth.

We can adapt the words of a famous Anglo-American hymn to our location for this Christmas Eve service, here in Union township:

O little town of Winfield, how still we see thee lie. Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by. Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light, the hopes and fears of all the years, are met in thee tonight.

The darkness tonight in our 21^st-century world is broken by light pollution and the glow of our devices, by global wars and rumors of wars. Yet the star of Bethlehem, understood by the Church Fathers as an angelic being, shines on to guide us to the cave at Bethlehem.

The angels coming to the shepherds sing, “Glory to God in the highest,” and this is part of the priestly prayer repeated before each Liturgy, a reminder of how the good news at Bethlehem grounds our participation in the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist throughout the year. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace good will among men,” is a proclamation that is also a prayer, a proclamation of God’s greatness and of His coming to earth, and a prayer for peace and good will among men.

On Christmas Eve, Union, the name of our local township, can be a reminder of the Russian Orthodox term sobornost, referring to the mystical unity highlighted at Christmas Eve, the solidarity of mankind saved in Christ. His birth as the Second Adam in the flesh reminds us and redeems us in our common human nature. We find our self by losing ourself in Him, in the dreamless sleep from which He wakes us tonight. He gives us the gift of unity in Him, in His Body the Church, our Church family, the basis for each of our homes and daily work and lives.

As the Christmas carol puts it, tonight is the culmination of the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Him tonight. All the thousands of years of struggles of the patriarchs, prophets, and faithful.

Even the very biblical term for Church reminds us of this. For the Greek term ekklesia in the Bible, usually translated into English as Church, is also the term in the Old Testament for the remnant assembly who kept faithful to God’s law in the Old Testament.

The Church in the New Testament on Christmas Eve transforms into the fully realized Israel, and the remnant find their faith made real in the babe in the cave at Bethlehem, the King of Kings for all nations and peoples and races, including here in Appalachian America.

In His Ascension he took up into heaven the human form in which He was born at Bethlehem tonight, fully God and fully man. May our mission work with God’s grace now save ourselves and others, that still our Lord may come quickly again.

For Christmas Eve links the first and the last books of the Bible, Genesis and Revelation. In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth, Genesis tells us. That “in the beginning” means “in the Logos,” for as the Gospel of John tells us, “in the beginning was the Word.” The Creed tells us that by Jesus Christ “all things were made,” by Him of one essence, unconfused and undivided, with the Holy Trinity.

Then in the Book of Revelation, at the sounding of the seventh trumpet marking the end of time and of this world, we are told of the woman travailing in birth. A great red dragon stands ready to consume the newborn child. The man-child is caught up to God and the woman is given a place of safety in the wilderness for three and a half years.

In this account, the Church Fathers saw a description of the Church reflecting also the account of Christ’s birth. They saw the birth of the child as about the kindling of the light of Christ in each of our hearts, accompanied by persecution of the Church by the antichrist, just as the evil king Herod had sought to slay the little boys after Jesus’ birth. The woman and the child also reference the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus, along with each believer born again in Jesus Christ.

So Christmas Eve has reference both historically and to our day too. The sharp rugged rocks often depicted in the icon of the night-time scene at the cave reference the harshness of the world. But above shines the star, and in the hidden cave comes the beauty of redemption, God’s love made tangible and personalized for us forever.

St. John Damascene wrote of how at Christmas the Logos, God the Word, thickened into image. So too at Christmas the law of God–for principle or law is another translation of Logos–became flesh. Jesus Christ fulfilled the law of God from the Old Testament in the New Testament that has made all of us in the Body of Christ part of the new covenant with Israel, the people of God. Christmas Eve resides today in the Gospel book that has replaced the Stone commandments in the Holy of Holies, through the Person of Jesus Christ.

The Icon of Nativity at the table of preparation in the altar is now out in the middle of the Church, with a relic from the cave of Bethlehem. Before this icon of the Nativity the bread is made ready for Holy Communion. And the secret priestly prayer repeats from the angels, “glory to God in the highest and on earth peace good will among men.”

As that early American hymn put it,

We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell…
Our Lord Emmanuel.

The mystery of Christmas Eve is that amid the darkness of the world and the mounting worldly powers of the antichrist around us, the light has come to shine from within our hearts, the divine light, given to us as we live in Jesus Christ, the hidden God who came to illumine the world from within a cave.

Christ is born!

An homily from St. John’s for the Sunday before Christmas, 7534/2026, by Priest Paul Siewers.

In graduate school I studied medieval literature, covering a broad period defined in my program roughly as running from around 410, when the Roman legions withdrew from Britain, and Rome had her first fall at the hands of barbarians, to 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Muslims. At the end of that period it seemed that the center of Orthodox Christianity historically vanished. But there was another hidden center that would arise, directly related to us here today, and that would be, unseen by many for a time, what became Russia, in which many holy people of the old Byzantine world placed their secret hope for a land housing the continuation of Orthodoxy.

In medieval studies, we were taught that what to us modern readers seemed the most tedious or boring readings were often among the most important texts to non-modern people. This is true of the genealogies of the Bible. They are an important glue textually, as I tell my Bible students at Bucknell as well as in our own parish Bible Study. The genealogies are a personal link through the generations, both a time machine of sorts and a spiritual ancestry.com.

In the case of the genealogy of the opening of Matthew, it goes back in time from the birth of Jesus of Nazareth all the way back to the time of Abraham, around 2000 years earlier. And the genealogies from Abraham’s time in the Bible preserved by the Church, as the Gospel of Luke later highlights, go all the way back to Adam and Eve. This is how the Orthodox Christian Bible scholars in Byzantium calculated our Church years, so that today we are in Year 7534. Our new year of 2026, brand new as it is, was based on faulty arithmetic in the Catholic West, by the way, as Jesus was born a few years before that. Nonetheless, the genealogies link us in the Church today, as Israel, all the way back through that family tree to our forefathers Noah and ultimately Adam and Eve. This is part of the lead-up to Christmas, because it is through the birth of Jesus Christ that we become in our baptism and chrismation grafted into the family of the Church.

The Evangelist Matthew’s genealogy is also an explication of our shared human nature, for we are all of the kin of Adam and Eve, and Noah, and kinship remember is related to the origins of the word kind, in terms of being kind to those who are our kin. That is really everyone, starting with our Church family, but that incorporates all peoples and races and nations and ages.

Jesus Christ’s genealogy in the Gospel includes women, unusually since such lists only included usually men as heads of households, namely Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Rahab and Ruth were Gentiles, and Raham, Tamar, and Bathsheba had questionable characters. Yet the genealogy symbolizes the inclusion of all people among Jesus Christ’s human family, the Church. It lists both righteous and wicked people, kings and peasants, men, women foreshadowing the Virgin Mary’s role, and Jews and Gentiles alike. All like us are sinners in the family tree of Christ, all mankind, redeemable through His birth and love for us in His suffering and Resurrection.

The Gospel of Matthew was thought to have been written for a core original Jewish audience by the Apostle Matthew. It serves as a literal link between the Old Testament and the New Testament, as it is the first chapter of the Christian New Testament. For early Christians, although primarily Jewish in background as was the Evangelist Matthew, both the Old Testament and the New Testament were written in Greek, so it also became easy to see them as the same book and not representing different dispensations as some heretics have since wrongly taught. There is continuity between what Father Michael Pomazansky of Jordanville called the Old Testament Church and the New Testament Church, and we read the history of the Old Testament in light of the spiritual meaning and light given to it by Jesus Christ’s Incarnation in the New, which is the whole summation of the Old Testament books of the Bible. Those people of Judah and the Levites primarily, who rejected the coming of Christ, really rejected their heritage and in such a view Judaism became a reaction against Christianity. For in the Church lies the fulfillment and realization of Israel and the re-gathering of all the tribes of Israel, including the lost ones, in the gathering of all nations in her. Because the Gospel of Matthew starts with “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ,” the symbol of the Evangelist Matthew given by the Church Fathers is the Man among the four creatures of Ezekiel’s vision of the Cherubim. It emphasizes the human coming of Christ, fully God and fully man unconfused and undivided, and receives the honor of being the Gospel on the Sunday before Christmas.

Jesus Christ is described immediately in the Gospel as the son of David and the son of Abraham, and then the detailed genealogy begins. As the son of David, He is King, and as the son of Abraham the fulfiller of God’s convenant to Israel, which would become known to the world as His Church. As Christ, or the anointed one, he fulfills the offices of both King and Priest from the Old Testament, as those anointed by the Lord. This is why the regicide or killing of the last Orthodox Christian imperial family in 1917 was so serious. It marked the killing of the anointed of the Lord, but also the effective end of Orthodox Christian kingship that in major form had extended back through Russia, the Third Rome, all the way back to Byzantium and the Second Rome of now-fallen Constantinople. The martyrdom of the Holy Royal Martyrs of Russia in that different genealogy of earthly history, for many holy elders and fathers marked a beginning to the last days of prophecy, although our Lord told us that of that time and that day we know not. Many holy fathers believe that the time of the Final Judgement is extended for the sake of the prayers of the faithful that they and more people may be saved. This is what lends urgency, brothers and sisters, to our mission work in America as Orthodox Christians. May God strengthen our efforts at mission work even here in our humble country Church, so that ourselves and others may find our Lord’s Church to be an ark in these latter days! 

To return to the genealogy in Matthew, it lists 14 generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and from the Babylonian exile and destruction of the First Temple to Christ another 14 generations. The third chain of names in this Gospel only seems to include 13 generations, though, leading to speculation that perhaps this is to symbolize how the Virgin Theotokos is not in the listed lineage. In any case, her absence relates probably to how the Evangelist is showing the legal and royal lineage through generations involving the descent from the Patriarch Abraham and David. This Gospel also seems to skip some generations and leaves out a few names, so that the number 14 may have been both for purposes of memorization and also symbolic, for according to a Jewish tradition of using numbers for letters, 14 signified David’s name. David as Prophet and King provided an authentication in the genealogy for Jesus as the Son of David and Christ, uniting also those offices in Israel in their highest fulfillment as Messiah and God Incarnate. In noting a few differences between the genealogies in Matthew and in Luke, some Church commentators have said that Matthew may be following Joseph’s lineage, and Luke following Mary’s. Scholars likewise say that Matthew probably was following the royal succession while Luke traces Joseph’s physical descent. Joseph of course was not who we today would call the biological father but legally the father of Jesus. Differences may also relate to situations of stepfathers within families.

But, in any case, the genealogy of Christ is a reminder of the grounding of the Church as Israel in the whole salvation history of the Bible stretching back thousands of years and now to all peoples. Stay grounded spiritually in this, friends. For just as Jacob’s Ladder is understood by the Church as a symbol or type of the Theotokos, linking heaven and earth, so to0 the Theotokos is the link between this genealogy and the Incarnation of the Son of God, fully God and fully man, for our salvation. To speak of the genealogies as offering grounding, we may be reminded in a mundane typology by the person who is seasick in a boat, and looks to the horizon for grounding. Let us also remember our genealogy in Christ in this way, brothers and sisters. The genealogies also show us a symbol of how the Church is a mystical hierarchy, a network of grace working across and beyond time and space, in the uncreated energies of God.

Brothers and Sisters, we are called to a Christian life that is not an abstract idea, but a lived and embodied experience. The genealogy of the Holy Fathers, which includes those Prophets who spiritually foresaw the coming of Christ, is a link to heaven that is also a reminder of how the Church offers that link right here on earth. The Orthodox Church is both the spiritual and the historical Church. God’s Church is not missing or invisible. The portal right here can be seen in the Royal Doors that open to us, the veil of the Holy of Holies taken away, as the gifts of the Most Holy and Pure Body and Blood of our Lord and God and Savior come to us. So, He came to us more than two thousand years ago as a baby in a cave, honored by angels and by animals and by His family, Who would nurture His Orthodox Church, even here in the quiet fields of Winfield, Pennsylvania, half a world and two millennia away, where He nurtures the spark of God’s love in each of our hearts at this Christmas time.

For Christ is in our midst!

Troparion of the Forefeast of the Nativity (Tone 4)

Make ready, O Bethlehem, * Eden hath been opened unto all. * Prepare, O Ephratha, * for the Tree of life hath blossomed in the cave from the Virgin. * For her womb proved to be a spiritual paradise wherefrom there came the Divine Plant, * whereof eating we shall live and not die like Adam. * Christ is born to raise the image that fell of old.

Kontakion of the Fathers (Tone 1)

Rejoice, O Bethlehem! * Ephratha, make ready! * for behold, the Ewe hasteneth to give birth unto the Great Shepherd Whom she carrieth in her womb. * And seeing Him, the God-bearing Fathers rejoice, * and with the shepherds praise the Virgin who giveth milk.

The Reading from the

Holy Gospel according to Matthew,

§1 [1:1-25]

The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham. Abraham begot Isaac, and Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Judah and his brethren. And Judah begot Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez begot Hezron, and Hezron begot Aram, and Aram begot Aminadab, and Aminadab begot Nahshon, and Nahshon begot Salmon, and Salmon begot Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz begot Obed by Ruth, and Obed begot Jesse, and Jesse begot David the king. And David the king begot Solomon by her that had been the wife of Uriah, and Solomon begot Rehoboam, and Rehoboam begot Abijah, and Abijah begot Asa, and Asa begot Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat begot Joram, and Joram begot Uzziah, and Uzziah begot Jotham, and Jotham begot Ahaz, and Ahaz begot Hezekiah, and Hezekiah begot Manasseh, and Manasseh begot Amon, and Amon begot Josiah, and Josiah begot Jechonias and his brethren, about the time they were carried away to Babylon. And after they were brought to Babylon, Jechonias begot Salathiel, and Salathiel begot Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel begot Abiud, and Abiud begot Eliakim, and Eliakim begot Azor, and Azor begot Zadok, and Zadok begot Achim, and Achim begot Eliud, and Eliud begot Eleazar, and Eleazar begot Matthan, and Matthan begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations, and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations, and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations. Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this way: When His mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. And Joseph her husband, being a just man and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily. But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a Son, and thou shalt call His name JESUS, for He shall save His people from their sins.’ Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, ‘Behold, a virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a Son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel’ (which being interpreted is, ‘God with us’). Then Joseph, being raised from sleep, did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife, and knew her not until she had brought forth her firstborn Son. And he called His name JESUS.

(Above: Penns Creek in our region)

I have been teaching classes on “America at 250” this academic year at Bucknell University, and one of the framing questions for the classes is this: Is America a propositional nation, based on an idea, or is it a country with a particular culture tied with a land?

Those derogating the latter side of the question often refer to such a notion as a “blood and soil” view.

However, that phrase, coming as it does from German nationalism in the 19th century, seems a straw man in the debate — except that living near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (the site of the bloodiest battle in Western Hemispheric history) it is hard not to think of “blood and soil” in a specifically American way.

Looking at the Declaration of Independence as a basic document, as we do in the classes, and also as an Orthodox Christian in the Russian Orthodox tradition, I cannot escape a view that America is a cultural country related to a particular land. A national idea country is an uncomfortable one in my tradition. It calls to mind the Soviet Union, which sought to replace Russia with an idea, and awful results.

No, ideology should not, I think, be the basis for a country, and is not in America’s case.

Even the word “country” has a meaningful variety of definitions that works against that notion.

For a country can be a nation, but the word country itself has ties to land and culture, as in being “in the country” or “country music.”

The Church I pastor in Northern Appalachia is a country Church, no doubt, as one can see from its location amid fields, its rural area, modest building and small if growing size, and the backgrounds of people in our community. And we have a cemetery there, where my family has a plot. Country also implies cultivating, and thus a culture. The parish is a country, too. Holy Scripture and Orthodox Christian tradition touch on the nations as the peoples or races (not in the pseudo-science racialist sense of the Enlightenment though–the Church is termed in old language a race, the race of all nations or peoples), through which salvation comes communally; hence the existence of “local Churches” in Orthodoxy.

But let us look at the basic idea that is advanced as the reason for America being a propositional country, from the Declaration’s preamble, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.“

It reveals a country of culture in the land, not propositional, starting with “Creator” and going back to the opening “we” referencing us as a people. Then go on to the ending where the Declaration pledges the signers’ lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, with faith in the firm protection of Divine Providence (another mention of God in the Declaration). The conclusion particularly focused on each of their histories together in America, sustained by the biblical God. Providence as a term in the Declaration does not offer a vague disembodied Deism, but a biblical sensibility.

The dignity the first statement summons for each human life is the ultimate basis of the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” also referenced in the Declaration. When St. Basil the Great of Cappadocia, an early Church Father, referenced the spark of God’s love in each human heart, he was describing the fully embodied and experiential sense of natural law that undergirds the Christian faith. Faith involves grounded culture more than proposition.

My students agree that the most-remembered idea of the Declaration that “all men are created equal” is foundational to America, but not necessarily propositional. They point to the “pursuit of happiness” as related to the “American dream” evidenced in place. They seemed more likely this fall semester to recognize the Declaration’s preposition as cultural in some sense. Some in discussion liked the idea advanced by Vice President J.D. Vance in his speech at the 2024 Republican convention that America is for him his family cemetery plot on a mountain in West Virginia.

The two notions of America –propositional and “deep country”– are not completely exclusive, though. In my classes, students as we discuss the above definitional phrase in the Declaration generally conclude that it does not argue that all people are equal, as in cultural Marxist notions of global equity in recent years in higher education, or commodified notions of people in a global marketplace–but that it says what it states, that all are created equal by God, at birth. And birth is in a place even if that dignity is spiritual.

The Declaration’s statement grounds people in Creation and comes from the Christian biblical spirituality of America’s founding generations. It embeds itself in Christian incarnational terms in the land through people’s lives, in neighborhoods, in a parish. It involves treating others with the dignity expressed in the New Commandment of Jesus Christ, to love one another as He loves us, and thus to love our neighbor more than ourselves.

Rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not rights of self-assertion as we understand them secularly today, but gifts from God, that carry with them obligations. The virtues involved in those gifts must be lived in a certain place and embodied in our lives. That too is cultural, not propositional, as much so as, say, George Washington’s character, even if he straddled being both Anglican vestryman and Mason, courageous lover of virtuous liberty and slaveowner.

Happiness to be pursued must involve, as is clear from the cultural context of the Founders’ views, virtue. Virtue also is a gift from God, a portal bridging divine grace and human struggle and aspiration, to be lived in community in a region that is to be cultivated, in our case in a parish in the country, with all its human faults and limitations, too.

This is a Christian cultural understanding, not a philosophical ideology of secularism. It requires a continuing Christian culture to tend properly. It relates to the faith that God became a man, so that man could become a god, to use the terminology of the early Christian leader Saint Athanasius the Great of Alexandria, who was describing our potential oneness in humility with God’s uncreated grace, although not with God’s mysterious and all-powerful essence. This happens by God’s grace in the neighborhood of our lives, working out from our hearts in an embodied way, starting locally.

This was perhaps understood and practiced more in the reform zeal of the many local Protestant communities established in America foundationally, the main formative Christian tradition of America, than in the arguably more Scholastic Catholicism of the day. Yet it is a common heritage for both, and completely familiar in the Orthodox Christian faith.

University of Chicago historian Anthony Kaldellis has written of “the Byzantine republic,” the sense of Christian commonwealth that infused the Christian Roman Empire of Byzantine for a thousand years, and helped inspire both Europe and Russia with hopes for a Christian commonwealth. In varying forms of monarchy, the underlying sensibility was of the responsibility and limitations of human governments under God, that rulers did not have divine right but by in effect a contract of the heart to God. The symphonia of Orthodox tradition involved both a conciliar (council-governed) sense of hierarchy in the Church and the double-headed eagle as a symbol of of an ideal harmony with distinction between the State and the Church, as checks and balances upon each other. In modern parlance, this approach was pre-Enlightenment and non-Western. But it became rooted, too, here, in American forms, primarily through the context of Christian traditions.

Many cultures of historical and Incarnational Christian perspectives contributed to this sensibility in America, and built on it, in the vast majority of “we the people”– what we Orthodox might term a somewhat religiously confused but decidedly Christian-identifying mix: English Anglicans and Congregationalists, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, German Lutherans, African-American Protestants, Irish and other varieties of Catholics, among others. With them came Slavic and Greek and Arab and Syrian and Native American Orthodox Christians, and now a growing number of American Orthodox Christian converts like myself.

Still, the Christian culture of the Constitution lingers. Neo-Stuartist in the implied Christian monarchism of the U.S. Presidency, as Harvard historian Eric Nelson has argued, that element was shaped by Jacobite (not Jacobin!) sensibilities of the Appalachian Scots-Irish among others, including Orthodox Christian immigrant culture no doubt. If an empty frame spiritually often today in a legalistic sense, the Constitution in its spirit reflects Christian culture overall: Awaiting the “Return of the King” in an eschatological if not Tolkienian sense. The Constitution as a document functions somewhat akin in the modern world to the symbolism of a monarchy itself in holding the country together, and is the oldest text of its kind, reflecting the biblical sense of textuality of the founders. The First Amendment, after all, guaranteed free expression of religion under our national government, just prohibiting national establishment of a particular denomination, which would have been a stumbling block for us Orthodox Christians in our mission work in a legacy Protestant country, anyway.

Indeed, at our modest country Orthodox Church in Union Township we worship Jesus Christ as God, the Creator of our world and at the same time a man who lived more than two millennia ago on earth in the Holy Land, but Who, following the unedited Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed familiar to most Christian denominations in the region. Christ also sits in human form at the right hand of God the Father, and Who shall return again to judge the living and the dead, His kingdom to have no end. That was written in now-vanished Christian communities of the Eastern Mediterranean many centuries ago in the Greek language. At the same time, we also at our little Church celebrate the American Orthodox saints who labored with Native Americans in Alaska and Slavic immigrants to the coal region of Pennsylvania, and our patron, Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco, alongside holy people of many lands going back to ancient times, up to the 20th-century Holy Royal Martyrs of Russia and the martyrs to Communism. They latter fell prey to the modern atheistic revolutionary spirit of what the Irish Orthodox Christian writer Paul Kingsnorth calls the Machine, which marks these latter days.

The Machine of a global technocracy, which would reduce us all to materialistic products of a system weirdly reflect aspects of both communism and consumer capitalism, stalks us in America, too. But while worshipping according to living Orthodox Christian tradition, we can remember the Christian culture of America’s founding, and do. At every Liturgy (using an ancient framework of worship) we say prayers for “this land,” America. At the start and at Eucharistic prayers we ring our Church bell, which is purposely inscribed with the biblical words from the American Liberty Bell: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.” For a reason, the Constitution was signed with the date “in the year of our Lord,” while including reference to Sunday, the Christian day of Resurrection and of sabbath rest for worship of our Creator.

All of this doesn’t exclude other religious faiths and philosophical views. But they are culturally foundational to America no more than Christian culture would be considered foundational to the modern states of Saudi Arabia, China, India, or Israel. Each of those important countries, representative also of a world civilization, has their own foundational culture and faith tied to their regions (in the case of China today, albeit, Communist-atheist, but with a history too of Chinese philosophical and religious traditions as cultural background arguably still today).

If we look to renew America, we must look to a renewal of American Christian culture, in its Orthodox roots, originally from the Byzantine civilizational zone in the Holy Land, and now rooted in many lands, and made native in them by local saints and martyrs and parishes and the struggles of the people. In a thirst for traditional Christianity, we see more Americans becoming Orthodox Christians today, even in our small parish, and the growing roots of American Orthodoxy.

In America’s federal Constitution as a country, checks and balances, states’ rights, localism, the division of powers, the Bill of Rights–these all express a Christian culture that both knew the evil tendencies of sinful human nature alongside the essential goodness of man made in the image of God, however fallen yet redeemable upon earth. In earliest days under the U.S. Constitution, some states even had official Christian denominations. Many of the elements of the Constitution were adapted from the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee Confederacy) based in upstate New York, but are meant to be adapted to Christian spirituality of the American people as a whole nonetheless, however imperfectly.

Logos in Christian culture, a Greek word used for Christ, carries the meaning of both reason and harmony. In a Christian view, both meanings were designed to be in place in man’s self-government and in civil authorities. Neither cold individual logic nor unthinking homogeneous harmony would suffice alone, but both melded. Christ Himself is fully God and fully man, unconfused and undivided, and traditional Christians believe we find ourselves in Him, in self-emptying, not self-assertion. That last point is the greatest difference between a propositional idea and a cultural basis for America at 250. In today’s global-Western nihilism, the propositional has become a cloak for self-assertiveness. There are no Humility Parades. But the foundational culture of America is that in which the person is realized in sobornost, the Slavic Christian term for mystical solidarity, multi-faceted but self-emptying in Christ.

Like the historical Church, both transcendent and immanent, an indirect type for the two natures in one Person of Christ, our country (however unworthily at times) has a place and history for its big ideas. In its foundation it may be a fractal of different cultural manifestations of Christianity in history and worldwide. But it has a name and a land and a genealogy and a grounding of its own, in these past 250 years, for good and for ill as with all manifestations of human history, but still to be patriotically loved as our native land. You can find this by a visit to the countryside in which our Church lies, as well as on a big scale at the Gettysburg National History Battlefield a morning’s drive away from us.

If the propositional is the more globally transcendent and “oceanic” view of American civilization, to borrow concepts from geopolitical philosophers, the cultural view is the more “terrestrial” or homeland sense of country. That’s the perspective of us in Appalachia for sure, and in the Middle West of my birth. America as homeland is woven large throughout all the regions of our continental republic and into our Constitution and cultures as well.

I am unworthily an Orthodox Christian Priest, and a longtime literature professor at a secular university in central Pennsylvania, a former big-city Urban Affairs Writer at a Chicago newspaper. A descendant of a participant in the Battle of Lexington with deep Yankee New England Protestant backgrounds, I am also a scion of Irish Catholic and Scandinavian immigrants, bear a surname most common in Estonia, and live in a blended Russian-American family. My country is America, but also this Appalachian region, the central Susquehanna River Valley of Pennsylvania, and ultimately the country parish that is my Church home and the roots of our family.

In the 250th year of the founding of our country, in what in our Orthodox Church biblically is the Year 7534, in what the West calculates as the 2026th Year of our Lord, may God bless our land and her people, and grant America many years!

The Scottish musician Dougie MacLean through the years has given a great modern rendition of Robby Burns’ poem “Auld Lang Syne,” which somehow became a world anthem of New Year’s Eve.

Not that many know what the Scots words mean. The custom of singing a song whose words we often don’t really understand is a rare true mystery of modern global culture.

But the song, whose title loosely means “For Old Time’s Sake,” is about remembering friends.

And Orthodox Christians can dig that, with an extra spiritual dimension added.

At New Year’s and every day we can remember also how Jesus Christ called us His friends, in Him calling us to love one another more than ourself (and, as we often forget, that our enemies are really our best friends spiritually).

Near the end of The Brothers Karamazov, which many secular and faithful people alike rank as the greatest novel ever written, the Orthodox Christian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky has one of his characters note that it can be just one good memory in the end that saves us. Like virtue, memory can be a ladder of uncreated grace, which is based not in legalistic logic but in love.

The New Year’s song can remind us of redeeming memory in both senses: Memories that help redeem us, and memories that God’s grace redeems for us.

The language of “Auld Lang Syne” (literally “Old Long Since”), comes from Scots English, an old variety of English from the Scottish Lowlands that is the closest living dialect to Chaucer’s Middle English. Parts of that archaism rubbed off here in American Appalachia too. Scots was the signature language of the Scots-Irish who are a signature historical culture in Appalachia where our humble Orthodox mission is located.

Although in a different old dialect and written down later, the song’s old language partly resonates with the English of early Bibles in our language. Their beautiful but (for us) archaic poetics in English–Coverdale, Tyndale, Geneva, King James–reflecting that of ancient biblical texts that stretch back in their own archaic memory to Moses c. 1,500 b.c., comes from the same era as Shakespeare’s exploration of the spiritual unity of humanity. It was a time when vernacular but literary English bloomed. Often such archaic but poetic English is preferred in American Orthodox liturgical uses of Holy Scripture, because of its deep affect.

On a poetic level, St. Nikolai of Ohrid, in an essay reflecting on Shakespeare from an Orthodox Christian perspective, called the insight of the Bard’s archaic English into the oneness of human nature “pananthropos.” That’s what we Russian Orthodox Christians might also call sobornost, a catholicity that is not so much spatial as spiritual solidarity.

Sometimes on civil New Year’s we can pause and remember the power of remembrance to which “Auld Lang Syne” points us in its own “archaic” Scots, a disappearing dialect today. Like New Year’s, it can remind us both of mortality and what endures.

When we sing “Memory eternal” as a prayer for departed Orthodox Christians, we ask that God may remember them as He remembered the Wise Thief on the Cross long ago, who indeed is remembered at every Orthodox Liturgy in our Pre-Communion prayer.

That God may remember us is praying that, despite all our sins (in which I am worst), in His love for us, He may remember the spark of His love in our hearts that we struggle to keep kindled and nurtured, the uncreated light of His we seek to let shine. We struggle in that divine grace to empty ourselves in Him rather than to assert ourselves, and pray that He remembers our beloved friends and us.

Part of the prayer “memory eternal” also can be understood also as a plea that we may remember those who have loved and who are departed as well, that they be remembered in the prayers of the living in the living tradition of the Church.

For our Lord gave us His new commandment, to love one another as He loves us, that is to love our neighbor more than ourselves through our emptying ourselves in God’s love.

To remember friends in this way is also to remember how Jesus is, as our dismissal prayers in Church note, “the lover of mankind,” and counts us in the Body of Christ as His friends.

So as the civil New Year in global media culture hit tonight from New Zealand all the way to us in the Eastern United States, we can reflect on remembrance as Orthodox Christians.

I remember linking arms to sing the song at Burns birthday parties long ago in Chicago and in Champaign, Illinois, and for a time in our college town of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, at the old Highlands Pub in a yearly gathering I helped organize, when our civil society was less uncivil even locally.

Even civil New Year’s can be a time of struggle underneath the celebration, an awareness of mortality and time passing, or desperate efforts to forget the same, or both. A time of pressure to be loved and with someone special, when that is not always the case or even possible.

For example, I recall one very dark New Year’s on the streets of Chicago late at night years ago. Yet that dark night of loneliness became, with God’s help, part of the spiritual journey that led me unwilling and unworthy still into the Orthodox Church and the family with whom I mark New Year’s tonight, and that is a memory redeemed.

There are deep civilizational memories and poetics, too, in the boundaries we mortals try to set on time, such as New Year’s Eve marked by singing Auld Lang Syne. Although we hit 2026 just now on the civil calendar (which submerged represents an inaccurate calculation from Jesus’ birth now often obscured as the year of the “Common Era”), in Chinese civilization we’re in the year 4772. In many Islamic lands it’s 1446. On the Jewish Calendar 5786.

But “civilizational” rituals of time can be absurd. A disco ball dropped in a town north of us here in the central Susquehanna Valley at midnight, in Williamsport, but a beaver (artificial) dropped in a town southwest of us, appropriately named Beavertown, for New Year’s. In Times Square in New York City those wanting to observe the New Year were advised to wear adult diapers (sold by many street vendors) because the crowd would be so densely packed and there would be no way out for urgent bathroom breaks. Then after midnight, the new socialist mayor of New York City is sworn in on a Koran in abandoned subway stop; attendees at the public block party would complain about a lack of facilities, music, and food for celebrating. China had a New Year’s Eve light, fireworks and music show at the Great Wall, which seemed more civilized or at least better organized.

But here on a snowy night in American Northern Appalachia, in which the Great Wall and Times Square seem equally distant, we marked New Year’s Eve at our little country Church chanting the Akathist for the Holy Protection of the Mother of God with candles lit, in an ancient Orthodox Christian service dating back to the vanished Byzantine civilizational zone. Linking time to God’s everlasting, typed by the linking of arms while singing “Auld Lang Syne,” helps us mortals always and forever, unto ages of ages.

Indeed, for us Russian Orthodox Christians, hearkening back to the roots of our faith in Christian Byzantium continued in the Third Rome of spiritual tradition, on our Orthodox Christian calendar it is 7534. That stems from ancient calculations of the inspired chronography of Holy Scripture, formed by Church Tradition, since the days of Adam and Eve.

Orthodox Christian New Year’s will come again Sept. 1 when, if the Lord does not return in the meantime, we will mark 7535. But, on our calendar, that new year will come on Sept. 14 on the civil calendar, because our sacred calendar differs–in fact “Old Civil New Year” in Russia is still remembered on January 14. So, too, Appalachian folklore still remembers “Old Christmas” and “Old New Year’s.” The distinct sensibility of our sacred calendar marks in part a resistance to what the Irish Orthodox Christian writer Paul Kingsnorth calls “the Machine,” a global chronology set in motion by industrialization and the British Empire, with its focal origin in Greenwich Mean Time and railroad time charts.

At this time when time is on our mind, we can remember how God’s time–also His beyond-time of remembering–is a beautiful mystery involving remembrance, for He is “beyond non-being” as St. Dionysius put it, even while His uncreated activity or grace engages us here in our time. This is why, in the biggest example, the Church is both historical and spiritual at the same time.

The Church Fathers considered simultaneous dimensions of (1) natural time (such as the seasons and the time of animals and plants), (2) human time (our social and technological calculations of time zones, calendars, and now digital time), and (3) eternity–created also, but for the human soul, saints and angels (as well as demons) not ending. Then there is (4-uber) the everlasting of God, beyond time, which we cannot understand, but metaphorically might be seen as a tapestry. He views and engages from a different dimension, analogous perhaps to the folding of time and space in quantum physics, but infinitely beyond.

Looking to the beyond-time of God’s love, we ask His remembrance for those faithful who repose, we hope for others and ourselves as sinners prayerfully, and through His uncreated grace we seek to let good memories shine through us for our light to shine, in 2026 and beyond in 7534.

We may sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve and remember our friends, including, if we only knew better, our enemies who spiritually are our friends, and those in need, whom we don’t know or haven’t bothered to get to know and care for yet, although we need them, too.

It’s a reminder that the “kindness” mentioned in the song comes from the same root as “kin,” and that we are all kin in Adam and Eve and in the family of Noah. And the “cup of kindness” mentioned in secular terms in the song, in an infinitely deeper way types for Orthodox Christians the Chalice at the Eucharist, the cup from which we participate in our Lord’s most precious Holy Body and Blood.

Friends may betray us, as the Gospel warns. But friendship is a word whose ancient root is related to “free,” indicating how the generosity inherent in friendship, as exemplified for us by Jesus, goes deeper than superficial ties, and how the spiritual solidarity of sobornost in Christ frees us.

May God this year give us blessed remembrance, including friends known and unknown—human, eternal, and most of all Divine, Jesus Christ–in moments of His beautiful grace that melt our boundaries of time.

Abraham is a central figure in this first of two special Sundays before Christmas, devoted in the Church from ancient times to the Holy Forefathers and the Holy Fathers of our Lord Jesus Christ on this earth. Today is the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers, and next week, the Sunday before Christmas, is called the Sunday of the Holy Fathers. Next Sunday in particular we commemorate in the Gospel Reading the genealogy of Jesus Christ in the flesh, and those prophets who spoke of His birth.

The Holy Forefather Abraham left the idolatrous and occult country of Ur of the Chaldees for the promise of the Holy Land. To Him, God said, “In thy seed shall all of the nations of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3, 22:18). As the Church’s Troparion for today puts it,  “By faith didst Thou [O Lord} justify the Forefathers, * when through them Thou didst betroth Thyself aforetime to the Church that was from among the nations. * The Saints boast in glory that from their seed there is a glorious fruit, * even she that bore Thee seedlessly. * By their prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.”

Like all of us Orthodox Christians, Abraham had to leave the land of his fathers behind. Spiritually, each of us has done this in joining our hearts to the Body of Christ, His Church, in the land of Orthodoxy, so to speak. Even if we were baptized as infants or children, we do this in our lives, and we renew our baptism and chrismation vows each time we come prepared for Holy Communion, to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ.

For as St. Cyprian of Carthage noted, to have God as your Father, you must also have the Church as your Mother. Brothers and sisters, our humble little Church, as a fractal of the Orthodox Church worldwide, is our homeland, the Israel of today, where we belong spiritually and physically.

Around the country we see a movement to the Church, in large numbers of converts currently to Orthodoxy in America, in the six catechumens we pray for in our Church, in the newly illumined baptized adults and babies this past year in our new temple. We welcome them home as we come home each day in our hearts and at every worship service to our Church. We see around us the family portraits of the saints across the millennia in the iconography, we study our living ancestry and Tradition in our online Orthodoxy and in-person Bible classes each week, and most of all we join with our Church family now and throughout history in the mysteries of Confession and Holy Communion. And with all of them, our Church family across the ages, we look forward joyful soon to the culmination of our history and theirs and that of the world in the birth of Christ ,

Abraham left the land of the Chaldeans, which long after was still known as a center of occult idolatry. In fact, the exile of the lost ten tribes of Israel in that region of the Assyrians long afterward led to the introduction of the occult into the cabalistic elements of what became Judaism in its rejection of Jesus Christ. Abraham’s journey as the head of his family became a type or sign of the Church family to come, as an ark of salvation for those seeking spiritual safety and thriving in the family of the Church. So at Christmas time the Ark of the Covenant literally is found and restored and fully realized in the previously empty Holy of Holies of the Temple, as never before in the Virgin Mary. The birth giver to Christ the Word, in HIs birth she fulifilled the law of God that had once rested in the supposedly lost Ark of the Covenant. That Ark is symbolized and embodied in the Gospel book and tabernacle and the Bread of Life and Blood of our Lord that will rest on our altar table today.

Abraham’s journey is also a reminder of the living history of Christmas, an historical journey that points toward the historicity and Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and reminds us of the journey of the Wise Men from the land of the Chaldeans to the cave and the manger. Like Abraham, our historical journeys to Orthodoxy, and our knowing this living history in our hearts, are the greatest spiritual medicine and weapon against the spirit of Anti-Christ in our age. For the Evangelist John tells us that the spirit of Anti-Christ denies that Jesus Christ became flesh, when we as Orthodox Christians experience that every time we partake of His Body and Blood at the Eucharist. In our commemoration of the Holy Forefathers of Christ leading up to his historical birth more than two thousand years ago, we highlight how we worship in His Church, which is both historical and mystical, and was never lost but is always sustained by God’s loving hand.

In my own life, I grew up in two Protestant denominations that partook of the spirit of Anti-Christ in downplaying or disregarding how Jesus Christ had come in the flesh. My father’s Unitarian-Universalist congregation believed Jesus only to have been a good human prophet, and my mother’s Christian Science denomination believed that Christ was just a spiritual idea. Those heresies may sound extreme, but they are common in our culture today, a kind of Judaizing Deism or Unitarianism that vaguely infects much of American culture, and leads many young people into atheism and the type of pagan occultism that Abraham left behind. This is why the Orthodox Church is growing today in America, because we reject such heresy, and we stand for the Incarnation of Christ, for the historic embodiment of our Lord ina. Church that has never been lost but is kept in God’s hand as we are here today, however unworthily, to the glory of God.

A memorable central event in Abraham’s life is recorded in the beautiful classic Orthodox Christian icon found both at the back of our worship area on your right, and at the front high place of our altar. This icon is known as the Hospitality of Abraham. In it we see the three angels who came to visit Abraham by the Oak of Mamre in the promised land. He hospitably entertains them though they seem strangers to him. The Church Fathers understood the angels as a type or symbol of the Holy Trinity, and that one of them, depicted in the Center of the icon, was a theophany of Christ, meaning an appearance of Him on earth before the Incarnation we celebrate at Christmas. This was a foretaste if you will of Christmas, also indicating the one God in Trinity Whom we worship, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. A relic piece of wood from the Oak at Mamre, which is a holy place of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in the Holy Land still today, can be found at the entryway to our Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville.

In keeping with the Hospitality of Abraham, liturgically this Sunday and next we  commemorate the three youths in the fiery furnace who like the Holy Forefathers stood against idolatry. They also can be as types of the Birth of Jesus Christ in the virgin womb. They experienced a theophany of Christ like Abraham, the fourth form in the furnace. As the American Gospel song put it, those holy forefathers although young in their faith did not bend, they did not bow, they did not yield, and they were bedewed by the divine grace of the Holy Ghost in the presence of the Lord amid the worst of trials. As today’s Church Kontakion says, “You did not worship the graven image, O thrice-blessed ones, but armed with the immaterial Essence of God, you were glorified in a trial by fire. From the midst of unbearable flames you called on God, crying: Hasten, O compassionate One! Speedily come to our aid, for You are merciful and able to do as You will.” Indeed, today Christmas is coming dear brothers and sisters, the hope for all mankind, out in the country here as in Bethlehem of old.

The three youths with their theophany also might be considered typology in ancient times of the Holy Trinity–of the Son in Whom human nature was enhypostasized in the Virgin birth, that is embedded in His Person, fully God and fully Man in the Incarnation and beyond, and in the Holy Ghost by whom Mary became the Bride of God as well as the Mother of God. With the Birth of Christ and the Church as the Body of Christ, the Church herself identified with the Theotokos and became in a mystery the Bride of Christ, and the Mother of us all. In the furnace of daily life we too are preserved by Him in His Church. And He is in our midst.

It has been said the Holy Forefathers we commemorate today are the maimed, the halt, and the blind in our Gospel Reading (given at the end below), called to dine with God. In a sense on earth they were everyday saints, like those around us here in Church today, God willing, however unworthy and sinful we may be, myself most of all. The Holy Forefathers like all of us who in our hearts consider ourselves spiritually sick with sin, weep and lament and seek God, and find Him, the Good Shepherd, throughout history, and from today as we look toward the approach of Christmas, and as we are invited to the supper of our Lord in the Eucharist.

The Holy Forefathers are our family tree in the Body of Christ, Brothers and Sisters, our Orthodox Ancestry.com. This is why the Church is described by Scripture and Tradition as our nation, our family, our race, and our spiritual hospital, a place of healing and transfiguration, our home. For we are the people of Israel today. The uncreated grace of God sparkles in our Church Mysteries and in one another as we open our hearts in this Christmas Season to feel Him born in us. May He bless all our struggles in these last two weeks of the Nativity Fast and find us in the joy of His birth in our hearts.

Glory to God for all things!

***

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke,

§76 [14:16-24]

The Lord said this parable: ‘A certain man made a great supper and bade many. And he sent his servant at suppertime to say to them that were bidden, “Come, for all things are now ready.” And they all with one accord began to make excuses. The first said unto him, “I have bought a piece of ground, and I need to go and see it. I pray thee have me excused.” And another said, “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to test them. I pray thee have me excused.” And another said, “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.” So that servant came and showed his lord these things. Then the master of the house, being angry, said to his servant, “Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor and the maimed and the halt and the blind.” And the servant said, “Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room.” And the lord said unto the servant, “Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. For I say unto you that none of those men who were bidden shall taste of my supper. For many are called, but few are chosen.”’

Categories of identity in the Secular Global West (SGW,TM) center on Race and Sex in an insanely transhuman way.

In the view of SGW, these qualities of identity are essential–inherent to the individual, not subject to question or change by others, and if “minoritized” (supposedly related to the majority of the globe as “people of color” and “queer” — the latter everyone not Christian basically) demand forcible accommodation.

But wait–these characteristics are also not essential! They are not categorizable or limitable by any biology, socioeconomic/cultural class, or tradition.

It reminds me of one of the most annoying TV ads ever.

Like “two minds in one,” SGW identity is a blue-pilled delusion both essential and not essential–a twinned split unity of intense psychological stress, supposedly “revolutionary,” “natural,” based on science, cloyingly cute, and intensely consumerist all at once.

Identity has become a product, as inane and banal as the classic TV ad–comically commercial while proclaiming itself revolutionary, scientific, and natural. Indeed, the ad demurely reflected a nascent sexual revolution, not only in the kiss at the door from sorority co-ed twins to their boyfriends, but in the hidden real-life pregnancy-out-of-wedlock of one of the twins at the time the ad ran.

And today’s identitarian movement, appropriate to its nihilism, is both not a joke and a joke.

It splits self, environment, and perception in ideological schizophrenia. It nurtures totalitarian culture by its mental illness. Essentially anti-Christian in anthropology and strategies, it puts a bulls-eye on Orthodox Christian beliefs and believers. It encourages identifying with passions, of power and lust. It celebrates the sin of Pride, racial and sexual.

In its nihilistic sense of identity, humanhood is reduced to an atomized individual essence of material traits (a paradoxical disembodiment of race and sex), adamant in individual nature while totally malleable to self-will.

This faux substance of modern gnostic (abstract and fundamentally atheistic) identity seems to come from Planet Krypton as in an old Superman comic. It is isolating because it claims to operate outside the relationship with God, Who, as Orthodox Christianity teaches, is good and the lover of mankind, and beyond His Creation.

The purposeful confusion of identity makes race and sex transcendent in an ontological replacement of faith. At once anti-biological and anti-Christian, the ossifying of identifying surface categories as objects of our will advertises “trans-humanness” by ignoring the soul. The new identitarianism ditches cosmology for cosmetology. No offense meant toward cosmetologists, but it offers transcendent meaning to race and sex on the surface, with no meaning at all.

What it does offer is a basis for overthrowing social norms: The individual value of rigid definitions of sexual and racial categories is made politically unassailable. It encompasses multiple sexes and types of relationships, along with customizable racial identities, under the umbrella of marginal. Then it claims for them a central role socially, demanding forced public accommodation by all.

In this, for example, in America a queer international Ivy League graduate student of color receives categorical moral and socioeconomic superiority to a white working-class heterosexual man in a traditionalist religious minority, denigrated as a systemically racist colonialist settler.

Or a privileged Brahman Indian tech-savvy immigrant enjoying elite educational and economic status becomes in America an oppressed “person of color” in America, a mystical category identifying him with an unemployed African-American whose family tree goes back to slavery, and with special career accommodations for his privilege.

And what privileged person of any minority status in this identitarian system will give up their position for someone more in need?

Identitarianism chalks up a gnostic win of will over skin-deep categorizations, for self-advantage. The ideology is skin deep but a nexus for a pretend revolution, while a perpetual source of ethical conflict of interest, seeking advancement in social revolution while keeping to privileged high ground.

Like its racialist partner, queer ideology ignores bodily difference while seeking to remake it, and claims superiority over those in traditional forms of family and anthropology that it labels oppressive, while gaining career success at the expense of those not so privileged.

Revising Marxism While Targeting Christian Tradition

This self-willed confusion of essence and personhood reflects aspects of Marxism revised to fit a post-communist West besotted with comfort and consumer pleasure. For classical Marxism, the collective socioeconomic status of the proletariat was an essence unchallengeable. But it was not any restriction on the fluidity by which a member of the proletariate could remake himself into an individual in the ruling class in Communist systems. The combination of essential and fluid identity inspired nihilistic revolutionary chaos and power-seeking alike in the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Within this “cultural Marxist” model lies a counterfeiting and parodying of Christian theology and anthropology with deeper roots than Marxism. For in Christian understanding, human beings are made up of both body and soul, limited in earthly experience by fallen human nature, yet capable of redemption through the openness of their spirit or nous (the eye of the soul) to God’s grace.

The difference between the Christian view of identity and that of current secular identitarianism, however, lies in the latter’s total focus on self-assertion rather than self-emptying in Christ. Pride becomes a virtue worthy of a month of parades that eclipse old community patriotic celebrations like the Fourth of July or more ancient Church festivals. There are no Humility Parades.

Orthodox Christianity, by contrast, involves self-emptying in Christ, who is understood to be one Person with two natures, fully God and fully man, yet not confused or divided in those natures. Humans find themselves in Christ through the engagement of His human and divine natures in His Person. But humans are not similarly God by nature. You could say that our human nature is conditional on His Person, on our participation in Him, as we are made in Him, according to God’s Image, Jesus Christ. Relationality, not self-assertion, is key.

Totalitarian Identitarianism

The current nihilistic confusion of essence and person in identitarianism ultimately involves what the Soviet dissident writer Igor Shafarevich called the self-destructive mental illness of totalitarianism. Philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that totalitarian cultures involve atomistic individuality, alongside terror, and a “banality of evil” that normalizes violent destruction of humanity. The end result is a destruction of self.

The psychological stress of living as both an individual essence (leading to extreme atomism) and a fluid vessel of one’s own will (leading to the terror of “the ends justify the means”) leads further to what Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as the ethos of totalitarian society: Principles of “survive at any cost,” “only material results matter,” and “the lie as a form of existence,” in which virtual reality replaces personal life (see Part IV of his The Gulag Archipelago).

Thus we see the ultimate psychological unsustainability of both sexual and racial identitarianism in ways of life built around transgenderism (attempting to alter one’s sex and gender in self-centered and consumerist ways) and racialism, by which for example being a “person of color” becomes a category transcending personal or spiritual life including socioeconomic circumstance. Self-identity categories supposedly transcend actual bodily and social experiences of place involving country or nation and family household. The resulting placelessness across generations is a type of polyamorous agglomeration, an ideological universal household that leaves alienation and unaddressed stress in the wake of essentialized lies about one’s self, in one’s feeling that one’s identity is both absolute and defined only by one’s own will. The resulting stress of isolation and the terror of those seeking total verification of their abstracted identity by others marks the recipe of Hannah Arendt for totalitarianism: Atomization plus terror. It also indicates what Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov said: That lying about yourself and to others precludes being able to love, which is hell. For the Devil, as the Gospel said, is a liar and the father of lies.

Non-Chalcedonian Heresy and the Roots of Secular Identitarianism

Only from an Orthodox Christian standpoint can the psychological crisis and totalitarian temptation of identitarianism be completely discerned and disarmed. It is also only in an Orthodox Christian perspective that the roots of this confusion in non-Chalcedonian theological errors can be seen. For the cultural roots of this identarianism lie in the formerly Christian cultures of the West, not originally in Marxism but in heretical developments of Western selfhood long before.

The Council of Chalcedon, held in 451 AD, is called the Fourth Ecumenical Council in the Orthodox Church, one of Seven in the first millennium that are especially regarded as inspired by the Holy Spirit in articulating more fully the dogmatic theology of Christianity (although the Photian Council in the ninth century is sometimes called the Eighth Council). Chalcedon’s main finding again was that Jesus Christ is God, One Person, with two natures, divine and human, unconfused and undivided. This “hypostatic [personal] union” as understood by the Church Fathers, a composite union, gives priority to the Hypostasis of God the Word.

As one explication of the Council’s finding puts it: “The Word was made incarnate by assuming flesh with a rational and spiritual soul and uniting it with His Divinity, in such a way that this eternal Hypostasis of His became also the Hypostasis of the assumed flesh…. enhypostatic character of the assumed flesh”…. [meaning that] “the Word Himself now eternally constitues the Hyposatsis and Person of Christ, the Word Incarnate…. God the Word united these natures in Himself… the Person (that is, God the Word) effects the union.” (Holy Monastery of St. Gregory, p. 23) Thus the Person of God the Son is the Person of Jesus Christ.

This permits the exchange of properties, or attributes “in such a way that the Incarnate Word has a composite Theandric [God-man] energy,” two energies and one Christ acting either Divinely or Humanly, “One Person willing and acting naturally in both Natures” (26). “Since the Divine properties as much as the Human are attributed to one and the same Hypostasis of God the Word, the Word suffers on the Cross in the flesh, and the flesh of the Word is said to be, and is, life-giving.” (27) Thus an essence of human individualism is not saved, but human nature, enhypostasized in Christ in His Incarnation. This is done through the mysteries of the Church and in them the self-emptying in Christ that involves becoming one with God’s uncreated grace.

During and after the Council of Chalcedon, confusion over these issues led to the first major schism of Christianity, between the Orthodox Church and the Coptic and Oriental Orthodox Christians, the latter two stricken with Monophysite and Nestorian heresies respectivley that led them either to overplay or underplay the divine nature of Christ in relation to His human nature. The right balance is important to the nature of human being and its fulfillment in Christ, as understood in Orthodox Christian anthropology. The Non-Chalcedonians regarded “nature” and “person” as the same, while distinguishing between “hypostasis” as essence and rejecting how the Church Fathers redefine that Greek term as person. The net result was to regard Christ as an amalgam of the divine and the human that formed the person, an error in Orthodox Christian teaching. The Hypostasis of the Son in turn became regarded incorrectly as the unity of that amalgam including the person shaped by the coming together of two natures. The proper understanding of the Logos and Son as a divine Person, one in essence with the Holy Trinity, but with two natures, fully God and fully Man, was lost in the confusion of nature and essence.

It is noteworthy that the confusion of nature and essence, along with a wholesale rejection of Christ, marks the secular identitarianism of today in the West.

The Emergence of the West and Compounded Identity Confusion

That first schism was largely forgotten historically in the West whose historical attention focused on the famous Great Schism of the 11th century, in which Roman Catholicism diverged from the Orthodox Church. That split compounded the already mentioned theological issues of heretical Christology among the non-Chalcedonian schismatics and heretics. While Catholicism subsequently subscribed to the Council of Chalcedon, it added elements to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and ecclesiology that in effect encouraged similar heresy to the earlier Schism while compounding the earlier problems further and more complexly.

This occured by adding the filioque to the Creed, stating that the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son (filioque in Latin), which had the effect of subordinating the Holy Spirit to a compound of Father-Son, thus weakening the Triadology of Orthodox Christianity. This made the Father-Son parallel to a combined subject acting on the Holy Spirit as object, creating an instrumentalist binary rather than a unified Trinity. Western theology, following St. Augustine, tended also to draw heavy parallels between the Trinity and human psychology, while expresisng an unbalanced emphasis on the one essence of the Trinity (re-focused on the Father-Son together) while de-emphasizing the distinct Persons. The binarized emphasis in the Trinity came to reflect a heightened individualism in the West, with an abstracted rationalism acting on Creation (and other humans) in an objectifying as well as self-objectifying way. The psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva argued that this modeled hyper-intensive individualism in the West by contrast with the Orthodox Christian East, which continued the earlier Triadology of the Church (Kristeva, 173-218). That hyper-intensive individualism, she argued, was reflected in the emergence of the Papacy centered around one individual, and the divine right of Western monarchies, rather than the model of conciliar governance in the Orthodox Church. In addition, it can be added, that with the Protestant Reformation came an emphasis on governance of Christian bodies by kings who headed Protestant state denominations (as in England, Scandinavia, and Germany), but also on a kind of monarchism of individual believers as their own interpreters of Scripture (resulting in the estimated 40,000 to 60,000 mainly Protestant Christian denominations in the world today, with even further fragmentations for individual beliefs supposedly based on reason).

Theological trends in the West also shifted toward a more academic understanding of grace in Scholasticism. Grace became increasingly defined as created by God, as if in a model of a somewhat random “thunder bolt” approach, by contrast with the Orthodox Christian view of grace as uncreated energy or activity of the fully Triadic God. The latter could metaphorically be compared to a kind of “energy field” sparkling in Creation yet fully divine, distinguished from the Essence of God, but more relational than the individualized Western “thunder bolt.” The conflation of essence and nature in heterodox views, and the diminishment of Christian Triadology into more of a binary model, obscured soteriology in the modern West. Natural law became more of an abstract grid in the West, and not the energized “spark of the love of God in the human heart” in Orthodoxy (Siewers 2016). In this process, the Russian Orthodox Priest-Martyr Daniel Sysoev notes that Western Christianity tended toward Monophysitism in Protestantism, a variety of non-Chalcedonian belief.

Monophysitism involved an emphasis on the divinity of the Christ not properly balanced with the humanity, and encouraged ultimately the idolizing of the individual will as above all. In this error, movements such as Unitarianism and Deism could thrive, as they did in the European Enlightenment. The individual will and reason came to assume a falsely quasi-divine role. At the same time, more fundamentalist forms of Protestantism could emphasize the divinity of Christ in a way that downplayed both his humanity and the historical nature of His Body, the Church. The heresy of modern ecumenism emerged from world Protestantism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, based in the idea found among both religiously liberal and conservative Protestantism that the historical Church had been “lost” to history. An “invisible church” emerged for the tens of thousands of Protestant denominations, and even larger number of Protestant individual believers and Bible readers, to aspire to join. This movement ignored the continuing existence of the Orthodox Church from apostolic times, and the human historical continuity of the Church alongside her spiritual nature. It “lost” the historic Church in a Dispensationalism that often seeks to replace traditional ecclesiology and ideas of Christendom with Christian Zionism and new heretical belief in “the rapture,” or cheerleading for “interfaith” globalization from the standpoint of revolution (“liberation theology”) or neocolonialism (the Eurocentric ecumenism movement), or both. The loss of the a sense of the historic Church accompanies the confusion of essence and person that led to the unbalanced rationalistic individualism of the modern West.

Schizoid Modern Identity and Christian Healing

A mere return to “Western Civ” education in high school and college will not remedy these trends, which are deeply theological and psychological, and hence cultural in nature. Indeed, the confusion of essence and person relates to biblical warnings against the “spirit of Anti-Christ.”

Specifically, in relation to current materialistic identification with a combination of race and sex, Orthodox Christianity can be seen as offering the antidote to secular identitarianism in full belief in Jesus Christ. St. Maximus the Confessor discussed this in his Ambigua 67 reading the “mean” and the “extremes” of the sexes (Siewers 2016). The mean was based in the account of Genesis 1:27, with regard to the creation of man as male and female, upheld by Jesus Christ in explaining the God-given nature of marriage. The “extremes” were in Genesis 1:26 regarding man as created according to the image of God, and Galatians 3:26, in which the Apostle Paul (inspired by God) teaches there are neither male nor female–nor, on the racial-ethnic side, Greek nor Jew–in Christ. Together, these “means” and “extremes” in balance present Christian unity of self. While there was differentiation of male and female by God in anticipation of the Fall, and in our reality today, it was not absolute, but a difference that St. Maximus said was to be overcome in the final restoration of all things. Thus, for example, virtuous holy women in the Church are called properly “manly,” and the Virgin Mary is regarded as the greatest of all saints.

The understanding of race similarly but less deeply was seen as a result of the Fall, mainly in biblical terms of nations and peoples, exacerbated with the destruction of the Tower of Babel. Israel was regarded as a race or a people, which was fulfilled in the Church, for all peoples. Being a member of the New Testament Church, as being a member of the Old Testament Israel, was a matter of subscribing to God’s law, fully realized in Jesus Christ. Protestant Dispensationalism and Christian Zionism remain a confusion of a modern state of ethnic definition, the 20th-century state of Israel, with the biblical Israel, the people or race of Christians today regardless of backgrounds.

The existence of nations or people, as in the so-called “Table of the Nations” in Genesis 10, is part of God’s Providence in our fallen state, and salvation can and does come through communities of nations or peoples. Each nation or people according to tradition had a guardian angel, with the Archangel Michael the guardian angel of Israel or the Church today.

But unlike either Enlightenment Protestant or secular-identitarian views, racial identities are not essentialist in determining salvation, as indicated in Hieromonk Seraphim Rose’s discussion of the dispersion of the peoples in the aftermath of Noah’s Flood and the Tower of Babel (Rose, 356-368). Canaanites, for example, are recognized as saved by their faith in God and by virtuous struggle, even though their ancestor Canaan, son of Ham, was placed under a curse by Noah. Contrary to Protestant-Enlightenment racialism, the “curse of Ham” (actually on his son Canaan) would have affected people mainly in the region of the Holy Land, not Africa, and not those (such as the people of Nineveh in the time of the Prophet Jonah) who became faithful to God.

The Orthodox Christian writer Dostoevsky famously warned against essentializing ourselves or others when his character Elder Zosima said in The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation):

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies.

This is a sentiment decidedly at odds with the kind of Western Scholasticism (individualism plus abstract rationalism) that gave birth to our current-day materialistic identitarianism of race and sex.

Elder Zosima’s words reflect the Slavonic definition of catholicity, sobornost, not just universal in spatial terms (as in “world domination”), but in mystical depth of spiritual solidarity (as in “we’re all responsible at least in part for each other’s sins”). With sobornost, we would celebrate humility, not PrideTM.

S.L. Frank, the 20th-century exiled Russian Orthodox philosopher and “Christian existentialist,” described the last century as a time of the “fall of the idols” of Western ideals. The last and most seemingly formidable such idol remaining in the Global West, to use a concept from the Old Testament prophets, is the making of idols of ourselves. This is identitarianism today. Worldly categories of identity, focused on the nexus of race plus sex, promote absolute categories of the “saved” and “damned,” based on materialistic categories of power and self-will. These would extinguish Orthodox Christianity. Frank’s definition of freedom stands out against such will to power: Freedom, he wrote, is voluntary service to universal truth, in the Person of Jesus Christ. (Frank, 135-139)

In Orthodox Christianity, it’s all there in the Christology of One Person with two natures, fully God and fully Man, unconfused yet undivided, Christ Who is our Way, Truth, and Life. Human anthropology is different, but realized in self-emptying in Him. The Body of Christ is the historical and mystical continuing Orthodox Church. As St. Cyprian of Carthage put it, to have God as a Father, you must have the Church as your Mother.

Glory to God for all things!

Works Cited

Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Expanded Edition. Ed. Jerome Kohn and Thomas Wild. New York: Library of America, 2025.

S.L. Frank. The Spiritual Foundations of Society: An Introduction to Social Philosophy. Trans. Bois Jakim. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987.

St. Gregory Monastery. The Non-Chalcedonian Heretics. Trans. Archbishop Chrysostomos. Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1995.

Julia Kristeva. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Hieromonk Seraphim Rose. Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision. 3rd ed. Ed. Hieromonk Damascene. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2024.

Igor Shafarevich. The Socialist Phenomenon. Shawnee, KS: Gideon House Books, 2019.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956. Abridged Edition. Trans. Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willets. New York: Vintage Arrow, 2018.

Alfred Kentigern Siewers. “Mystagogical, Cosmological, and Counter-Cultural: Contemporary Orthodox Apologetics for Marriage.” In Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2016. Ed. David Ford, Mary Ford, Alfred Kentigern Siewers. 353-394.

The guide below outlines simplified Orthodox Christian daily prayers and readings (based on the famous Russian Orthodox Optina 500 cell rule), for those living in the world in America.

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Morning prayer: (these prayers can be found in complete form in prayer books or online as the introductory prayers used in many services, and are also given in full below under the concluding text of the Small Compline/Evening Prayer)

“Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God have mercy on us.”

O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth…

Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal… x3 with bows

Glory to the Father… Both now…

Most Holy Trinity have mercy on us, Lord be gracious to our sins, Master pardon our transgressions, Holy One visit and heal our infirmities for Thy name’s sake.

Lord have mercy x3
Glory…. Both now…

Lord’s Prayer, ending with:

“Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers…”

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Prayer Rope Prayers (3 groups in the morning and 2 in the evening, or other combinations of 5 x100 per day)

First group of 100. One hundred prayers with prayer rope, on each knot: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. Make the sign of the Cross with your right hand as you say the prayer standing if possible. A full prostration every ten prayers, or in whatever combination works well, 10 prostrations per 100 prayer-rope prayers. At each prostration, cross yourself as you say the Jesus Prayer.

After this, the following Prayer to the Most Holy Theotokos:

My Most Holy Lady Theotokos, by thy holy and all-powerful entreaties dispel from me, thy humble, wretched servant, despondency, forgetfulness, folly, carelessness, and all impure, evil, and blasphemous thoughts out of my wretched heart and my darkened mind. And quench the flame of my passions, for I am poor and wretched, and deliver me from my many cruel memories and deeds, and free me from all evil actions: for blessed art thou by all generations, and glorified is thy most honourable name unto the ages of ages. Amen.

At the end of this prayer a full prostration.

Second group. Then again as above with the first group.

Third group. Then again as above with the first group.

Fourth group. One hundred prayers on the rope consisting of “Most Holy Theotokos save me.”

One prostration for each ten, saying the same. Then the prayer: My Most Holy Lady Theotokos from above, followed by a prostration.

Fifth group: As above with the first group.

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Scripture reading daily: One chapter of the Gospel each day

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Evening prayer: Small Compline (simple version without extra Akathist/Canon, see next pages)

Small Compline as a Reader Service

Note: The translation used is primarily that of Fr. Lawrence of Jordanville.   The order of service is based primarily on the Reader Service Typikon by Bishop Daniel (the Old Rite Bishop of the ROCA) and translated by Fr. George Lardas.  All the psalms are from The Psalter According to the Seventy, © Copyright Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Brookline, MA, used by permission. Some other material, such as prayers and hymns, are also Copyright HTM, used by permission. All rights reserved. These works may not be further reproduced, beyond printing out a single copy for personal non-commercial use, without the prior written authorization of Holy Transfiguration Monastery. 

Senior Reader:  Through the prayers of our holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. 

Reader: Amen.  Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee.

O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere present and fillest all things, Treasury of good things and Giver of life: Come and dwell in us, and cleanse us of all impurity, and save our souls, O Good One.

Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us. (Thrice)

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the unto the ages of ages. Amen.

O Most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us. O Lord, blot out our sins. O Master, pardon our iniquities. O Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy name’s sake.

Lord have mercy. Thrice.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Our Father, Who art in the Heavens, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

Senior Reader:  O Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.

Reader: Amen.

Lord have mercy. Twelve times.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

O come, let us worship God our King.

O come, let us worship and fall down before Christ our King and God.

O come, let us worship and fall down before Christ Himself, our King and God.

Psalm 50

Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy great mercy; and according to the multitude of Thy compassions blot out my transgression. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know mine iniquity, and my sin is ever before me. Against Thee only have I sinned and done this evil before Thee, that Thou mightest be justified in Thy words, and prevail when Thou art judged. For behold, I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins did my mother bear me. For behold, Thou hast loved truth; the hidden and secret things of Thy wisdom hast Thou made manifest unto me. Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be made clean; Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow. Thou shalt make me to hear joy and gladness; the bones that be humbled, they shall rejoice. Turn Thy face away from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence, and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation, and with Thy governing Spirit establish me. I shall teach transgressors Thy ways, and the ungodly shall turn back unto Thee. Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, Thou God of my salvation; my tongue shall rejoice in Thy righteousness. O Lord, Thou shalt open my lips, and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. For if Thou hadst desired sacrifice, I had given it; with whole-burnt offerings Thou shalt not be pleased. A sacrifice unto God is a broken spirit; a heart that is broken and humbled God will not despise. Do good, O Lord, in Thy good pleasure unto Zion, and let the walls of Jerusalem be builded. Then shalt Thou be pleased with a sacrifice of righteousness, with oblation and whole-burnt offerings. Then shall they offer bullocks upon Thine altar.

Psalm 69

O God, be attentive unto helping me; O Lord, make haste to help me. Let them be shamed and confounded that seek after my soul. Let them be turned back and brought to shame that desire evils against me. Let them be turned back straightway in shame that say unto me: Well done! Well done! Let them be glad and rejoice in Thee all that seek after Thee, O God, and let them that love Thy salvation say continually: The Lord be magnified. But as for me, I am poor and needy; O God come unto mine aid. My helper and my deliverer art Thou, O Lord; make no long tarrying.

Psalm 142

O Lord, hear my prayer; give ear unto my supplication in Thy truth; hearken unto me in Thy righteousness. And enter not into judgment with Thy servant, for in Thy sight shall no man living be justified. For the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath humbled my life down to the earth. He hath sat me in darkness as those that have been long dead, and my spirit within me is become despondent; within me my heart is troubled. I remembered days of old, I meditated on all Thy works, I pondered on the creations of Thy hands. I stretched forth my hands unto Thee; my soul thirsteth after Thee like a waterless land. Quickly hear me, O Lord; my spirit hath fainted away. Turn not Thy face away from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit. Cause me to hear Thy mercy in the morning; for in Thee have I put my hope. Cause me to know, O Lord, the way wherein I should walk; for unto Thee have I lifted up my soul. Rescue me from mine enemies, O Lord; unto Thee have I fled for refuge. Teach me to do Thy will, for Thou art my God. Thy good Spirit shall lead me in the land of uprightness; for Thy name’s sake, O Lord, shalt Thou quicken me. In Thy righteousness shalt Thou bring my soul out of affliction, and in Thy mercy shalt Thou utterly destroy mine enemies. And Thou shalt cut off all them that afflict my soul, for I am Thy servant.

The Doxology

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace and good will among men. We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee, we glorify Thee, we give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory. O Lord, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty; O Lord, the only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ; and O Holy Spirit. O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, that takest away the sin of the world; have mercy on us; Thou that takest away the sins of the world, receive our prayer; Thou that sittest at the right hand of the Father, have mercy on us. For Thou only art holy; Thou only art the Lord, O Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father. Amen. Every night will I bless Thee, and I will praise Thy Name forever, yea, forever and ever. Lord, thou hast been our refuge in generation and generation. I said: O Lord, have mercy on me, heal my soul, for I have sinned against Thee. O Lord, unto Thee have I fled for refuge, teach me to do Thy will, for Thou art my God. For in Thee is the fountain of life, in Thy light shall we see light. O continue Thy mercy unto them that know Thee. Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this night without sin. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the God of our Fathers, and praised and glorified is Thy name unto the ages. Amen. Let Thy mercy, O Lord, be upon us, according as we have hoped in Thee. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, teach me Thy statutes.. Blessed art Thou, O Master, give me understanding of Thy statutes. Blessed art Thou, O Holy One, enlighten me by Thy statutes. O Lord, Thy mercy endureth forever; disdain not the works of Thy hands. To Thee is due praise, to Thee is due a song, to Thee glory is due, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

The Symbol of Faith

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages; Light of Light, true God of true God; begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father, by Whom all things were made; Who for us men and for our salvation came down from the heavens, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man; And was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried; And arose again on the third day according to the Scriptures; And ascended into the heavens, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father; And shall come again, with glory, to judge both the living and the dead; Whose kingdom shall have no end. And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life; Who proceedeth from the Father; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; Who spake by the prophets. In One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. I confess one baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead, And the life of the age to come. Amen.

Then:

It is truly meet to bless thee, the Theotokos, ever blessed and most blameless, and Mother of our God. More honorable than the Cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim, who without corruption gavest birth to God the Word, the very Theotokos, thee do we magnify.

Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us. Thrice.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the unto the ages of ages. Amen.

O Most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us. O Lord, blot out our sins. O Master, pardon our iniquities. O Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy name’s sake.

Lord have mercy. Thrice.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Our Father, Who art in the Heavens, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

Senior Reader:  O Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.   

Reader: Amen.

If the temple be dedicated to the Lord or to the Theotokos, the troparion of the temple is said first, then the troparion of the day (see below), then “O God of our Fathers…”, etc.

If the temple be dedicated to a saint, the troparion of the day is said first, then the troparion of the temple, then “O God of our fathers…”, etc.  See the question about Patrons, if you are unsure about which troparion to use here.  If need be, you could simply omit the troparion for the temple, and use only the troparia given here.

Lo, thy care for thy flock in its sojourn/ prefig­ured the supplications which thou dost ever offer up for the whole world./ Thus do we believe, having come to know thy love,/ O holy hierarch and wonderworker John./ Wholly sanctified by God/ through the ministry of the all-pure Myster­ies/ and thyself ever strengthened thereby,/ thou didst hasten to the suffering,/ O most gladsome Healer.// Hasten now also to the aid of us who honour thee with all our heart.

On Sunday night:

Supreme Commanders of the Heavenly Hosts, we unworthy ones implore you that by your supplications ye will encircle us with the shelter of the wings of your immaterial glory, and guard us who fall down before you and fervently cry: Deliver us from dangers since ye are the Marshals of the Hosts on high.

On Monday night:

The memory of the righteous is celebrated with hymns of praise, but the Lord’s testimony is sufficient for thee, O Forerunner; for thou hast proved to be even more venerable than the prophets since thou wast granted to baptize in the running waters Him Whom they proclaimed. Wherefore, having contested for the truth, thou didst rejoice to announce the good tidings even to those in Hades; that God hath appeared in the flesh, taking away the sin of the world and granting us great mercy.

On Tuesday night:

Save, O Lord, Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance; grant Thou unto Orthodox Christians victory over enemies; and by the power of Thy Cross do Thou preserve Thy commonwealth.·

On Wednesday night:

O holy Apostles, intercede with the merciful God, that He grant unto our souls forgiveness of offenses.

And to St. Nicholas, Fourth Tone:

The truth of things hath revealed thee to thy flock as a rule of faith, an icon of meekness and a teacher of temperance; therefore thou hast achieved the heights by humility, riches by poverty. O Father and Hierarch Nicholas, intercede with Christ God that our souls be saved.

On Thursday night:

Save, O Lord, Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance; grant Thou unto Orthodox Christians victory over enemies; and by the power of Thy Cross do Thou preserve Thy commonwealth.

Troparion of the patron of the Temple is sung here, unless it is a feast of the Lord or of the Theotokos.

Troparion for our Patron

Lo, thy care for thy flock in its sojourn/ prefig­ured the supplications which thou dost ever offer up for the whole world./ Thus do we believe, having come to know thy love,/ O holy hierarch and wonderworker John./ Wholly sanctified by God/ through the ministry of the all-pure Myster­ies/ and thyself ever strengthened thereby,/ thou didst hasten to the suffering,/ O most gladsome Healer.// Hasten now also to the aid of us who honour thee with all our heart.

Then, Sunday night through Thursday night (if simple service):

O God of our fathers, Who ever dealest with us according to Thy kindness, do not withdraw Thy mercy from us, but through their intercessions guide our life in peace.

Adorned in the blood of Thy martyrs throughout all the world, as in purple and fine linen, Thy Church, through them, doth cry unto Thee, O Christ God: Send down Thy compassions upon Thy people; grant to Thy community, and to our souls great mercy.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the souls of Thy servants, where there is neither sickness, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting.

Both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Through the intercessions, O Lord, of all the saints and the Theotokos, grant us Thy peace, and have mercy on us, as Thou alone art compassionate.

On Friday night:

O Apostles, Martyrs, and Prophets, Venerable and Righteous Ones; ye that have accomplished a good labor and kept the Faith, that have boldness before the Savior; O Good Ones, intercede for us, we pray, that our souls be saved.

Glory to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the souls of Thy servants, where there is neither sickness, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting.

Both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

To Thee, O Lord, the Planter of creation, the world doth offer the God-bearing martyrs as the first-fruits of nature. By their intercessions preserve Thy Church, Thy commonwealth, in profound peace, through the Theotokos, O Greatly-merciful One.

On Saturday at Compline, the troparion and Kontakion of the Resurrection in the occurring tone are read, if available. If not, available, then use the weekday version above.

IT SHOULD BE KNOWN: that from the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, and during all of the Holy Great Lent, on all Saturdays at Compline the Kontakion of the Resurrection is not read, but rather the one from the Triodion (except the fifth week of Lent), as also during the Holy Pentecost season on all days, the Kontakion from the Pentecostarion is read, until the Sunday of All Saints. If there occur on Sunday a feast of the Lord, only the Kontakion of the feast is read. But if there be a feast of the Theotokos, or one of the saints that have a Polyeleos, or a great doxology, the Kontakion of the Resurrection is read, but that of the occurring feast or saint is omitted.

Reader: Lord, have mercy. Forty times.

Thou Who at all times and at every hour, in heaven and on earth, art worshipped and glorified, O Christ God, Who art long-suffering, plenteous in mercy, most compassionate, Who lovest the righteous and hast mercy on sinners, Who callest all to salvation through the promise of good things to come: Receive, O Lord, our prayers at this hour, and guide our life toward Thy commandments. Sanctify our souls, make chaste our bodies, correct our thoughts, purify our intentions, and deliver us from every sorrow, evil and pain. Compass us about with Thy holy angels, that, guarded and guided by their array, we may attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of Thine unapproachable glory; for blessed art Thou unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Lord have mercy. Thrice.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

More honorable than the Cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim; who without corruption gavest birth to God the Word, the very Theotokos, thee do we magnify.

Senior Reader: Through the prayers of our holy fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us.

Reader: Amen.

On Sunday nights during Great Lent, the prayer of St. Ephrem is said here.

Then in any case:

The Supplicatory Prayer to the Most Holy Theotokos

O undefiled, untainted, uncorrupted, most pure, chaste Virgin, Thou Bride of God and Sovereign Lady, who didst unite the Word of God to mankind through thy most glorious birth giving, and hast linked the apostate nature of our race with the heavenly; who art the only hope of the hopeless, and the helper of the struggling, the ever-ready protection of them that hasten unto thee, and the refuge of all Christians: Do not shrink with loathing from me a sinner, defiled, who with polluted thoughts, words, and deeds have made myself utterly unprofitable, and through slothfulness of mind have become a slave to the pleasures of life. But as the Mother of God Who loveth mankind, show thy love for mankind and mercifully have compassion upon me a sinner and prodigal, and accept my supplication, which is offered to thee out of my defiled mouth; and making use of thy motherly boldness, entreat thy Son and our Master and Lord that He may be pleased to open for me the bowels of His lovingkindness and graciousness to mankind, and, disregarding my numberless offenses, will turn me back to repentance, and show me to be a tried worker of His precepts. And be thou ever present unto me as merciful, compassionate and well disposed; in the present life be thou a fervent intercessor and helper, repelling the assaults of adversaries and guiding me to salvation, and at the time of my departure taking care of my miserable soul, and driving far away from it the dark countenances of the evil demons; lastly, at the dreadful day of judgment delivering me from torment eternal and showing me to be an heir of the ineffable glory of thy Son and our God; all of which may I attain, O my Sovereign Lady, most holy Theotokos, in virtue of thine intercession and protection, through the grace and love to mankind of thine only begotten Son, our Lord and God and Savior, Jesus Christ, to Whom is due all glory, honor and worship, together with His unoriginate Father, and His Most Holy and good and life creating Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

A Prayer to our Lord Jesus Christ, by Antiochus the monk

And grant unto us, O Master, in the coming sleep, rest for body and soul, and preserve us from the gloomy slumber of sin, and from every dark and nocturnal sensuality. Subdue the impulses of passions, extinguish the fiery darts of the evil one that are cunningly hurled against us, assuage the rebellions of our flesh, and every earthly and fleshly subtlety of ours lull to sleep. And grant unto us, O God, a watchful mind, chaste thought, a sober heart, a sleep gentle and free from every satanic illusion. Raise us up at the time of prayer firmly grounded in Thy precepts and keeping steadfastly within us the memory of Thy judgments. All the night long grant us a doxology, that we may hymn and bless and glorify Thy most honorable and majestic name: of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Most glorious, Ever-Virgin, Mother of Christ God, present our prayer to thy Son and our God, that through thee, He may save our souls.

My hope is the Father, my refuge is the Son, my protection is the Holy Spirit: O Holy Trinity, glory to Thee.

Choir:  Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.  Amen.

Lord, have mercy.  Thrice.

O Lord, bless.

Senior Reader (Facing the East, rather than facing the people):  O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, for the sake of the prayers of Thy most pure Mother, our holy and God-bearing fathers, and all the saints, have mercy on us and save us, for Thou art good and the Lover of mankind. 

Choir:  Amen.

Senior Reader:  Remit, pardon, forgive, O God, our offenses, both voluntary and involuntary, in deed and word, in knowledge and ignorance, by day and by night, in mind and thought; forgive us all things, for Thou art good and the Lover of mankind.

Choir:  Amen.

Senior Reader:  O Lord, Lover of mankind, forgive them that hate and wrong us.  Do good to them that do good.  Grant our brethren and kindred their saving petitions and life eternal; visit the infirm and grant them healing.  Guide those at sea.  Journey with them that travel.  Help Orthodox Christians to struggle.  To them that serve and are kind to us grant remissions of sins.  On them that have charged us, the unworthy, to pray for them, have mercy according to Thy great mercy.  Remember, O Lord, our fathers and brethren departed before us, and grant them rest where the light of Thy countenance shall visit them.  Remember, O Lord, our brethren in captivity, and deliver them from every misfortune.  Remember, O Lord, those that bear fruit and do good works in Thy holy churches, and grant them their saving petitions and life eternal.  Remember also, O Lord, us Thy lowly and sinful and unworthy servants, and enlighten our minds with the light of Thy knowledge, and guide us in the way of Thy commandments; through the intercessions of our most pure Lady, the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, and of all Thy saints, for blessed art Thou unto the ages of ages. 

Choir:  Amen.

Choir:  Lord, have mercy.  Thrice.

Senior Reader:  Through the prayers of our holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us.  Amen.

Please join us in the central Susquehanna Valley for a traditional Orthodox Christian celebration of Christmas on the “Old Appalachian” date, Tues. Jan. 6 and Wed. Jan. 7. Services at St. John Russian Orthodox Mission Church, 92 St. John’s Lane, Winfield, PA (off Felmey Road near the Post Office).
All are welcome!

Christmas Eve (Jan. 6)

9 a.m. Royal Hours for Christmas Eve
Vesperal Liturgy of St. Basil the Great

These ancient services feature a whole arc of Orthodox Tradition, from reception into the Church by triple immersion to Communion in the Holy Eucharist.

4:30 p.m. Christmas Eve Wassail

Wassail means “be well” in Old English, a traditional greeting associated with Christmas. Informal fellowship, a light fasting buffet, and faith-based Caroling will express how community and tradition mix in our parish life.

5:30 p.m. Great Compline and Matins

In which, like the Shepherds at Bethlehem, we keep watch at night, in worship, before the celebration of Christmas, and in the Church together become part of the great story of our Lord’s Nativity. An awesome quiet time in which to learn more about the beauty of Orthodox Christian worship.

Christmas Day (Jan. 7)

10 a.m. Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (Hours at 9:40). The main service for Orthodox Christians at the Nativity of our Lord, centered around the celebration of His birth in the world, and in our hearts.

After Liturgy, we will join in a festive Christmas lunch at La Primavera Restaurant in Lewisburg.

All our welcome to all services and events!

Come join us! Come and see!

An homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers

Dear Friends,

The first glorified Orthodox Christian missionary to America, Saint Herman of Alaska, famously said, “From this day, from this hour, from this minute, let us strive to love God above all, and fulfill His holy will.”

In this Christmas season we are familiar with the phrase “pay it forward.”

Saint Herman knew this in his words to us, again:  “From this day, from this hour, from this minute, let us strive to love God above all, and fulfill His holy will.”

So did the one of the 10 lepers who returned to give thanks to our Lord Jesus Christ in the Gospel parable.

So did the shepherds who heard the angels at the birth of Christ.

So did Saint Nicholas whose feast we commemorated Friday, in helping those in need while he was alive and still today through his prayers.

Dear brothers and sisters, as we continue our journey of anticipation through the Advent Season and the Nativity Fast, let us give thanks too, and re-dedicate ourselves to the greatest gift of all—God’s gift of Himself to us, and our gift of ourselves to God and to one another.

This coming week on Wednesday we will commemorate St. Herman’s feast as much of America celebrates the Eve of commercial Christmas. St. Herman’s legacy, like St. Nicholas’, is to remain true to the teachings of Orthodox Christianity, and in this way to help the vulnerable, as we remember the little baby Jesus in the cave this season.

We help the vulnerable most by preserving whole the teachings and life of the Orthodox Church, to help them to full salvation in Christ.

St. Herman did this through his life of prayer and sacrifice for others.

Born to a peasant family in Russia, he became a monk and arrived in 1794 in Alaska with a mission from Valaam Monastery, where he had been trained in the hesychastic tradition of the Philokalia. He stood up for the Alaskan natives. The monks baptized more than 7,000 in the Kodiak region, and Herman worked as a baker and mission steward. He became head of the mission in 1807, running the mission school, and teaching there church subjects such as singing and catechism, as well as agriculture on Spruce Island. He retired to Spruce Island to practice the Orthodox art of unceasing prayer. Wearing simple clothes and sleeping on a bench covered with deerskin, alone in the forest, he explained to one visitor: “I am not alone. God is here, as God is everywhere.”

But he soon received many visitors—especially Natives —on Sundays and church feasts. Soon a chapel and guesthouse were built next to his hermitage, and then a school for orphans, and he gained a few disciples. Families moved nearby to be closer to him. During an epidemic, he was the only Russian to visit and care for the sick and dying. Herman spent the rest of his life on Spruce Island, where he died in 1837. Based on early records of his death, and to offer Americans a spiritual alternative to the commercial Christmas of the Western calendar, our Russian Church Abroad established his commemoration on Dec. 25 of the civil calendar, our December 12.

In 1993, Patriarch Alexis II visited Kodiak to venerate the relics of Saint Herman. He left as a gift an ornate lampada (oil lamp) which burns constantly over the reliquary. Pilgrims from all over the world are anointed with holy oil from this lampada. Our mission has been blessed to have holy oil from that lamp, a reminder that the light of St. Herman’s life has not gone out. That is because it is the light reflected from Christ shining through his heart, as he still intercedes for our mission work in America.

Saint Herman was the one of the ten lepers who returned to God to give thanks, so to speak. He gave thanks for the light of Christ that warmed his heart and so many others.

That light also kindled a young seeker for truth in 1960s America, who became Father Seraphim of Rose, a modern-day missionary of our Russian Church Abroad. In northern California he helped establish with the blessing of our patron Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco the Saint Herman of Alaska brotherhood in 1963, before St. Herman was recognized as a saint. That brotherhood successfully published many English translations of Orthodox texts, helping to spur the growth of Orthodox Christianity in America we see today. They also promoted the glorification of St Herman as a saint, which occurred jointly by ROCOR and the OCA in 1969.

Saint Herman reminds us of how the light of Christ cannot be overcome by the darkness. He has been compared to our North Star in our missionary work in America. Now Father Seraphim Rose is being considered officially for sainthood by our Russian Church Abroad. The love of Saint Herman was received and re-kindled by Father Seraphim, whose writings and life in turn have touched many of our hearts in modern America. This happened with the encouragement and prayers of our patron Saint John.

This chain of light and love is Orthodox Christian Tradition in the mysteries of the Church.

In this way we each feel Christ born in our heart every day.

As Rector, in honor of this American Orthodox legacy during the Christmas Season, I hereby name our modest parish library today the St Seraphim of America library. With God’s help, may it grow in future so that one day we will have a freestanding library bookstore building for the Church Fathers and lives of the saints to edify our community and mission work. This is not by the way to pre-empt the work of our Diocese currently in officially examining the potential glorification of St Seraphim as a saint, we won’t be honoring him in that way in services. But it is a small way locally to mark a veneration of his role in the ongoing living story of the Orthodox mission to America, his influence on many of us, and how we are all part of that living tradition going back to Saint Herman and beyond. It is a small way to “pay it forward” so to speak.

May Saint Herman of Alaska and Saint John of San Francisco and Saint Seraphim of America intercede for our missionary work here in Northern Appalachia, that we feel Christmas every day in our hearts and live St. Herman’s words:

“From this day, from this hour, from this minute, let us strive to love God above all, and fulfill His holy will.”