Experiences of Divine Light.Father George Calciu.

Father George Calciu.

Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa (1925-2006) was a Romanian priest and dissident. He served 21 years in prison during the Communist regime. He was first imprisoned in 1948, but claimed his 1978 imprisonment was harsher. He had criticized Nicolae Ceausescu’s repressions and became seen as an "enemy of the state". Reportedly he suffered beatings and harassment in prison. He was released from prison due in part to pressure from supporters such as U.S. president Ronald Reagan. He spent years in exile in Virginia and ultimately settled there permanently. In the mid-1980s he preached on the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

After being defrocked by the Romanian Orthodox Church, Calciu-Dumitreasa became a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, which never recognised his defrocking. In 1989 he took charge of the Holy Cross Romanian Orthodox Church at Alexandria, Virginia. In his last years he revisited his native land several times and met some of those whom he had influenced. He remained critical of certain Romanian Orthodox bishops to his last day, claiming they were former Securitate secret police infiltrators.

Calciu-Dumitreasa died of pancreatic cancer on November 21, 2006 at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Woodburn, Fairfax County. He was survived by his wife of over 40 years, Adriana, and their son, Andrei. He was interred at the Petru Vodă Monastery in Poiana Teiului Commune, Neamţ County, Romania.

 

 

 I will tell you of my experience. Before I was arrested, I always liked the monasteries. So every time I had the possibility to go to a monastery, I was there. Very near to Bucharest is a very important monastery called Cernica. The prayer of the heart to Jesus Christ was taken by George, a disciple of Paisius Velichkovsky, and brought to Cernica. From then until now-nearly two centuries-in Cernica every monk performs this prayer. Even during the persecution by Ceausescu, nothing could stop them from praying, nothing could make them unworthy to see the true Light, the Uncreated Light.

One Sunday I was there in the church of Cernica, officiating at the Holy Liturgy with some monks. At the beginning of the Liturgy Fr. Benedict Ghius (1904- 1990) was there, a very spiritual monk. He had been the spiritual leader (not the organizer) in the Antim Monastery of the Burning Bush, which was a group dedicated to prayer, formed by monks for the sake of the most important intellectuals in Bucharest during the Communist regime. People from the Burning Bush were arrested until the group was exterminated, and many of them died in prison. Fr. Ghius was arrested, too, but he was set free at the same time I was1965. And he gave up everything and entered the Cernica Monastery, where he practiced the Prayer of Jesus. He was perhaps the most loved by God. I never saw him sad or angry.

The hidden spiritual joy.Abbot Nikon.

Abbot Nikon was born in Russia in 1894. He began to pursue his higher education in the field of medicine-psychiatry, but he became convinced that: true knowledge of man was possible only through knowledge of God. Discontinuing his studies, he began to lead a secluded life, devoting himself to the study of the Gos­pels and the Holy Fathers. Here at last he discovered the "one thing needful."

In 1931 he gave monastic vows, and within a year he was ordained hieromonk. A year later he was sentenced to four years in the Siberian camps. Towards the end of the war, with the re­opening of many churches, Fr. Nikon was assigned first to one parish then to another. Finally he was sent, as though exiled, to the small town of Gzhatsk, where he remained until his death in 1963.

Abbot Nikon.

How are you feeling?! Are you depressed?! We should not fall victim to despondency, grumbling about our illnesses and sor­rows, for God has established a law firmer than heaven and earth, that only through many trials is it possible to enter the Kingdom of God.

We have now come to such a period in the history of humanity when one is saved exclusively through enduring sor­rows without a murmur, with faith in God and hope in His mercy. Today there are no other paths by which to attain salvation. For our times one path alone is left to us: the patient endurance of sorrows. “Saint Isaac the Syrian” writes: "More precious to God than any prayer and sacrifice are sorrows endured because of Him and for His sake.

Why tremble?.Saint John Chrysostom.

Saint Paul helping Saint John Chrysostom

in interpreting his teaching.

For all those who suffer...
A selected passage from the commentary of Saint John Chrysostom on the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans.

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God”.

 Saint Paul seems to me to have mooted this whole topic with a view to those who were in danger; or, rather, not this only, but also what was said a little before this. For the words, the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us; and those, that the whole creation groaned; and the saying, that we are saved by hope; and the phrase, we with patience wait for; and that, we know not what we should pray for as we ought; are all of them said to these. For he instructs them not to choose just what they may think, themselves, to be useful, but what the Spirit may suggest ; for many things that seem to one's self profitable, do sometimes even cause much harm. Quiet, for instance, and freedom from dangers, and living out of fear, seemed to be advantageous for them.

The Blessed Surgeon’s faith and love. Excerpts from the life of Saint Luke of Simferopol.

The faith.

When he arrived in Simferopol in 1946, Saint Luke had thought that his knowledge and experience in surgery would be in demand. However, a month-and-a-half passed before he received official per­mission to practice medicine. From 1946 on, he worked as a consultant at the Simferopol Hospital. He also assisted the Hospital for Invalids of the Great Patriotic War. Until the end of 1947, he gave reports and lectures to doctors and operated on patients and the wounded. Zhdanov (the official in charge of Russian Orthodox Church Affairs) characterized his medical activity as very active.

Archbishop Luke regularly attended meetings of the surgeons' associa­tion, in which civil doctors and surgeons participated. He would listen carefully to their reports and speeches and always introduced necessary corrections. According to Dr. G. F. Pyatidvernaya, during a meeting, one surgeon asked the archbishop: "How can you, such a specialist, a surgeon, believe in somebody whom you have never seen, in God?"

Doubting Thomas… Believing Thomas.?!.Kosmas Damianidis.

Dearly Beloved Brethren,

Nobody knows the time or even the place that our Lord is returning to judge the living and the dead. For this reason, the Fathers of our Church do not tell us to try and outsmart God, by predicting the time that He will appear. On the contrary the Fathers concentrate on teaching us to be constantly ready and watchful, by praying, fasting and doing works of love and faith. We are instructed to expect a sudden if not instant entry of our Lord.

In the final chapter of the Book of Revelations, the Apocalypse of St John the Theologian, we are informed that we must fully accept the imminent coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Furthermore we are told that our world will suffer terribly before the Second Coming of our Lord and that this world will be destroyed. Nevertheless so let it be, in obedience we should pray "Even so, come, Lord Jesus" (Rev 22:20) and come quickly.

In John chapter 20 we are told of the pitiful sight of the Apostles who gathered in a small dark house for fear of the Jews after the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. They had locked every window and door, and they were in a state of mourning. They must have been deeply depressed, angry, disillusioned, confused and very afraid to say the least.

WHY DO WE NEED THE LADDER?.Priest Dimitry Shishkin

In our time, many laypeople ask the question: Why should people of the twenty-first century act according to rules written by monks and for monks in deep antiquity?. Why should they read monastic books in which there isn’t even a remote mention of the problems that we face today?.

Here it is, the fourth Sunday of Great Lent, dedicated to a monk who lived one and a half millennia ago. Just how relevant are the writings of St. John, abbot of Sinai, to the twenty-first century?. Could there really be something of value?. 

“Asceticism irritates and even angers some people, because it disrupts the momentary comfort that doesn’t want to know anything about eternity.”

Priest Dimitry Shishkin, rector of the Church of the Protection of the Mother of God in the village of Pochtovoe, Bakhchesar region (diocese of Simferopol, Crimea). 

The main problem of our times is man’s loss of understanding of his higher calling. More and more the idea is spreading in the world that the meaning of human life consists in living here, on earth, with the maximum comfort and happiness. And by happiness is meant some average set of emotional-physical joys and conveniences. Having “waved away” the ascetical experience collected by the Church over the centuries, man handicaps himself, makes his life catastrophically truncated,  because he rejects help in the most difficult and most important work- discovering the fullness of love and harmony with God. Moreover, having completely immersed himself in emotional-fleshly life, man completely loses the true concept of spiritual life. He may even know about it from books, can think about it and discuss it, but no more than that. This is because the living experience of discovering the grace of the Holy Spirit, the experience of growing in the knowledge of God is acquired in no other way than by “love for the very venerable commandments and sacredly fulfilling them.” Without this experience, eternal grace-filled life becomes a certain culturological fact, and nothing more.

If God knows us, like the wise virgins, we will never die!.Dr. Daniel and Dr. Jane Hinshaw.

{Medicine, health, psychiatry, faith, death… issues discussed by Dr.Daniel and his wife Dr.Jane Hinshaw, through an Orthodox, scientific and spiritual perspective, in a meeting with the community that took place in the dining room of our monastery of  Saint John the Baptist, on Saturday 3 February 2018.}

A special blessing that we would like to share with our readers.

One of the extraordinary things about the Orthodox Christianity’s understanding of reality is Orthodox Anthropology: how do we understand the nature of the human person.

The Eastern fathers of the Church have emphasized how there is a unity of the body and soul and this occurs from the very point of conception, and so as human persons we acquire our personhood because God has called us to be persons, God makes us persons.

      The image of the Trinity is impressed upon each of us as Christians, by our Chrismation and baptism, so the Holy Spirit is there and hopefully will dwell with us as we draw toward the Kingdom. And so God has done everything possible to make us His children. And yet we have this tendency, because of the fall, to continually wander away. In the Church’s use of the Greek language, there has been this term called amartia to describe what sin is, but in classical Greek before the Christian era, amartia in its most basic form meant: not being the way things should be. The classical example was the athlete, the one who would be throwing the javelin and he missed the target. Another extraordinary thing about the Orthodox Church compared to the Western branch of Christianity is, there is a recognition because of the fall of Adam and Eve, that not only do we have sins that we consciously choose to do, but there is also sins that we don’t consciously choose, that this is not the way that should be, where we are not meeting the mark, we are not hitting the target.

“Pray… some donor may appear out of nowhere” Kyriakos C.Markides.

His eminence Athanasios
Metropolitan of Limassol.

Father Maximos spent most of the morning in his office chatting with two fellows in their mid-twenties. They had arrived at the monastery two weeks earlier and were staying in a cell reserved for visitors. I assumed at the time that they were potential novices exploring the option of a monastic life. But Stephanos, being a kind of lay father figure to the younger monks and therefore having intimate knowledge of the goings-on in the monastery, informed me confidentially that the newcomers had a very severe drug problem. They had arrived with the aim of freeing them­selves from their deadly addiction, and were not primarily concerned with the salvation of their souls. Father Maximos was their therapist and the monastery was serving as a detoxification center of a sort.

Love does not exist without patience.Saint Cyprian of Carthage.

   Love is the bond of fellowship, the foundation of peace, the link and strength of unity. It is greater than both faith and hope. It comes before both good works and martyrdoms, and since it is eternal it will always remain with us in God's presence in the realms of heaven.

    But if you remove patience, love no longer endures. Remove the substance of endurance and tolerance and it has no roots or strength to persevere. For this reason the Apostle spoke about love in the same breath as tolerance and patience.

On Suffering.Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh.

"Suffering has burnt everything out of me.  

Love only has survived..."

 Priest Confessor.

Archbishop Anthony Bloom
London-1964

Archbishop Anthony*: I think there are two tendencies in the modern world which are equally wrong. The one is to pretend that things do not exist which do exist because they are too painful to face; and the other one is when they come your way because you cannot avoid it, simply do away with them artificially: pain-killers, tranquillisers, anything, provided you do not face up to what is real.

    M.: In order to ease someone's agony you may administer a drug which may be ending the patient's life. How would you decide that dilemma?

    A.A.: I think you cannot impose on a man more than he can bear, and if you can, you must bring him to the most bearable limit. But, on the one hand, I think you must do all you can to avoid his losing consciousness unnecessarily, which I think is done very often because people think that if a patient is unconscious he suffers less and his death will come in an easier way which I think is wrong.