My beloved spiritual children in Our Risen Lord Jesus Christ, Our Only True God, and Our Only True Savior,
CHRIST IS RISEN! TRULY HE IS RISEN!
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DECLARING VICTORY OVER FEAR, PANIC AND VIRUSES
By Metropolitan Athanasios of Lemesoy, Cyprus.
"...The Church in difficult times has always taught us and directed us to pray. This crisis will be dealt with--with prayer. We need people who have such great strong prayer, such that can turn the events of the world around. Because in truth, only prayer can turn around the development of events. Everything else is human. Of course, it is good to have the human approach and it is beneficial. But prayer can, in reality, and in a short time, turn around everything and can end this difficulty. However, this difficulty has a beneficial side to it. It teaches us many things. It shows us our weakness, the temporary nature of human things. It teaches that everything around us is ephemeral. Therefore, we must understand that our first need and our first longing should be the Kingdom of God. Just as the Lord says in the Holy Gospel, "Seek first the Kingdom of God and everything else will be given to you." We will be given everything from our Lord, the Lord of Glory; we just need to seek the Kingdom of God.
This is our true necessity and need, this is what we truly need. Of course, all other things are necessary too, but God knows our needs and provides. The Church is calling us to struggle and pray, to struggle to gain more prayer--prayer that streams from repentance and humility. We must repent for our personal sins, for the sins of our brethren and for the sins of the whole world. We need to offer God strong prayers, gushing out of our humble and repentant heart; so that God can have mercy on us and overturn the difficult events. If we pray, everything will be overturned. If we do not pray, then the events will take the human course of things; and we do not know how things will be and how things will develop.
Our Churches will remain open. The Worship of God will never stop. The priests and we [i.e., the hierarch himself] will be in the position that God placed us. And as shepherds of the Church, we offer our prayers and the services of the Worship of God and for Holy Communion and Thanksgiving. We offer these for the whole world, for the whole Adam. Whoever wants to approach. Whoever feels difficulty and weak or anything else, they can act as their conscience directs them. We cannot judge any man. We are called to pray for the whole world, the whole Adam, for all the human race.
Maybe someone can question themselves and say, "We that come to Church, we will not ever get ill?" We will get ill and one day we will die. Who told us that we would remain immortal in this world? Did we need the coronavirus to remind us that one day we will die? We needed the coronavirus to tell us that we can fall ill? What did the forty martyrs say? "Our actions are in philotimo (good honor)."
Since one day we will die, let us die honorable, and is pleasing to God. Let us also remember our Saint Neophytos who said, "What other thing exists above all but the fear of God and the remembrance of death?--to remind us of our exodus from this world and our presence in front of God.
What does the Church offer us? The strength to not fear; the victory against the fear of death. We will all go through biological death, without exceptions. However, the spiritual death is a death that a faithful person who believes in God will not undergo. He who believes in Me will never taste death, meaning spiritual death, because the biological death we all go through. And this is death that we fear--the spiritual death--the eternal separation from God. We do not want this separation, it terrifies us, because this is eternal separation, eternal death--the eternal separation from our Lord Jesus Christ. The biological death is human nature and will arrive one day. Even if we are Saints, been if we are sinners, we will all go through the gate of the biological death.
The Resurrection of Christ, Who was victorious over death and Who destroyed the fear of death, and then we shall hear the night of the Resurrection: "No one fears death, because we are freed from death by our Savior. No one should fear death because our Savior released us from the fear of biological death, and we move on to live the resurrection. Death is conquered. There is no death. There is only eternal life. Christ is alive, the Kingdom of God is real and will be to the ages.
With this type of faith, we will walk through this difficult time that we currently face--without fears, without panic, without human reasoning. We will walk crying out the Love of our Lord Jesus Christ. We know that our life here has an end. We know that this life is just passing through, a journey through, from the temporary to eternal--to the eternal Kingdom of God.
In these times of crisis, our faith is tested, our way of life matters, our thoughts are evaluated, and the quality of our relationship with our Father, our God, is measured: our life, our strength, out time in works of repentance, our time in prayer and in the worship offered to God. The Church will remain in prayer, giving glory and worship to the Living God, without any human selfish act. With the wisdom of the Church, we will be given hope that God is above all things. I am not saying that we ignore the human side of things. Not at all. But we need to be victorious over fear, victorious over death which destroys love--the True Love, Who is Christ, the One Who destroys fears. He who loves God fears nothing. Nothing darkens his life, not even the most difficult moment. For God's love is victorious over the fear and gives us the taste of Eternal Life..." (Source: Orthodox Heritage)
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"Glory Be To GOD For All Things!" -- Saint John Chrysostom
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With sincere agape in His Holy Resurrection,
The sinner and unworthy servant of God
+ Father George