"Aegeates answered, 'Are you Andrew, who razes the temples of the gods and teaches the people the sorcerous faith which has recently appeared and which the emperors of Rome have ordered destroyed?'

Saint Andrew, the First-Called Apostle of Christ was a native of the city of Bethsaida, the son of a Hebrew named Jonah and brother of the holy chief of the Apostles Peter. Disdaining the vanity of this world and preferring virginity to wedlock, he did not wish to marry, and having heard that the holy Forerunner and Baptist John was preaching repentance by the Jordan, he forsook all things and became his disciple. When his teacher pointed to Jesus as He passed by, saying, "Behold the Lamb of God" (St. John, Ch. 1), Andrew and another disciple, whom many believe to have been the Evangelist John (who wrote these things in his Gospel), left the Baptist and followed Christ.

A journey is, by its nature, an act of movement, of transportation, of growth. What is left behind, newness is perceived and embraced, growth of understanding takes place. And even if the journey comes to a close in the same physical location from which it began, that place is transformed for us by the journey through which we have re-approached it. The aid shelter on a street corner in London is no different after a journey to the Middle East; but after witnessing there first-hand the struggles and torments of poverty, of suffering, of sorrow, the meaning and importance of that small shelter is indeed different for me.

The Nativity Fast as all Orthodox Christians know is a period of abstinence and penance in preparation for Christmas. Sometimes the fast is called St. Philip's Fast (or the Philippian Fast), as it traditionally begins on the day following the Feast of Saint Philip the Apostle (November 14th).

Katherine awoke, marveling at what she had seen and heard in the dream. The next morning, she went with a number of her maids to the cell (kellion) of the holy elder (geronda) and fell down in tears at his feet. She told him what she had seen in the dream and asked what she must do to gain the love of Him Whom she so desired. The godly elder spoke to her at length of the mysteries of the True Christian faith, beginning with the creation of the world and our forefather Adam and continuing up to the Second Coming of the Master Christ. He told her of the ineffable glory of Paradise and the terrible and eternal torments of hell, and she, being a learned and wise maiden, straightway understood and believed with her whole heart. Then she received Holy Baptism at the elder's hands, and he instructed her to pray fervently to the Most Holy Theotokos as before.

During the reign of the impious and pagan Roman emperor Maxentius, there lived in the city of Alexandria a maiden named Katherine. She was of royal lineage, very beautiful and tall, and had reached the age of eighteen. She was also most learned, having studied all the writings of the Hellenes (Greeks), and had acquainted herself with the authors of antiquity: Homer, Virgin, Aristotle, Plato, and others. It was not, however, only the philosophers that she had read: she knew well the books of the physicians Asclepius, (Asclepius was the Greek god of medicine), Hippocrates, and Galen. Moreover, she has entirely mastered the arts of rhetoric and dialectic and knew many languages, so that all were amazed at her learning. Numerous rich men of noble birth came to ask her hand of her mother, who held the Christian faith secretly because of the great persecution raised up against the faithful at the time by Maxentius.