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THE SUNDAY OF ORTHODOXY

Rev. Dr. Doru Costache
of our life and hope The tree on the far horizon / might well be your mother waiting. Everything is familiar to us, like the womb of our mother and the womb is everything. And within the frame of the cosmos, of this humanised universe, of this world made in our image, the chaos of distance disappears You are no longer in wind and rain without shelter, for our Lord is everywhere and the whole nature is marked by a familiar touch. All is light. Even the words will support you during your lifetime obstinate fight with the idols of your mind, with the gods and demons of your shadow. During this struggle and at the end of it, when liberated and full The coming of our Lord, Logos of life, our hearts will become and Redeemer of all creation, and mountains able to experience for most of all his praised resurrection, introduced necessary geodesics into ever the glory of the utter stillness In the end you will be victorious: the chaos of our consciousness, in the middle of nowhere Therefore, there is no risk of being twice dead, defeated by decay and forgotten: you everything in the world for us is meaningful and enlightened. We are will be remembered, you will be living no more into the hasty point- alive. The terms in italics are from the less recurrent weekly cycle, but into book Mother A Moving Reflection a world of everyday Eucharistic miracle, into a real world, full of life. of God, poems by Archbishop StyliWe are permanently and contempla- anos S. Harkianakis (ATF Press, tively experiencing Sundays beauty Adelaide, 2005). Dedicated to all mothers in the world, the volume and joy. Subsequently, our way of experiencing Christianity is related displays the authors complex sensibility towards all that is wonderful to poetry What would become of us without and meaningful in our lives. You do not need to think about of a particular Sunday. Instead, my short essay will focus on a special & permanent feature of the Orthodox Christendom its poetic sensibility in expressing the experience of faith and life. I called this essay The Sunday of Orthodoxy because for us Orthodox Christians living the faith represents an act of celebration; and celebration is full of joy, as are the paschal liturgy and every Sunday liturgy. This feeling of joy and our propensity for poetic expression derives from our very consciousness that both space and time are no longer without orientation marks, without cardinal points. analogies! Everything around us represents a metaphor of ourselves, I took the liberty of mixing all these poetical words into a phraseolextent they might be right. But I wonder if we know, young or old, how to really carry on the fight for Christ. What is the right way to fight, according to the rules of the game, when only few of us bother to attend the holy confession? Isnt the holy confession part of the rules of the game? Or how can someone tell me that they are true Christians, if they take revenge and hate their close ones, for whom Christ died on the cross How can we sing Forgive our sins, as we forgive those who trespass against us, without understanding that they are pledging towards God the following facts: that they will forgive one another as God forgives them We will be judged by God in the same way that we judge people. We must ponder together at what we truly represent. We are Gods nation and humanitys elites. We cannot become too complacent about this rotten world. If we think the way the world thinks then we do not belong to Christ. Even if we pay our membership fee [English version by Lily Strungaru] ogy, which represents mainly the feelings I experienced when reading. After all, every book is the womb where everyone may contemplate the wonder of budding life, the other books that could be born of it It is extremely difficult to speak about a volume of poetry; it is the reason why I choose to dream and sing together with the Archbishop, and not to critically analyse the marvellous texture of his metaphorical discourse. It is Sunday the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the Sunday of Poetry. For Poetry was never alien to Orthodoxy.

What it means

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regular basis; a praised effort indeed! But let not confuse going to church with everything there is to do, in a Christian sense. In fact, even Christ our Savior, teaches us that not one of us ever achieved everything asked of us, but let alone pretend that we did more... I am not referring to the fact that we are sinful people. We all have sins. I am referring more to our submissions in sin especially our hatred toward people. Maybe some will tell me that they are fighting it. And perhaps to some

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