Author: lazarus abboud
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Prayer
“Pray without ceasing.” What is prayer? Prayer, for us, is the state through which man passes over to God, and through which God looks down upon us. In its act, as Metropolitan Paul Yazigi says, it is a sense of God’s presence at every moment, in every sphere of our lives. Prayer brings us into…
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Constantinople and Byzantine Glories
The idea of Constantinople and the glories of Byzantium still lingers in the minds of some Christians, and today they see, in the attempt to convert the Church of Hagia Sophia into a mosque and to hold prayers in it, an offense to Christianity and to its civilization, as though the face of Christianity were…
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The Tragedy of the Byzantines
The sin of the Orthodox today is that they remain stuck in the dream of restoring the glories of ancient Byzantium, for since the fall of the empire and its glories until today, their mad dream breaks them. Therefore you see the weakness of the ecclesiastical administrations in that they submit to the state and…
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The Weak Sect
Father Lazarus Abboud The Christians of the East suffer from many problems, especially in the matter of sectarianism and citizenship, so they have come to consider themselves a minority demanding the rights of minorities. They see their weakness in their inability to bring about changes toward citizenship for the whole homeland, so they replace that…
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The Scourge of God
Father Lazarus Abboud. The epidemic spread in “all the world” and reached a state of rapid outbreak, so visions (attributed) to the Virgin on Mount Athos came on the tongue of one of the monks, saying: mark your houses with the sign of the cross in holy oil. The simple believer, in his faith, realizes…
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Administrative Heresy
This term is strange to the believer’s ear, because he is accustomed to hearing about heresy in its intellectual form. But for heresy to be administrative, it requires contemplation and a reading that incarnates doctrines behaviorally. Doctrines are not purely intellectual terms that do not touch human reality, for what does man benefit from Christ…
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Introduction
Tomorrow, Sunday, we enter the threshold leading to the great Pascha, to which we ascend through three phases that churn our journey toward Jesus and form our relationship with Him: 1. The first phase is the Paschal threshold, the period of preparation by repentance for going out into the fast, and it contains four stations…
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The Second Phase: A Period Not for Repentance
In the second phase we come out of our chamber in which we spent the period of preparation in order to meet Jesus. We meet Jesus where He is staying “« RABBI, WHERE ARE YOU STAYING?»” (John 1:38), in order to go with Him. In this period we are not occupied with ourselves, but rather…
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The Sunday of Forgiveness: The Station of Reconciliation with the Self and the Other:
On the previous Sunday, man took a stance in existence before God, by bearing responsibility, that is, by becoming a mature man — for children bear no one’s responsibility. This stance today requires that man transform it into action in the society in which he lives: he first forgives himself and is reconciled with it,…
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The Third Station: The Station of Judgment, the Station of Stance:
This Sunday is an invocation of the dread Second Coming. Here we are not speaking of the last coming παρουσία (Parousia), but rather the second, personal one ἔρχομαι (Erchomai) — the personal coming in which Christ comes to each one of us, and we do not know when the appointed time is, nor the place,…