International Orthodox Christian Articles

The sealed Eastern Gate mentioned in Ezekiel 44:1-2 points to the eternal virginity of St.Mary. “Then he brought me back the way of the Gate of the outward sanctuary which looketh towards the East; and it was shut. Then said the Lord unto me: This Gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened and no men shall enter it by it, because the Lord the God of Israel hath entered in by it, therefore it shall be shut. Verses like Jn 2:3-5 and 19: 26- 27 prove the respectful relation of Jesus to Mary, the Mother of God. St.Mary did everything according to the ‘Law of Moses’. The parents of Mary were Euakim and Hannah. Mary was born as the result of prayers and offerings. She was born as the result of prayers and supplications of her parents. While staying in her home at Nazareth after the engagement with Joseph, she was told by the Angel about the divine plan of Incarnation of the Savior (Luke 1:26). Her response was so humble: “I am the servant of the Lord, Let it happen as per the word of the God”. (Luke 1:38). The magnificent in Luke 1:46-55 shows the courage, wisdom, sanctity and social concern of St.Mary. It reflects deep spiritual insight to humanity. The part of St.Mary in the ministry of Jesus is explained mainly in the following verses- (John 2:1-11, Luke 8:19-21, Mark 3: 31-35, Luke 11:27, John 19:25-27, Acts 1:14, Luke 1:30). The Holy Church Fathers points out many Old Test indications for St.Mary. The burning bush (Ex 3:2).The fleece of wool in Gideon’s story (Judges 6:36), the ram thicket by his horns (Gen 22:13), Ezekiel’s vision of God’s glory by the appearance of fire (Ezekiel 1:1), the vessel of Aron (Num 17:8) are some of the examples. The Shekina and the golden lamp-stand are also mentioned by the Holy Church Fathers as indicatives for St.Mary. Traditionally the Church celebrates the feast of the bodily departure of St.Mary on August 15^th and she is considered to be the holiest and greatest saints of all time.

These past few years have been shocking and heart rending with many tragic incidents that have caused so mush loss and hurt to hundreds of families and relatives of those affected. Youngsters involved in crime, drug-trafficking, drug abuse, alcohol dependence, suicide attempts, mental health problems, cyber crimes, abuse of mobile phones, computer, internet, traffic accidents, financial misappropriations, robbery, rape, sex rackets, missing up children, destruction of public property, malpractices in exams, violence in campus are alarming in the situation. While watching the news and reading news paper and listening to the interviews of those affected, various thoughts and emotions emerged. Condition of sadness, hurt, anger and questions left me feeling helpless.

Is it possible to remain positive and helpful in the midst of crisis? Does one just keep a blind eye and deaf ear and carry on with normal life. Is it insensitive and selfish to talk abut there miss happenings and then not to do anything about them? How do we as ordinary citizens and human beings make a difference or are we just passive spectators’? The answers to all these questions are still a mystery. And this is not the first time that such queries have erupted; they have been needling the human mind since forever. “God has not promised that our skins will always be blue, but he has promised to see us through”. Youth today have very special and distinct needs, which can no longer be overlooked. It is essential to invest in youth. They are perhaps the most vulnerable segment of our population; they are also the most promising assets. We have to combatively work at making them healthy, educated, secular and unprejudiced.

Globalization and it’s manifestation like increased consumerism, materialism etc that has exposed our young generation to more and more vulnerabilities. Too much of expectations and pressure to perform have increased their stress levels. Degeneration from our values and deviations from our culture have inflicted more wounds to the spirit of young ones. Proper counseling, guidance, human resource development initiatives, value education etc right from the very young age with regular follow up and feed back would definitely contribute to personality development and excellence. These kinds of initiative will help them to realize their true potential and responsibilities. They empower individuals to liberate themselves from personal growth and change. Even child is unique and has the ability and power to transform their life positively and sense the society meaningfully.

Faith sees the invisible

Believers the incredible

And

Receives the impossible

If the will exists, then there are chances that we would find ways to liberate the young generation and inspire them for positive action, than just remain spectators. Perhaps we need to dig in a little deeper, make a commitment that involves finding out more about how we can help and contribute and be proactive citizens. Infact, we need to try harder to reach out. So we have to decide not to give into this dismal picture. If there is a rocky road then we will just have to wear tough shoes and do the things we feel we need to do as ordinary citizens contributing to the society we live in.

“Vision without task makes a visionary

Task without vision is drudgery

Vision with task makes a Missionary”

Sunil D Kuruvilla (Contributing Editor)
HRD Trainer and Career Counsel
Director Insight Mission
Website: www.insightmission.ingame.org
Email: insightmission@yahoo.com

The role of man and woman assigned in Eden

The family is the basic unit that makes a human animal a reformed man from the crudities of this animal life. Just as Jesus gives His Holy Body to His spouse the church, the married couple exchanges their body each other for their mutual dependence for growth and happiness. The same way of venerating the mystical body of Christ, one ought to treat his sex or the body of the other and vice versa as something sacred, the visible via- media primary relationship that the couple begins their life with. The hidden nucleus that st. Paul delineates is a mystical truth. Christ is the head and the church is the body, in the same way man is the head and woman the body. Man, therefore, is the head of the household, the main reason in creating Adam first and Eve from ‘the bone of his bone and blood of his blood’. Just as the church members eat and drink the Holy Body and blood of Christ, wife similarly participates in the body and blood of her husband for conception, the mission of God executed by the agents of God that is the means of the propagation of our race. This is why the sexual organs of man and woman are created in such a way that one gives and the other one receives as agents of God in conceiving children for the Creator. I have limitations in giving a meticulous explanation to the readers how this giving and receiving process take place lucidly because the topic is too delicate to be explained in open.

Numberless thanks to the Almighty for designing and shaping our genetic organs in such a way that one gives and the other one receives, so that the works of God for replenishing the earth with the children of God continues till the demise of Death. If the receiver overpowers the charge of the giver in giving the Divine Body of Christ to the giver, just like the wife takes the role of man in the cohabitating process that certainly is detrimental, it is to be understood that the time is overripe for its finish. Putting the horse in front of the cart is the only logistic that approves the validity of the equality of the decisions-making venues in the spiritual arena, and this primary step will certainly lead to the women’s ordination. The female ordination and gay clergy is the last milepost for the coming of the Lord, Mt.24: 15. While the lethal plagues like Aids, chicken guinea, dengue fever and other sicknesses are infecting over the believers of the ‘God’s own country’ (Kerala), the religious hierarchy hurricane with the issue of blessing with the equality in the decision- making areas that leads to women’s ordination, in the same way of the disciples feuding over the leadership tussles while Jesus was agonizing over the crucifixion that He had to undergo. The meticulously well-contrived and irrevocable steps and process of elevating woman in the parish venue have been like this.

Taking the infant girl after the baptism to the Altar > combined choir > OT readings > Equality in the decision making venues > deaconess > priest > bishop >

Such open challenges and threats made it possible in the other churches for women to grab the clerical positions. It may be stated now that women don’t vie for the position of priesthood. Time changes, so also the attitudes. The hidden agenda is not transparent in the beginning.

Despite sex is a physical need, its magnetism that welds the human relationship to a magnified field is inexplicable and incalculable in our imagination, the basement that kindle one’s spiritual gold mine, since raising up children in God’s ways is a missionary work, 1.Tim.2: 15. The sacrament of matrimony is a replica of the Groom- Bride relationship between Christ and the church. One has to have enough depth of knowledge about the purity of sex that visibly serves as the symbolic functions of the mystical body that we participate within our worshipping life. The final doom of humanity is a product of the disobedience of the Divine commandments and laws, together with the amorousness and profligacy of sexual relationship that began only after the fall of our first parents soon after infringing upon the first commandment given to them. When the Divine laws are violated, the froth of the passions of the body prop up. The Pre-marital and extra-marital relationship that mars the spouse-to-spouse relationship is the founding stone of our destruction that eventually destroy this world. The sex corruptions of dating and its aftermath that encroached into the religious arena as equality in decision- making venues and female ordination paved the way for torpedoing the visible sign of the Groom -Bride relationship in our church worship. Such unholy alliance that cut the taproot of the sanctity of life evaporated the mercy that Jesus showers to His children. ‘Kamam’, the impulsive sexuality, is the root cause of all other vices that branched out into different forms of passions after the disgrace that preyed in Eden. The congenital problems and their vibrations that has no bounds and limits has degenerated a world that God created and handed over to us. While sex is the mother of mankind, it has become the mother of all evils lately because ‘the greatest evil is found where the highest good has been corrupted’. The modern madding crowd that has no knowledge of God’s love and mercy is a primary product of the corrupt derailed sexual pleasures that invite the desecration of the holy religious and physical life on earth. The apparent decision of the Holy Synod is not good news for women of the church’, whereas it is a good news for the wailing mankind of the furnace as it is the last frontier for the coming of the Lord to espouse the church in Paradise.

“The Catholicose has issued a Kalpana giving permission to woman over the age of 21 to attend the meetings of the church as observers from now on provided that they satisfy other requirements applicable to men as well. It is expected that after reforming the constitution of the church, woman can get voting rights as well”

How can you say that it is a good news for women of the church, when sex slavery, sex trade in a mafia style on a global basis has triggered after the gaining of equality for women in secular and work place arenas. Don’t try to ride on the mere utopian fallacies of equality that only tickle and trickle our wild passions of the flesh. The basic spiritual rule is that one cannot asunder husband and wife, head and tail, because they are one flesh. The tail is there where the head is. The crocodile tears that have no compunction of heart rebound like the drops that fall on colacacia leaves.

Mr. E.S.John, Australia

When he was baptized into the Orthodox Christian Church 16 years ago, life was never the same for Dr. H. Tristram Engelhardt.

"That was a watershed moment in my life," the renowned bioethicist and editor of "The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy" wrote in an e-mail. "With my baptism everything changed and I committed myself – proud and arrogant Texan that I am – to realize what it meant to die to myself and to put on Christ." His baptism not only influenced his work in medicine and moral theory, he said, but also transformed the way he approached the world. From that moment, he explained, Engelhardt made a commitment to treat everyone "within the context of Christian love – whether patients, students or anonymous strangers."Engelhardt, a philosophy professor at Rice University and professor emeritus in the Department of Medicine and Department of Community Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. He is also the author of several books including "The Foundations of Christian Bioethics".

Raised a Roman Catholic, Engelhardt started taking Orthodox Christianity seriously while consulting with various Catholic prelates, he said. "What happened from an intellectual point of view was the recognition that Roman Catholicism and the various Protestant faiths not only came into existence in the eighth century and later, but that their whole mind-set, their whole paradigm of theology and church life, was other than that of the original unbroken Christianity," he wrote. During his visit to Spokane, Engelhardt will discuss the differences between traditional Christianity and the views of morality that have prevailed in a "post-Christian, secular culture." During a presentation at Gonzaga, the bioethicist will show how faith and reason, which framed the Western thought beginning in the 12th century, produced "an appreciation of theology radically at odds with that which subsequently became prominent in the Christian West." An understanding of morality is possible only with faith, according to Engelhardt.

"If one does not know that God exists, one will then act as if the universe comes from nowhere, goes to nowhere, and for no discernible ultimate purpose," he wrote. "One will suffer a kind of ultimate disorientation. One will be lost in the cosmos … Without a proper orientation towards God; everything goes, at least to some extent, wide off the mark."

Various authentic studies and reports say that Orthodox Christianity is the fastest growing faith in the world. Many Catholic and Protestant believers are finding Orthodoxy as their true Christian faith. Many people with their family who earlier practised Catholicism or Protestantism are now members of the Orthodox Church. These are not forceful conversion providing money or any charismatic subjugation, but people willingly accept Orthodox Christianity as the true apostolic faith. Orthodox Christian faith is experiencing fats growth in Russia, America, and Latin America, in Europe and even in China. This is not a forceful conversion or by providing amenities as the catholic or protestant churches do, but people around the world is now accepting orthodoxy as the true Christian faith and that too on a voluntary basis. It is said that if an authentic research is carried out to find out the true Christian faith one will end up in Orthodoxy Christianity. It must be understood by our people that Orthodoxy is not a mere Christian faith, but it’s an experience as well as a way of life. It is also believed that Orthodox Christians will become the largest Christian group in the world, in near future.

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