Orthodox Portal

1. Limit the amount of time you spend watching television, listening to audio equipment or the radio. Use media such as the Internet sparingly except for spiritual reading or religious-oriented programming.
2. Donate money to others, to the Church, to some poor family, some social or educational work of which you know. Be sure not to tell anyone what you have done.
3. Maintain the Fast as much as possible. Try to avoid all flesh meat. This should be the absolute minimum requirement of the Fast and an example of practicing self-control…. Do not judge others who may not seem to be fasting. It may be possible that their personal struggle is, in reality, much more difficult than your own.
4. Observe prayer time at home, school, or work, at least once each day, preferably at the same time. Observe a short Rule of Prayer, but keep it faithfully every day of the Fast.

(The Orthodox Chruch A to Z. Father George Grube, Light and Life Publishing.)

The Presentation or “Meeting” of our Lord Jesus Christ is better known in the West under the name of Purification of the Holy Virgin. Like the majority of feasts of Palestinian origin, that of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple belongs to Christian antiquity. Aetheria (end of the 4th century) saw it celebrated in Jerusalem with a procession and with great solemnity. This feast was to be introduced in Constantinople in the 6th century under Justinian, and thence passed to Rome in the course of the 7th century. The practice of holding candles during the Feast, introduced in Jerusalem about 450, has been preserved in the West: hence the name of Candlemas….

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“Don’t pressure your children,” says Elder Porphyrios. “Whatever you want to say to them, say it with your prayers. Children don’t listen with their ears. They’ll only listen to what we want to tell them when divine grace appears and enlightens them. When you want to say something to your child, say it to the Theotokos instead and she will do all the work. Your prayer will become a spiritual hug, which will embrace your children and captivates them….”

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Life giving faith consists in unquestioning belief in Christ as God. Only when Christ is accepted as perfect God and perfect Man does the plentitude of spiritual experience described by the Apostles and Fathers become possible. Christ is now the cornerstone on which we must construct our entire life, both temporal and eternal… Christ, having linked God and man inseparably in Himself, is the one and only solution of the apparently insoluble conflict [of evil in the world]. He is in truth ‘the Savior of the world’ (John 4.42.) He is the measure of all things, human and divine. He is the sole way to the Father. He is the sun which illumines the universe. Only in His light can the way be seen. (His Life is Mine, pg. 50)

“One, and only one has spoken to us clearly and definitely about all that will come to pass at the end of time: the Lord Jesus Christ… For human understanding and logic, however great they may be, are too puny to reach to the world’s beginning and its end. Understanding is useless where vision is needed. We need a seer, who sees as clearly as we see the sun – to see the whole world, from its beginning to end…their has only been one such: the Lord Jesus Christ….” (St. Nikolai of Zicha, Homily on the Last Judgment. Homilies.)

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