Just a couple of photos from around the area yesterday from the pages of the Worcester Telegram.
Fr. Peter Live ~ Episode 2
Episode 2 is now online.
Catch Up
After the live program I will return here to the rectory and record my show Shepherd of Souls. This week I have an interview with Fr. Nicholas Apostola on the Orthodox View of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. I will not give anymore details so you will have to listen.
This week has been a busy one and I am fighting a cold again so prayers would be appreciated.
Last Saturday night I met a group of 20 somethings at a local watering hole for another round of Theology on Tap. This was a great night of meeting with a different age group in their own surroundings. We need to do more of this and take the Gospel to where they are and meet them where they are. We had a great discussion and after I process more of my thoughts I will write something more about it.
Sunday was the celebration of the Feast of St. Nicholas at our Sister parish here in Southbridge. I have written about the situation here in Southbridge before. We are a town of about 12,000 people and have three Orthodox Churches in this little town. Well we hope to rectify this starting very soon. We have agreed to meet to begin a discussion about merging two of the three parishes. please pray for us as we continue this very important work.
Tonight I continue my adult religious education program on the theme of Orthodox Spirituality. If you are a listener to Shepherd of Souls in iTunes you got the extra episode this week with my lecture. I plan to do the same this week so stay tuned. If you do not subscribe please take a moment to go on over to iTunes and search for the show.
Parton Saints of 2009

Commemorated on October 11th
Pray for deacons
The proposal was acceptable to the whole community, so they chose Stephen, a man filled with faith and the holy Spirit, also Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicholas of Antioch, a convert to Judaism. [Acts 6, 5]
Apolytikion in the Third Tone
O Holy Apostle Philip, intercede with the merciful God that He grant unto our souls forgiveness of offences.
Kontakion in the Fourth Tone
Since thou wast enlightened by the Holy Spirit, thou enlightenest the earth and all its fullness with the beams of thy wise teachings and miracles, Apostle Philip, thou sacred initiate.
Memory Eternal

A spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church said Alexiy, who headed the powerful church for 18 years, died at his residence in Peredelkino outside Moscow.
The Church never commented on Alexiy’s health and did not immediately disclose a cause of death. But diplomats in Moscow had said he was suffering from cancer.
In a sign of his importance, Russian state television immediately ran a film showing highlights from Alexiy’s life, accompanied by the sound of tolling church bells.
“This is an irreplaceable loss for all Russian Orthodox people, wherever they live,” said Sergei Mironov, speaker of the upper house of parliament.
Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia since 1990, the Estonian-born Alexiy was a powerful and influential figure with close links to the Kremlin.
He oversaw a major religious revival in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with hundreds of new churches built across the country, monasteries reopened and seminaries filling with new priests.
Russia’s Orthodox Church is by far the biggest of the churches in the Eastern Orthodox communion and is the majority religion in Russia.
During his 2000-2008 presidency, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB spy under communism, was often seen with Alexiy attending major religious ceremonies and President Dmitry Medvedev has continued the tradition.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said he was “so shocked that it is very hard for me to find words on the spot”, Interfax news agency reported. “I respected him deeply”.
Medvedev, who was on an official visit to India, was expected to make a statement shortly.
Deeply conservative
An unapolegetic conservative, Alexiy was outspoken in his defence of traditional Russian values and was critical of the Catholic church for what he said was its efforts to win converts among Russian Orthodox believers.
He stood in the way of a visit to Russia by the Polish-born leader of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II.
Both churches said they were open in principle to an historic meeting between the Russian Patriarch and Pope Benedict, who was elected in 2005. But despite several rounds of dialogue between bishops from both churches, Alexiy felt the obstacles were too great.
“Problems remain on the agenda for our bilateral relations with the Roman Catholic Church which demand real solutions,” Alexiy said in a speech in June to the Council of Bishops.
“Among them is the question of missionary activity of Catholics in traditionally Orthodox Russian lands”.
In a first reaction from the Catholic Church to Alexiy’s death, Bishop Brian Farrel, secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, said:
“Patriarch Alexiy had to lead the Church in a period of great transformation. He knew how to carry out this task with a great sense of responsibility and love for Russian tradition.”
Father Peter Live
We could not get the live stream to work but we are going to try again maybe next week so stay tuned for that. If you are interested, I recorded this weeks show and I will put a link at the end of this post. The show is an hour long so plan for it. Thanks for listening.
Advent Rant
First off I am not against Christmas decorations I am against rushing the season! For those in the western world the season of advent runs from the Sunday after Thanksgiving until the 24th of December. Then the Christmas season begins and runs until the 6th of January. Okay with that said it is fine if you wish to decorate and put all your Christmas decorations out just don’t forget what the advent season is all about. It is about preparing.
In the Orthodox Church this is called Christmas Lent and is a time set aside, just like Great Lent before Easter, as a penitential season. Notice the vestment color changes to red, and in the western church the priest wears purple. This is a time for remembering and preparing for the birth of the Christ Child. Yes in our modern western consumer driven world we need to start celebrating the season right after Halloween so we can buy all the junk that three months after Christmas we have broken, forgotten about, or thrown away, or my favorite re-gifted!
So That’s all I was saying. Don’t loose advent in the rush of Christmas! Don’t forget the preparation before the feast. Slow down and just be for a time and think about what is to come. Not the parties and all of the other holiday hoopla just meditate on what the season in all about. JESUS!
Now before you start with the hateful comments and misunderstanding me, some of this is tongue and cheek so take a step back and relax!
I Have a Dream
Let’s pray about this and see what comes of it. I am on to a few possibilities.
The Greatest of These is Love
Our entire existence on this world from a Christian perspective is to commune with God and this communion is possible through love. If love does not exist then God does not exist and there can be no spiritual life. Where love resides there God is and all righteousness. The love of human beings has it’s origin in God. We are to love one another and we are to love God with our whole heart, mind, and soul. Why is this true? Because God first loved us. “For God so loved the world that he sent His only begotten Son.” (John 3:16)
The 4th Century spiritual father Macarius of Egypt tells his spiritual children that the aim of life as the “acquisition of the Holy Spirit” is expressed most perfectly in Love. The Holy Spirit himself is identified with God’s love by the saints. St. Simeon the New Theologian writes, “O Holy Love, – i.e., the Holy Spirit of God – he who knows you not has never tasted the sweetness of your mercies which only living experience can give us. But he who has known you, or who has been known by you, can never have even the smallest doubt. So God who is love enters into the union with humanity through the Son of His love by the Spirit.”
Let us look at three types of love in Scripture. Agape is love as the action of perfect goodness for the sake of the other. This is the most basic of all the meanings of love, to do everything that we possible can for the sake and well-being of the other. This is the type of love that God has when we say that God is love. This is the love that we as spiritual beings must have first and foremost.
Eros is love for the sake of union with the other. Erotic love, not sinful erotic love, but love free from the sinful passions. The pure desire for communication with the other, including of course God. This is the love that should exist between God and his creation as the pattern for the erotic love in the world between husband and wife.
Friendship or phila is the love that should exist between God and humanity. We have no greater friend that God and God’s wishes to be the friend of all of humanity. The very purpose of coming to know Christ was to destroy the “enmity” between humanity and God and to restore the co-working relationship that existed in the Garden. “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. (Exodus 33:11) “Greater love has no man than this that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing. But I have called you friends; for all that I have heard from my Father, I have made known to you.” (John 15:13-15)
So we have seen love as goodness, love as union and love as friendship. These are all to be found in relationship between God and humanity and the relationship between human beings. We need the spiritual life in order for there to exist these forms of true love. Because these forms of love all exist in the spiritual life and the spiritual life is a life rooted in God.
Bartholomew: search for unity between Orthodox and Catholics “a duty”
The celebrations were attended by a large delegation from the Church of Rome, led by Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the council for Christian unity, representatives of the other Christian confessions, the diplomatic corps, and various authorities.
Ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew began his homily by recalling the historic meeting in Jerusalem in 1964, between Paul VI and Athenagoras, which put an end to the historic and distasteful schism of 1054 between the two sister Churches, initiating a dialogue of love and truth in full and mutual respect, with the objective of reestablishing full communion. And precisely in order to highlight this journey toward full communion, Bartholomew gave the example of the two brothers “in the flesh,” Andrew and Peter, who later became spiritual brothers in Christ, to emphasize the role that the two sister Churches must play. Although the two brothers Peter and Andrew followed different geographical paths to testify to the truth of Christ our Lord – the former sanctified the Church of Rome with his own blood, while the latter founded the Church of Byzantium, which later became Constantinople – they have remained united in the course of history through the two Churches: Rome and Constantinople.
This connection between the two apostles, Bartholomew continued, the beginning of which was biological in nature, later became a spiritual bond in the name of our Lord, and ended up constituting the bond that unites the Churches. And this bond must always be kept in mind,
continued the ecumenical patriarch, in order to restore full unity. Because today, by honoring the apostle Andrew, one also honors the apostle Peter – it is not possible to think of Peter and Andrew separately. The thorns must therefore be removed which for a millennium have wounded relations between the two Churches, and guidance toward unity must be taken from the spirit of the common tradition of the seven ecumenical councils of the first millennium. And all of this is not only out of respect for our two apostles, Bartholomew concluded, but also because it is our duty toward the contemporary world, which is going through a tremendous
sociopolitical, cultural, and economic crisis. A world that has urgent need of the message of peace, of which the founder of our Church, Jesus Christ, is the messenger, through his cross and
resurrection. Only then will the word of our Church be credible, when it can also give a message of peace and love: “Come and see” (John 1:47).
Cardinal Kasper, as the pope’s representative, also focused in his homily on the importance of dialogue for full unity between the Churches, saying that the same feast is celebrated today in Rome, a sign of our common apostolic heritage, which requires us to work for full communion. Because this ecumenical commitment is not an option, but a duty toward our Lord, in order to be able to consider ourselves an essential part of the Church of Christ, our Lord.
Kasper then cited the three visits of the ecumenical patriarch to Rome in 2008, which included his participation, together with Pope Benedict, in the inauguration of the Pauline year, and his address to the synod of Catholic bishops, also at the invitation of the pope. This reinforced the bonds between Rome and Constantinople. He concluded by speaking of the importance of the document of Ravenna (2007) in the dialogue between Catholics and Orthodox.
Finally, in a conversation with AsiaNews, Cardinal Kasper maintained that the journey with the Orthodox, although it will certainly not be short, has started on the right path, “in part because we have many, many things in common with the Orthodox.” Moreover, Kasper continued, the fact that Constantinople has a very broad vision helps a great deal in the journey of dialogue toward full communion.