The fact that humans are so very aware of our own mortality means that the fear of death drives much of our intoxication with our passions. But at the center of Great Lent, the Church gives us the image of the Cross to drive us to embrace another way of living that is prepared for death. If you are going to follow Christ in any serious way, you must be willing to allow that which is unlike God in your life to die, in fact, to actively seek to “kill” that which will truly kill me if you don’t overcome it!
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Love Fr. Barnabas and his homilies
Fantastic Homily
II Samuel 3:31 Then David said to Joab and to all the people who were with him, “Tear your clothes and gird on sackcloth and lament before Abner.” And King David walked behind the bier.
Saints Willingly Go
I carried the heavy awareness of loss.
Desolation lurked near prepared to pounce.
In the condition this knowledge left me
there was no want in me to lounge.
Those worst thoughts drove me to the floor to stare,
shocked by grimy details, paralyzed and aching.
Blank face stamped by silence; eyes swell to wet.
Racing, dead stopping as my mind sets to blaming.
How can my mind give up its desperate grasp?
Cutting sadness for the length's evil will stretch
across all the 'everywhere' invitations to sin?
Those innocents, shredded and forced to the edge.
Days of martyrs who held on firm, past or present?
An avid esteem of their hero's commitment.
Saints fast from Satan's temptations of sacrifice,
comforts only cause, to allow forgetting of grief's limit.
His hero smile, so generous, promise eternal,
and He never shirked or ducked, not even one blow.
They raked and bled every precious inch of muscle.
Demands so inhumane, yet He paid every debt owed.
My mind screams tearfully for the neighbor.
Lives were lost, pain was had, now cost.
I just want God to restore the innocence.
I can't get past these miserable thoughts.
Cotton and silk, comfort too fine as smile is denied.
Only coarse wrap of sackcloth scratches soothing pain.
I urgently paint my brow with the grief mark of ash
and don the desired mantle, now urgent, tears like rain.
The day and night of man, those hunters, those hunted,
and floods that hatch the spiders for feeding,
I reach up to embrace the storm God provided.
In the thorns there is joyful trust, this servant's pleading.
~ kk © rainbowsinthewater
Thank you Fr Barnabas for bringing us back to our cross.
10:50–11:08
MAY GOD BLESS YOU, FATHER!
As a Georgian who is converting to Orthodoxy it's nice to hear a priest that sounds like me!