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Dear Friends of Saint Dumitru Monastery,

Christ is Risen!

Resurrection. We are at the end of a journey, that of Great Lent, which we undertook for our Savior (in fact, for our own souls) and accompanied by Him. Each one of us toiled more or less, some from the first hour, other from the third, the sixth, the ninth, the eleventh… Today all of us are called to the Supper of the Lord.

Entering the Holy Week, we discovered that all temptations of the Great Lent, and those of our life, prepare our hearts to sense the Passion of the Christ. And, in doing so – that is, fixing the eyes of our hearts on Him, Who was „crushed for our sins” (cf. Isaiah 53:5) -, paradoxically, our hearts are healed; as it happened to the heart of Mary, the sister of Lazarus, who anointed the feet of the Lord in the eve of His Entrance into Jerusalem, at the beginning of the Holy Week (cf. John 12:3). 

Thus, the fruits of Great Lent, and of our lives, are: sensing the Passion of the Lord and the healing of our hearts. And, as much as we sense His Passion, that much our hearts are cleansed, and that much our hearts see/know God (cf. Matthew 5:8).

Our times. The great Christian writer, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, said in 1983: “Today’s world has reached a stage which, if it had been described to preceding centuries, would have called forth the cry: ‘This is the Apocalypse!’ All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless without a repentant return of our consciousness to the Creator of All… without reaching out to the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently pushed away.”

As 40 years ago, today we hear of wars, of rumors of wars, of crises, of threats… and, more than then, we experience every day the deviation of nature from its normal climatic bounds.

On Holy Saturday we heard in the Divine Liturgy, among the 15 lectures from the Old Testament, the one relating how the 120,000 inhabitants of Niniveh repented at the message of Prophet Jonah (cf. Jonah 3:5). 

At the end of this Great Lent, we wish for ourselves and we wish You to heed the voice of old and new prophets and to turn our hearts in repentance to our God. In other words, to make the words of Saint Herman of Alaska the motto of our lives: “From this day forth, from this very hour and this very minute, let us love God above all and seek to accomplish His Holy Will.“

Feast Day. We will use this opportunity to invite You to our summer feast day, the Ascension of the Lord, which we will celebrate on Saturday, May 31. We expect to have a large number of hierarchs and priests as we also celebrate the Centennial of the Romanian Patriarchate. 

In Christ, our Lord and Savior,

Abbot of Saint Dumitru Monastery
Protosyngellos Ieremia with the brotherhood