I’m getting ready for the weekend services, and I see that the saint of the day will be “Hieromartyr Gregory the Bishop of Greater Armenia, Equal of the Apostles and Enlightener of Armenia.”
We’ll be hearing this hymn at Orthros tomorrow:
Seeing a dreadful spectacle, the unbelievers were amazed; for him whom they had believed dead in […]

Greg shared a YouTube video with me last week, and I think he did it on purpose knowing that it would bug me a lot. He was right. On the video you have Richard Dawkins, a well-known atheist, apparently (though not well-known to me. I don’t hang out with lightning rods.). He wrote a book […]

Winning the prize for longest movie title of the year (I think), we have “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” just coming out in theaters. I admit I’m a little intrigued with this one. There have been 11 other movies about Jesse James, and the sad fact is that the 1966 […]

Once again, I’m attempting the difficult maneuver of getting a hotel coffeemaker to yield a satisfactory cup of tea, this time in the Hampton Inn outside Chicago. Greg and I are on one of our occasional quick trips here to enjoy goddaughter time and catch a little of that Chicagoland swank, if we can get […]

It actually got down below 60 degrees today, which means that along with getting our lawn mowed for the last time and putting away all the gardening stuff, I can harvest the basil from my window box. Not like this takes very long to do — I don’t get very good sun at the window […]

Besides being the leavetaking of the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross, I saw that we’d be chanting a lot about the Great-Martyr Euphemia, and so I looked her up at the OCA Website (which is the best resource of online hagiographies I’ve found, BTW). She was persecuted, tortured and martyred in 305 AD […]

By the way, in case anyone is wondering why all of the sudden I’ve started having bulky images in every post, … apologies. My job as a graphic artist usually allows me the ability to drain off some creative juices and then I don’t have to start thinking I need to illustrate every shopping list […]

My priest, Father Elias, sent out an e-mail that contained the stories of both the finding of the Cross in the 4th century and its recovery in the 7th. I think everyone knows how St. Helen found the True Cross — if you don’t, HERE’s a link — but I thought the story of reclaiming […]

I hope I’m not the only one who gets the Feasts of the Cross mixed up. There are three main feasts of the Cross, and after twenty-odd years in the Orthodox Church, I still can’t keep the names straight, not to mention all the other important why’s and wherefore’s.
So I did a little research and […]

Cleaning out my Orthros book, I came across the hymn for the Nativity of the Theotokos that I liked most from today’s service. I felt like this one summed up the gladness of the feast best. And I tend to think of any hymn to the Theotokos as a bouquet of flowers that you offer, […]