St. Thomas the Apostle Eastern-Byzantine Catholic Church

05/20/2024

This is amazing! If you have 35 min to spare, listen.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/99cQcFHo8KwN4f2J/?mibextid=WC7FNe

Christ is risen!

Out now!! Anastasis: The Harrowing of Hades Audio Drama is a retelling of Christ’s descent into the underworld from the perspective of Old Testament righteous.

Put on your best pair of headphones and explore what happened to the Old Testament souls in hades, the emotional build-up to the fateful crucifixion and the consequences of Christ’s enigmatic descent into hell.

Expanding on the Harrowing of Hades graphic novel by Creative Orthodox, and written uniquely for audio.

I put this passion project together with the help of so many talented people that I’m truly indebted to!

If you enjoy this, share it, get the graphic novel and share it again! 😅

https://youtu.be/lsxWavgcPCo

05/19/2024

The Pentecostal Season is without a doubt beautiful due to budding of flowers, the promise of food crops, and nice warm weather to play. However it is also one of the most spiritually significant times as well. Obviously Pascha and Pentecost have now been celebrated, but now is a time to renew our fervor.
During the Great Fast the truly rough work is begun(tearing down ourselves with the promise that God can and will raise us to glory if only we’d cooperate). Now is the time to make good on that work.
Renewing our vigor is not normally something that can be planned out and executed. How times have we become zealous from a random film, perhaps a wonderful and providential event, or even a book?
We can’t make it happen but we can prepare. Man and the Cosmos is a wonderful introduction to the theology of St Maximos the Confessor. He is not as well known and certainly not as well read by parishoners as say someone like St John Chrysostrom or Augustine. His writing can be a bit dense for the layman. This, as I said, introduces, tries to summarize, and help us comprehend the ideas and theology of St Maximus.
Just as St Philip was asked by the Ethiopian ”how can I unless someone instructs me?” We too need guides to lead us through our more trying and complex fathers.
Yet he is worth it! The theology behind man as a microcosm itself makes him worth a read.
Glory to Jesus Christ!

05/19/2024

God bless you Melanie! How do we not just love our parishoners? Today she presented blessed St Michael/Guardian Angel medals to three of our younger parishoners. They’ve done so well lately and it does not go unnoticed. May God continue to guide these young souls. Most Holy Theotokos pray for them

05/12/2024

St. Nectarios of Aegina, Homily on Motherhood

The mother by a single glance, by a single kiss, by her sweet voice and her delicate caresses, can immediately arouse in the child’s heart the leaning and inclination toward the good. Likewise, by a single disapproving glance, by a single tear falling on her cheeks, by a single expression suggestive of her heart’s sorrow, she can remove the child from the most destructive danger of the heart. The child, nurtured in his mother’s bosom and warmed in his mother’s embrace, begins to love before he learns the concept of love, and he begins to subordinate his will to the moral law before he learns the concept of the moral law, and it is the mother alone who is most suited to arousing in the child’s heart his first conception of God. Because of this, Basil the Great says (Letter 223), “The conception of God which I received in childhood from my blessed mother – it was this conception, brought to maturity, that I had within myself. For I did not change from one set of opinions to another in the maturation of my reason, but rather I brought to completion the beginnings handed down to me by her.”

03/31/2024

A MESSAGE FROM ABBOT DAMIAN

Christ is risen
Indeed, he is risen

Gathering together in the darkness
In the middle of the night
We proclaim LIGHT!

And while a week ago, we witnessed a resurrection ; life, returning to a rotting co**se, Lazarus, four days dead was brought back to life and left, stumbling about in his shroud wrappings

Now, we dare with very limited capacity to proclaim another resurrection

Christ had revealed to Martha (John 11:25)
"I AM..."
" I AM... RESURRECTION "
On Good and Holy Friday, we witnessed that which we cannot explain with words. Somehow, creatures put to death their Creator. The Divine Word, I AM, MADE INCARNATE IN CHRIST was left hanging on a tree DEAD. His bones needed not to be broken as with the two criminals on each side but His side was pierced with a lance. He was dead

But as He hung dying In the midst of excruciating suffering, we heard Him speak, mysterious words

"Father , FORGIVE.
FATHER FORGIVE THEM
Father forgive them, for they know not what they do
(Luke 23:34)
Forgiveness, emanating from the mouth of a crucified man, hanging on a tree, brings to our consciousness, the memory of a garden.
A garden planted by God (Genesis 2:8,9,16,and 17)
“…God planted a garden”
… and in the middle of the garden, God planted the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil

At Calvary or Golgotha (the place of the skull).
There is a fission in the rock that runs vertically down to a chapel known as the chapel of Adam(and Eve). Tradition holds that our first parents were buried here, and as the earth quaked at the moment that God died, the temple veil was torn in two and blood from the cross poured down upon the skulls of our first parents, and they were restored to the life given to them in the garden, as the first children of Light
“ made in the image and likeness of God” who is Light ( John 8:12).
At the bottom of the icon of the crucifixion, we see in the cave of Golgotha an image of the skull, and the crossbones being drenched in blood. So that the tree that becomes the instrument of death , now becomes the instrument of LIFE.

On Palm Sunday when Jesus enters into Jerusalem riding on the foal of a donkey, the children climbed trees.
Unconsciously , but spiritually astute, the children proclaim with tree branches, the victory over the tree of death.
Revealing the forgiveness of all sin, and proclaiming the tree of the cross as The Tree of Life
Let us lift up this tree,THE CROSS and proclaim with our whole being.

CHRIST IS RISEN!