Our yearly motto, “Be at peace with one another and with all”, is taken from a hymn written by the famous hymnographer Kosmas of Maiouma of the 8th century. The verse is from the tropario of the 8th Ode of the Canon of the Holy Monday matins service and is chanted on Palm Sunday Evening. St Kosmas became bishop of Maiouma, a port-town near Gaza in modern day Palestine and helped defend the Church against the heresy of iconoclasm. This was a turbulent period. Having this in mind, how is it that St Kosmas still wrote the words “be [...]

In his First Epistle to the Corinthians, Apostle Paul is addressing a people who are in danger of making a drastic mistake with their choices. They are building their Christian Community – the Church - upon an insecure foundation. They are building upon the foundation of human wisdom, human resource and human effort. As a result, their lives are filled with imbalance and instability. So Apostle Paul addresses them with the following verse (3:10) “According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder, I laid a foundation, and another is building upon it. [...]

St. Paul’s counsel to the Ephesians delivers a direct and powerful message to his spiritual children: ‘and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you’ (Eph 4:32). With this year’s synthima, we are called to challenge ourselves in christotis. Experientially, Christotis means to make room in my own life for Christ to come in, and transform me from my old self. Literally, ‘xρηστοί’ means, ‘honourable, virtuous, moral’. Elsewhere, it translates as useful, helpful, obliging, or benevolent. Beyond logically understanding what christotis means, our challenge is to ask ourselves if we have experienced christotis [...]