April 25, 2017
I disappointed a little girl right before Holy Week. She had been reading Catherine’s Pascha, and she wanted to know more about Catherine’s family. Specifically, she wanted to know the names of Catherine’s mommy and daddy. So she got out her toy phone and...
April 18, 2017
If you’re not Orthodox, it can be hard to understand what your Orthodox Christian friends have been doing for the last week, or why they’re so bleary-eyed today. Let me see if I can explain it. To imagine Pascha, think of what it would be like if you combined the...
March 27, 2017
When my kids were small, I wasn’t a big fan Easter baskets full of candy. It’s not that I didn’t allow my kids to have candy. I did. But they’d had candy, lots of candy, at Halloween and Christmas and Valentine’s Day. For them, candy was the ordinary way to celebrate...
March 17, 2017
Today is the feast day of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. It’s a feast that nearly always falls during Lent. We have these feasting-fasting days from time to time. And special traditions grow up around them, to honor both the feast and the fast. We eat fish...
February 15, 2017
We had our house blessed on Saturday. For most Orthodox Christians, the house blessing is an annual event. Some time between Theophany and the beginning of Lent, your priest comes to your home. There are prayers at your icon corner. Then the family and the priest...