Fasting sends our prayer to heaven, giving it as if wings.

—St. Basil the Great

“I have humbled my soul with fasting”, says David the Psalmist. The goal of every Christian is to prepare his soul for eternity, for life with the Lord; because we should be trying to humble our souls, to calm the passions, but the passions can only be extinguished with fasting and prayer. Humility is the most important element for the salvation of the soul. Everything else—ascetic labors, fasting, prayer, prostrations—these are the means, the way by which the soul approaches humility.

The first week of the Holy Forty Days of Lent , in the words of our pious ancestors and all Orthodox Christians, is called the dawn of abstinence, the week of purity. This week the Church convinces its children to come out of that sinful state into which the whole human race fell and lost paradise through our first parents’ lack of restraint, and which each of us only increases through our own sins; to come out by the path of faith, prayer, humility, and God-pleasing fasting.

Sanctity of Life Sunday 2018

Archpastoral Message of His Beatitude, Metropolitan Tikhon

January 21, 2018

To the honorable Clergy, venerable Monastics, and pious Faithful of the Orthodox Church in America,

My beloved brothers and sisters in Christ:

Because of inclement weather, the following services are cancelled:
 - 1/17/18 7:00p Vespers
 - 1/18/18 8:00a Divine Liturgy

Here is the service schedule for Saint Mary of Egypt during this Nativity season