On the feast of the repose of St. Cyril, Equal to the Apostles, this website officially went live after several months of preparation. There is still much in store that I hope will be of service to the Church and to Orthodox Christians everywhere.
Before I discuss the broader vision I have for this website in a later post, I would like to explain why this website exists, and why now.
I would not venture to assign a precise percentage to this, but it is at least unobjectionable to say that what we, as Orthodox Christians, ought to do on a daily basis significantly shapes our lives in every other chronological sphere of the liturgical calendar. Yet it is precisely at the level of the daily, I suspect, that so many of us struggle to find consistency and balance with the rest of what we love in our tradition.
Simply put, we might more easily find gladness in the yearly feasts of the Nativity or Great and Holy Pascha, the Divine Liturgy, or even the weekly fast days than in the Church’s daily cycle. The explanation might be, if for no other reason, that it is the daily in which we are caught up: the bustle of ordinary, modern life.
For each day of the year, the Church has assigned readings of the Holy Scriptures with a significance that is tied directly to the day’s place in the liturgical calendar. The readings that we hear at the Divine Liturgy are a part of this daily cycle.
Similarly, each day there are saints that we strive to remember, to venerate, and to entreat for our salvation. For those of us in privileged countries, it is more likely that we own Bibles; we could continue the daily cycle of readings if so desired, with God’s help. But how many of us with that same privilege regularly read the saints, let alone know where to find them in English?
My goal is to provide the most comprehensive and user-friendly directory of Eastern Orthodox saints’ works in English, whose purpose is to promote daily immersion in the apostolic tradition. By daily immersion, we can hope to receive instruction in the faith and the care of our souls from the saints, who are our only true educators.
As St. Justin Popovich says:
Education (enlightenment) is simply the projection of sanctity, the radiation of light; the saint shines and, thereby, enlightens and sanctifies. Education is entirely conditioned by sanctity; only a saint can be a true educator and enlightener. Without the saints, there can be no enlighteners; without holiness, there can be no education; without enlightenment there can be no sanctification. Sanctity is sanctity only by divine light. True enlightenment is simply the radiation of holiness; only the saints are truly enlightened and sanctified, for they have poured out the divine light over all their being by the practice of the evangelical virtues and have thereby purged themselves of all the darkness of sin and vice. Evangelical sanctity, evangelical righteousness, lives and breathes, radiates and acts by light. In sanctifying, it at the same time illumines and enlightens.
—Humanistic and Theanthropic Education,” in Man and the God-Man
May the enlightenment of the saints guide us toward deification.
