To the Beloved Clergy and Orthodox Christians of our Holy Metropolia
Most Reverend Fathers,
Beloved Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
The Orthodox Church has dedicated the first Sunday of the Fast of Holy Pascha to the victory of the Orthodox Faith over heresies. This Sunday is called The Sunday of Orthodoxy, and we are all invited to reflect upon and deepen our understanding of this word, Orthodoxy.
According to the translation from Greek, the word orthodoxy means right faith or right worship of God. This means that this word speaks of the way we confess our faith about God, but also of the way we glorify God. Orthodoxy means to believe rightly, not in something but in Someone, in Christ as the true God revealed to the world; and it means right worship, not of something abstract, but of the God Who exists in Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
However, the Orthodox Church does not only possess the true teaching about Christ, but it has Christ Himself as Head of the Church, who gives Himself to all its members, the Faithful. The knowledge of the truth is thus life, and not simply an intellectual act. The Savior Himself says it in His High-Priestly Prayer, “And this is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent” (John 17:3). Thus, life as knowledge of the truth is fulfilled in the personal relationship between the believer and the Fountain of Truth, Christ, through prayer. From its beginning the Church has expressed this truth: the law of faith (lex credendi) finds its most perfect expression in the law of prayer (lex orandi). Orthodoxy is the truth faith which is most fully expressed in true prayer. Prayer is the voice of the person who seeks God, the voice which comes out of the depths of our being when we seek the One who can reveal to us the purpose of this life. Prayer is a giving of ourselves to God, which is evident in the communal prayer which culminates in the Divine Liturgy. In the Divine Liturgy we bring ourselves and we ask for Christ, who can change our nature in accordance with His image, the true image of God. Through prayer and through communion with the Body and Blood of the Lord, our fractured being receives the power to be put back together and soothed. In prayer, the mind is united with the heart and the entire being finds again its original unity with God and with the world.
There could be no more appropriate thought that I could bring to our priests and believers on this Sunday of Orthodoxy than that we believe rightly and verify our faith through right prayer. And to this thought I add another: let us go through the Lenten season with this right prayer, which will bring us the peace of Christ during this period of preparation for the Feast of the Lord’s Resurrection.
† Metropolitan Nicolae