In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

My beloved children in the Lord,

Today, on the day of the resurrection of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ, we also honor our most venerable father Herman on the day of his glorification. And on this same day, in obedience to the directive of the Holy Synod, we will shortly offer a Service of Thanksgiving for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of this nation’s founding. Before we do, let us spend a few moments with St. Herman, our patron and wonderworker, because he has something particular to teach us about what kind of thanksgiving we are about to offer.

Saint Herman’s own life very nearly spans the period in which this republic came into being and it may be worth remembering that both timelines were happening in the very same years, one in full view of history and the other hidden almost entirely from it.

In 1776, in the year the colonies declared their independence, the young Herman, who would have been in his early 20’s, had already given his life to prayer in a monastery near St. Petersburg.

Two years later, while Washington’s army was enduring its long winter encampments in the field, Saint Herman entered the Valaam Monastery on Lake Ladoga, which would become the school of silence that would form him for the rest of his life.

When delegates gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft a Constitution, Saint Herman was already known among his brothers at Valaam for slipping away into the forest, alone, for days of unseen prayer.

In September of 1794, the year our first President began his second term, Herman and seven companions from Valaam stepped off a ship onto the shore of Kodiak Island, and Orthodox prayer was raised on this continent for the first time.

Between 1811 and 1818, while a young nation fought a second time for its survival, Herman withdrew to a small island he called New Valaam — to a hut, a garden, and a life of hidden service to orphans and to the poor.

And in the winter of 1836, in the year this nation elected its eighth President, an old monk, alone on that same small island, entered into eternal life exactly as he had lived it: unseen, unnoticed, known to almost no one but God.

We should not draw any straight line between these two histories. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that, while a nation was being built in full public view — through debates, and battles, and declarations that fill our history books to this day — there was, at the very same time, another kind of building going on, hidden, silent, known only to heaven. And it is that hidden building, not the visible one, that gave us our patron saint. It remains, still, the pattern offered to us for how we are to live.

We might wonder why we gather today, in this Cathedral, so many thousand miles from Kodiak, to honor a man who died in utter obscurity nearly two centuries ago.  Few of our American saints headline the history books, but St. Herman is perhaps, to the eyes of the world, the very least of them. But, as the Lord says, the least among us shall be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. St. Herman was constantly becoming less, reducing himself, humbling himself, both through service to the Alaskan natives and Russian settlers and through unrelenting prayer and asceticism. As we hear in a supplicatory canon written in his honor:

“In a wilderness cell thy soul suffered the birth pangs of holiness, O father, and only angels attended at thy struggles in Christ. Now in my mind I run to thy island hermitage, seeking shelter . . .”

Saint Herman’s holiness was cultivated in a secret. Like a sapling carefully sheltered against the ice and wind, like a plant kept in a secret garden, behind a wall, lovingly tended — so was the soul of St. Herman, carefully guarded by silence and asceticism during the days of his life. This monastic missionary had a true love for people, but that love for people was founded in a surpassing love for God the Savior.

This is what we should carry with us into the prayer we are about to offer. As we give thanks today for two hundred and fifty years of freedom in this land, let us remember that the deepest thanksgiving a Christian can offer is not measured in monuments or milestones, but in the hidden labor of a humbled heart. St. Herman built nothing the world would call great. He built a hut, a garden, a school for orphans, and a life of prayer that almost no one witnessed but God — and it is that hidden greatness which the Church has canonized, and which we now ask him to help us imitate.

Let us therefore faithfully follow St. Herman’s path of humility, self-abnegation, asceticism, unconditional love for God, openness to his neighbor in every need, preaching and living the Gospel commandments in all circumstances. If we do so, we will be offering the saint the greatest honor that our mortal nature can manage. And, in honoring St. Herman, we also honor the Christ the Savior, who lives in him and is glorious and wonderful in him.

Let us therefore become the least—reduced and humbled through asceticism, loving God above all, open to our neighbor’s needs, setting aside superficial kindness and slowly learning the true and Christ-like love and concern that we learn about in St. Herman’s life and that we encounter when we pray to him. And let us maintain this attitude as we turn to offer our own thanksgiving to God for this nation, this land, and every soul within it.

Through the prayers of our venerable father Herman, wonderworker of all America, may Christ our God have mercy on us and save us.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

My beloved children in the Lord – In the rather short reading from the Gospel of Saint Matthew appointed for today, we heard how, departing from a certain region, Jesus came near the Sea of Galilee, went up into a mountain, and sat down there. And great multitudes came to Him — bringing with them the lame, the blind, the mute, the maimed, and many others — and they laid them down at His feet, and He healed them. Seeing these miraculous healings, the multitude marveled, and glorified the God of Israel.

The movements in this account are similar to the one we hear during the Paschal season, on the Sunday of the Paralytic.  That account, which offers up the miraculous healing on the Sabbath of the paralytic by our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ, is longer but the actual moment of healing is equally brief: the Lord says to the paralytic: “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” And immediately, we are told, the man was made well, took up his bed, and walked.

In today’s Gospel, the multitude bring the many broken people and simply lay them down at the feet of the Lord and, as we are told “He healed them.” There is a simplicity to these movements should not go unnoticed. In fact, it is striking to note what that crowd, in this case, did not do. They did not come to the Lord with an argument, or with a plan for how healing ought to work, or a theory about what was wrong with those who were ill. They came with an attitude of humility, the only way those who are desperate can come — carrying their own broken bodies, and the broken bodies of people they love, and they simply laid them down. As we should all do, they brought forward all their affliction with honesty but with quiet hope.

But in both of these simple accounts, there is a lot of activity surrounding the brief moments of healing: in the case of the paralytic, there are the years of patient waiting at the pool that this man endured, hoping for healing; there is the fact of his isolation, having no man to help put him into the water; there is the complicated ritual followed by all those who waited for the moving of the water by the angel. Afterwards, there is the drama raised up by those who accused the Lord of breaking the Sabbath.

One can imagine that there is a similar level of activity in the lives of all those who approach the Lord, both those who were suffering and broken and those who cared for them and brought them to the feet of Christ.

In all this activity, there is a reminder to all of us, as we experience the complexity and difficulty of our modern existence, and that reminder is found in the words that conclude both of these accounts. In the case of the Paralytic, we hear that: The man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. And today, the multitudes received not only healing of their bodies but worship, because we are told that they glorified the God of Israel.

Christ, the one whose name is made known and the one to whom glory is offered, is the center and the foundation of our lives, both in times of joy and in times of sorrow, in health and in sickness, when we are hopeful and when are despairing. It is good for us to remember this, that is to remember Jesus Christ, the one who makes us well, and not to be distracted by the loud voices of this world that remind us constantly of the brokenness of that world.

We certainly know of the brokenness of the world. We know that ancestral sin has brought in three things: suffering, corruption and sickness, and finally death. All these realities are not new to us. But the ultimate cause of suffering, corruption, and death is the separation from God that was first brought about by Adam and Eve through their sin, that is from the loss of grace that came about by their separation from God.

Today’s Gospel account is therefore an encouragement to all of us who live in this world, an encouragement to continually reach for the light of Christ, by which we are guided back to wholeness. It is the light of the resurrection that illumines the darkest regions of the world but also the darkest parts of our own hearts. And when we see the dark parts of our hearts, we do not despair but rather see more clearly the direction we need to take. And that direction is towards the Lord who makes us well, who heals our brokenness, and dispels our paralysis.

In the most fundamental way, the simple Gospel reading we heard today provides us with an image what it means to hand the faith to those who come after us. The multitude on the mountain did not glorify God because their situation had been explained to them. They glorified Him because their brokenness had been carried to Him, and He had not turned it away.

We find a parallel simple image in today’s Epistle. Saint Paul, writing to a congregation full of its own knowledge and its own certainties, says something quite plain: “Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies.” Knowledge is not the enemy. The Apostle does not tell us to stop learning, stop discerning, stop building the structures our life together requires. But he is clear that knowledge held without love does not build the Church. It only inflates the one who holds it. Even more clearly, the Apostle reminds us of this truth: “If anyone loves God, this one is known by him.”

This is a gentle reminder to us that often the complexities we are presented with in life are not problems to be solved but opportunities to love God so that we might be known by him, that is, receive his divine grace. And in this simple movement is where healing begins and where worship flows forth.

May we all persevere with the patience of the lame, the blind, the mute, the maimed, who were brought to the feet of the Lord today. And may we kindle in our hearts the love of those who carried them, knowing he himself, the one who trampled down death by his own voluntary death, always remains the divine physician who brings healing to all who strive to follow him. And in so doing, may we be united to him through repentance, through prayer, and through love so that we might in oneness of mind praise and worship him, together with his Father without beginning, and the most holy Spirit, both now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

Christ is in our midst!

It is a good thing to sit down together at the end of a long day — and this has been a long and full day, beginning with the celebration of the Divine Liturgy, business meetings, instructional talks, lunch with your clergy wives, an open floor with you this afternoon, and now, finally, a chance simply to eat. I am grateful to Archbishop Irénée and to everyone who has organized this evening, and glad that our business, for a few hours at least, can rest.

This evening has been styled a banquet, and it is worth pausing on that word for a moment. Trace it back far enough — through the French banquet, the Italian banchetto, the Old High German bank — and in every case you arrive at the same humble origin: a bench, un banc. A banquet, properly speaking, was not a meal at separate tables, but a meal taken together on a single long bench. Whatever our actual seating arrangement tonight, that is the older and better sense of the word, and it is the one I would like us to keep in mind: a banquet is what happens when people do not eat apart from one another.

There is something fitting in that, for a week built around the theme of generation to generation — because a bench, unlike a chair, does not really allow you to sit apart by age or seniority. The old and the young end up shoulder to shoulder on it, whether they planned to or not. It is, I think, no accident that in most traditional icons of the Mystical Supper, the Apostles are shown gathered around the Lord not in individual chairs, but on a bench — one continuous seat, one company, undivided.

Which brings me to a second table, further back than that one — the wilderness, where our theme’s own psalm spends a good deal of time talking about food. The psalmist recalls Israel fed, astonishingly, by God himself: “He had commanded the clouds from above, and opened the doors of heaven, and had rained down manna upon them to eat… man did eat angels’ food.” And yet the psalm does not let that gift go unquestioned — it also recalls how quickly the people grumbled and forgot what had been done for them. Which is exactly why the psalm insists, before and after that story, that this must not happen again: that what God has done must be told, deliberately, to the generation that did not see it, “that they might set their hope in God, and not forget his works.” The manna was a gift. The telling of it was a task.

I do not think it is a coincidence that when the Church wanted a word for how she hands down her most central act of worship, she reached for exactly that logic. Saint Paul, writing of the meal Christ gave us the night before He suffered, does not say he invented or improved upon it. He says: “I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you.” Received and delivered — that is the whole of tradition in two words, and Paul uses it about a meal, given at that same long bench the icons remember.

On a fundamental level, the Church has never really handed down bare information. She has handed down a table — from the manna in the wilderness, to the bread and cup Christ gave His disciples, to the Divine Liturgy we will serve together before this Assembly ends. God feeds His people first, and only afterward asks them to tell the story of having been fed.

Which brings me, at last, back to tonight. This is a smaller and more ordinary bench than either of those — but not, I think, unrelated to them. We have sat together, we have eaten, and some of us will go home and tell others what happened at this gathering: what we heard, what troubled us, what gave us hope. That, too, is a small instance of the very thing our theme asks of us. It requires no pulpit and no program. It only requires that we not let the evening be forgotten.

So let us give thanks — for this meal, for this company, for the Archdiocese that has gathered us here, and for the God who, in every generation, insists on feeding His people before He asks anything else of them. And let us rise from this bench, as from every bench the Church has ever kept, with something worth telling to those who were not here to taste it themselves.

Thank you, and bon appétit to us all.

Christ is in our midst!

It is a joy to be with you this evening and to participate in the 2026 Assembly of the Archdiocese of Canada. It is hard to believe that three years have passed since I joined you in Québec but I am honored to be back with you here in Alberta. I recall very vividly my time with you in Edmonton for the 2017 Assembly. I especially enjoyed our tour of several of the rural parishes of the “holy land” and the opportunity to witness the life, history, and struggles of those communities. I count it a blessing to be back in these western regions and look forward to my time with you here in Calgary.

I am grateful to His Eminence Archbishop Irénée for his invitation and hospitality and to all of you — clergy, monastics, and faithful — who have travelled from across this vast Archdiocese to be here. Although we have already entered liturgically into tomorrow’s commemoration, I note that today, July 15, is the feast of the holy and equal-to-the-apostles Prince Vladimir — a day which also happens to be my birthday. I don’t say this to draw attention to myself, but because Saint Vladimir is, I think, one of the more fitting patrons for the work you undertake this week. Here was one man, in one generation, who received the faith and chose — freely, and at some cost — to hand it on.

Everything that has followed from that choice: a thousand years of the Church’s life among the Slavic peoples, the planting of Orthodoxy in North America, in time, the establishment of this very Archdiocese, its expansion and flourishing, including the succeeding gatherings of clergy, monastics, and faithful at events such as this assembly, and even our evening prayer this evening — all of this flows from a single act of transmission. That is no small thing to have as a birthday companion.

It is, of course, also the theme you have chosen for this Assembly: from generation to generation. The words come from Psalm 78 — a longer and, I would say, a more searching psalm than that single familiar phrase might suggest. It actually does not begin with confidence but rather with grief: the psalmist laments a people who have seen the sanctuary defiled, the city laid waste, and no one left to mourn the dead. He does not soften this but brings it honestly before God, and he asks – almost demands – to know how long this will endure.

And only then, out of that lament, comes the vow that gives you your theme: we will declare thy praise from generation to generation.

I mention this not to cast a shadow over our week together — this is meant to be, and will be, a joyful gathering — but because I think it matters what kind of promise this is. It is not the confidence of a people that are untested but rather the resolve of a people who have known loss, and who choose, still, to hand on what they have received. I suspect many of you know something of that kind of resolve already, in smaller and larger ways, in your own parishes and families. We know that it is only through the Cross that joy comes into the world and so our transmission of the faith, while it is expressed in joyful praise, is also rooted in the sobriety of the Cross.

We will have much to consider together over these next days — the wave of new faces in our churches, the work of forming them well, the burdens carried by our clergy families, and, in a very real sense, the shape of the Church’s life in this country in the years ahead. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, which has sustained us and our communities in the past, be upon this Assembly — that whatever else we do or say this week, we too might be found, in our own generation, declaring His praise. 

Thank you again for your hospitality!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
My beloved children in the Lord,

According to the Gospel we have just heard, today is “the last day, that great day of the feast.” The work that was begun at the time of the Lord’s Nativity and perfected in his Pascha has now borne its fruit.

The Spirit whom Christ promised has come. The Comforter whom Christ desired to send is poured out on all flesh. And with his coming, with his outpouring, the eschaton, the end of the world, has come upon us. We Christians are, in the words of St. Paul, those upon whom the end of the ages has come. Christ came to make sinners into saints; the years that we lived in sin are now restored to us as the years that lead us to repentance in Christ. And henceforth, anointed with the Spirit, we are empowered to live in accordance with his call to holiness.

Wherever the Spirit blows and comes to rest, there life flourishes; what is dead is made alive and fruitful. Wherever the Spirit is, there the fruits of the Resurrection are already known. Wherever the Spirit is, the end of time, the fullness of the ages, is already present, though hidden from the eyes of the world.

According to the Book of Acts, “divided tongues, as of fire” came to rest upon the disciples on the day of Pentecost. They all received the same fire—and yet the tongues were divided: each received the gifts of the Spirit suited to his particular mission and vocation. So it is with us. Each of us has received a portion of the Spirit according to our need: choir member, reader, deacon, priest, monastic, parent, child, witness for Christ in the world.

Now, this gift does two things at once, and we must hold them together. On the one hand, it fires us for our calling. On the other, it quiets us. The Holy Fathers speak of hesychia—that interior stillness which is not our own achievement but the Spirit’s gift. The flame that rested on the apostles did not agitate them; it clarified them. It burned away the noise and the fear, and left them knowing, with luminous certainty, what they were to do next. This is the gift we must ask for: not merely enthusiasm for our vocation, but the inner quiet in which vocation itself becomes unmistakable.

The life of faith is long, and it is not always luminous. There are seasons—and perhaps many of us know them—when the initial fire seems to have cooled, when the practices that once felt vivid feel merely dutiful, when we wonder whether we are making any progress at all. This is not a sign that the Spirit has departed. It may, in fact, be the very moment when the Spirit is doing his most serious work in us: stripping away the excitement and the novelty, the consolations we mistook for the substance, so that what remains is something quieter, more deeply rooted, more truly our own. The apostles themselves passed through such a season—between the Ascension and Pentecost, ten days of waiting in an upper room, not knowing exactly what was coming. The fire did not fall until they had learned to be still.

The spiritual life is not measured by what we feel, nor by what we have accomplished, nor even by the clarity with which we perceive our own progress. It is measured, if at all, by our faithfulness—our patient, humble return, again and again, to the One who called us. That return does not need to be dramatic. It only needs to be real. The tongue of flame that rested on us at our baptism and chrismation has not gone out. It burns, perhaps low, perhaps hidden—but the Holy Spirit does not abandon his dwelling. “Quench not the Spirit,” St. Paul tells us. And the surest way not to quench it is simply to remain: to stay, to pray as we can, to receive the Sacraments, to love the person in front of us—and to trust that the God who began a good work in us is faithful to complete it.

We Orthodox Christians, all of us, have received the heavenly Spirit. We each possess a divided tongue of flame. And it is our duty to cherish that flame, to let it grow into a blaze, and to share that fire with the world, spreading the Gospel of the burning love of the God-man, the Good News of his forgiveness that consumes all the power of death and sin.

To him who came to cast fire upon the earth, our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, be all glory, together with his Father, who is a consuming Fire, and the All-holy Spirit who appeared as tongues of flame. Amen.

Today Christ opens the eyes of a man born blind, and the blessedness, the happiness, of such a miraculous event seems self-evident. Yet the Pharisees react with hostility, and the formerly-blind man’s parents react with fear. What are we to make of this?

Christ says that he is the Truth, and that the truth will set us free (Jn. 14:6, 8:23). When he opens the blind man’s eyes to see the bright world that he made, the latter is no longer subject to the lies he was told, to the misconceptions that he nurtured, when once he was blind. When Christ opens his eyes, he is no longer subject to the false narratives woven by others; he sees clearly past the distortions of those Pharisees who desire to rule and control.

This is why, throughout the ages, the tyrannical authorities of oppressive regimes have hated the Christian faith. From the centuries of the Roman Empire to the decades of the Soviet Union, the petty Pharisees of the ruling ideology have feared the power of Christ and the Christian faith to open the eyes of the blind.

This is not because Christ’s kingdom is in competition with the kingdoms of this world: Christ’s kingdom is not of this world (Jn. 18:26). But when our eyes are opened, and we behold the light of the Resurrection, and we see ourselves as sons of the light and of the day, then we know that we are living for the age to come. Knowing the promise of the Resurrection, we are able to obtain to an inner freedom that no power in this world can overcome. “The kingdom of God is within you” precisely because it is unlike an earthly kingdom; one cannot say of it “Here it is” or “There it is” (Lk. 17:21).

Christ desires to open our eyes to this reality, too; he wishes that we would no longer see ourselves merely as part of this passing world. Blinded no longer by the power of sin and passions, we are called to understand our place in his eternal kingdom, and to live unbound and unburdened by the heavy-pressing chains of the lies told to us by the world, the demons, and by our own misguided and passionate thoughts.

The formerly-blind man’s confession of faith resounds with a deep power and unsurpassed peace: “Lord, I believe.” In the face of all life’s troubles and cares, let us also find strength and consolation in these words, knowing clearly who we are in Christ and to how great a salvation he has called us.

“He told me all that I ever did,” declares the Samaritan woman to her fellow residents of Sychar. All that she ever did – shouldn’t this be a source of shame and regret? After all, she has had five husbands, and the one she has now is not her husband. However, when the Lord tells her what she has done, this does not cause her to shrink back, reproached; it causes her to go to her neighbors with joy, even excitement.

This Gospel passage is an ever-timely reminder that God loves us regardless of our many sins, our ugly past, our current struggles. We may find the memory of the Samaritan woman’s liberating happiness especially encouraging whenever we prepare ourselves for the sacrament of confession. When we approach this sacrament, we are not informing God of things he does not know; rather, we are declaring what he already knows, in the presence of his priest as witness, so that we can experience the same joy and freedom that the Samaritan woman once experienced. He knows all that I ever did – and yet he has come to me in the heat of the day and granted me to recognize him as Christ, my Savior, my Lord and my God, and thus to know his unbounded divine love for me, his creature.

As we celebrate the Midfeast of Pentecost, we are reminded that the Paschal season is a movement. It is not simply a festive forty days after the Lenten fast, nor simply a lengthy celebration of Christ’s Resurrection. It is a movement from the empty tomb to the tongues of flame in the upper room, and this pause at the midpoint reminds us of that fact. Christ’s Resurrection was not the end, but a new beginning, pointing us toward life in the Spirit, the lives of the saints, the life in and of the Church.

In ancient days Jacob rolled away a stone to water the flocks, and during these days of Pascha, we contemplate how, the stone rolled away, living water flows from the tomb of Christ to water the flock of the faithful. Today, near the Sheep Gate, the paralytic waits for someone to lift him into the pool when the water is stirred, but instead the living Water stirs himself up and comes to the paralytic; Christ himself takes the initiative to rescue and heal this paralyzed man, this lame and lonely lamb.

But we notice that Christ’s healing consists precisely in loosing the man’s paralysis, so that now the former paralytic can walk on his own. Christ does not leave this man helpless, but grants him the ability he once lacked. Likewise, when we are baptized into Christ – and each time we turn again (or rather, he turns us again) to repentance and renewal of our baptism through confession of sins – we are not left helpless, either. Instead, we are imbued anew with the power of the Holy Spirit, so that we can walk, as it were, on our own two legs, doing the works God desires us to do. “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (Jn. 8:36).

On this Third Sunday of Pascha, we continue to contemplate the world-changing reality of the empty Tomb. In particular, this Sunday calls us to contemplate our role in bringing news of this reality to our fellowman. Last Sunday, Thomas Sunday, took place in the intimate setting of the sealed upper room; we saw how a single disciple, a single heart, could be changed by direct encounter with the Risen Christ. This Sunday, however, we consider the Myrrh-bearers, and how an angel commanded them to proclaim the Resurrection to the apostles. After all that we have seen and heard, how are we called to share this light, joy, peace, and hope with others? An angel brought a message to the women, the women shared it with the apostles, the apostles shared it with others, and finally that message has reached us. How shall we continue to pass this message – this all-powerful, all-transformative word of Christ’s Resurrection? – on to those whom God has placed in our lives?

We need not get carried away. “Are all apostles?” asks St. Paul rhetorically, and the implied answer is “no.” The angel, the women, the apostles: each of these had a different role in announcing the Gospel. We don’t all have to be missionaries to distant lands or street-corner evangelists. But all of us may announce the power of the Resurrection by forgiving wrongs, living in the joy of Christ’s victory, striving to conduct ourselves in accordance with the Gospel, and repenting with hope when we fail. In this way at least we can bear a meek and quiet witness to others – and to ourselves – concerning the life-changing power of Christ’s Pascha.