My dear brothers,
On September 1st, our Holy Church celebrates the beginning of the “Indictus”, that is, the beginning of the new Ecclesiastical Year.
The “New Year” of our Church is linked to the starting point of the earthly teaching of Our Lord Jesus Christ and to the renewal of the fertility of the earth.
Therefore, as Christians, we are called to praise and thank the Giver God for the beautiful gift of His creation and for all His blessings. We should beg and plead with Him to enlighten our minds so that we may spend the new church year with repentance, with love, with spiritual purity and a good conscience.
Christ opens the doors of the new year to us and invites us all to follow him, to become participants in his eternal life.
The beginning of the new ecclesiastical year must go hand in hand with a new beginning. With a new personal beginning, with more faith and more prayer, which will have as its goal our union with God.
In our time, we constantly witness destructive wars and bloody conflicts between peoples and cultures, in the name of the supposed preservation of peace, which seem to have no end.
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza continue to escalate, threatening to destabilize the entire region.
People are being killed every day in our neighborhood, and we are helpless to help, content to watch tragic and heartbreaking images on television.
We constantly refer to human rights, at the same time that they are violated in the worst way.
As humans, we have lost our purpose. We have lost our humanity.
We move away from God, we separate ourselves from our neighbors, and we become selfish and egoistic.
Now we live alone.
Loneliness can only be cured if we heal our relationship with the Source of Life.
Therefore, in this constant solitude, there is a great need for prayer. There is a great need to return to the arms of our God and to the maternal care of our Church, where there is true joy, hope and salvation.
Happy and blessed New Year of the Church!
† The Nea Ionia, Philadelphia.
Heraklion and Chalcedon
Gabriel