DID YOU COME TO CHURCH this morning at 10 am and discover the sermon had already been preached, and the Liturgy of the Faithful was well underway? You musta forgot to set your clocks ahead one hour, cuz DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME began this morning and it was already, in fact, 11 am when you came to Church! Oh well! You won’t miss coffee hour!

THE SUNDAY OF ORTHODOXY is this morning. We celebrate the restoration of icons, essential to Orthodox worship because they proclaim the Incarnation of God the WORD from the Holy Virgin.

BRING A FAVORITE ICON from home to Church this morning. We’ll process with our icons outside [looks like weather will be permitting], at the conclusion of the Divine Liturgy – icons carrying icons of the Icon of the invisible God, Jesus Christ [Col 1.15], proclaiming to the world that our primary substance is personal communion that lives and moves and has its being in the Personal Communion of the Holy Trinity – because our primary substance is our having been made in the Icon of God, the Icon that is Christ, the Wisdom and Power and Knowledge of God, who in these last days, became flesh as the Son of Man of the Holy Virgin Theotokos [Mother of God].

WE SERVE THE DIVINE LITURGY OF ST BASIL this morning, and on the next four Sundays of Great Lent.  St Basil’s Liturgy is the same as the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom; but some of the prayers are longer.

READERS’ WORKSHOP, Part 2, led by Peter & Susanna, on the Vigil and the Divine Liturgy happens this Saturday, Mar 15 at 10 am after the 9 am Memorial Divine Liturgy.

BAPTISM OF CLEMENTINE MICHELLE Peterson is on Sunday, March 30. Baptismal Divine Liturgy begins at 9 am.

RECEPTION of Catechumens. We look forward to receiving through Baptism and Chrismation Shari Burkowske, Nick Peters, and Meer Opiew, and through Chrismation, Marizo Meehleib on Lazarus Saturday.

THOSE BEING RECEIVED into the Church this Lenten season, and their sponsors, please meet with Fr Paul and Mother Nancy this morning toward the end of coffee hour.

ST HERMAN’s Book Club meets next on Saturday, April 5, at 9 am, before the Memorial Divine Liturgy.  

LENTEN STORY CIRCLE during Coffee Hour this morning during Coffee Hour. Sonia will tell a story of a saint; and, there will be another service project for the children (and any adults interested in participating).

PRE-SANCTIFIED LITURGY is served during the weeks of Great Lent. (Because of Lent’s penitential character, the Divine Liturgy is not served during the weeks of Great Lent.) The Host for the Pre-Sanctified Liturgy is consecrated at the Proskomedia before the Divine Liturgy of the Sunday before; hence, the service is called the pre-Sanctified Liturgy.

PRE-SANCTIFIED POTLUCK follows the Pre-Sanctified Liturgies served on Wed and Fri evenings during Great Lent. Look for a sign-up sheet on the bulletin board downstairs that shows what dishes you can bring for the Lenten Potluck.

CONFESSIONS DURING GREAT LENT. Great Lent is when each of the faithful participate in the sacrament of confession in preparation for Holy Pascha. Please give your confession before Lazarus Saturday. A sign-up schedule for confessions is posted on the bulletin board downstairs to help us distribute our confessions evenly throughout Great Lent, so that we’re not all waiting until the last week! Confession times are available before each service of Great Lent.

ST HERMAN’S CATECHISM resumes on Saturday, March 22, from 11 – 1230 pm, after the Memorial Divine Liturgy. No Catechism Class the next two Saturdays (Mar 8 & 15).

ST HERMAN’S PARISH SCHOOL OF ORTHODOX THEOLOGY holds its next class on Tuesday evening, Mar 18 from 7 – 830 pm. Fr Paul will finish his reader’s digest version of The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy.

LENTEN SUNDAY VESPERS are served this afternoon at St Mary’s Cathedral (OCA) at 5 pm. The MEOCCA Choir gathers for rehearsal at 4 pm at the Cathedral. All are welcome to come sing in the MEOCCA Choir if they come to the rehearsals.

ST GEORGE ANTIOCHIAN Orthodox Church hosts a series of presentations by Dr. Jeannie Constantinou on March 28-29. All are welcome and encouraged to come!

man’s personal relationship to a personal god

the LORD said to pontius pilate: ‘For this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.’

‘What is truth?’ queried Pilate sceptically, and, convinced that there was no answer to that question, he did not stay for one, even from Christ, but went out again to the Jews.

Pilate was right. To the question, What is truth? there is no answer if we mean the ultimate truth, the foundation of the world’s whole existence. But if Pilate had had in mind the Original Truth or the Truth of Truths, and had phrased his question as it should have been phrased – if he had asked, ‘Who is truth?’ – he would have received the answer, ‘I am the truth,’ which is what the LORD, in the foreknowledge of Pilate’s question, had said to His beloved disciples a few hours before at the Last Supper, and through them to the world at large.

Science and philosophy ask themselves: What is truth? while genuine Christian religious consciousness is always directed toward the truth that is Who.

Scientists and philosophers often look upon Christians as ill-founded dreamers, while considering that they themselves stand on sure ground, which is why they call themselves positivists. Strangely, they do not understand the full negative extent of their What’. They do not understand that real truth, absolute Truth can only be ‘Who’, and never ‘What’, because Truth is no abstract formula or idea but Life itself.

What, indeed, could be more abstract or more negative than truth in the form of ‘what’? This great paradox is seen all through the history of mankind since Adam’s fall. Bewitched by its own powers of reasonings, humanity lives in a sort of vertigo, so that not only do ‘positive’ science and philosophy set themselves, like Pilate, the question What is truth? but even in the religious life of mankind the same radical misconception is to be observed: the continual search for truth as what. Reason supposes that once this sought after truth is found man will become master of magic powers and free arbiter of existence.

The truth that is Who cannot be obtained through the exertions of human reason. God as Who is only made known through a communion in being, that is, through the Holy Spirit. The LORD himself declared:

‘If a man love me, he will keep my words; and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our abode with him. The Comforter, which is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things.

Archimandrite Sophrony, Monk of Mt Athos, pp. 78-79