The Holy Priest-Martyrs and Bishops of Cherson Basil, Ephrem, Capiton, Eugene, Etherius and Others (284-305); Passing into Eternal Life (1935) of Blessed Leonid Fedorov, Exarch of the Russian Catholic Church, and Martyr
Isaiah 4:2-5:6; Genesis 3:21-4:7; Proverbs 3:34-4:22
Great Fast Day 8. Abstention from meat and foods that contain meat. According to liturgical prescriptions, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated today.
Read Proverbs 3:34-4:22
Welcome to the second week of the Great Fast. I certainly hope that the first went by well and will assume that you were successful, with God’s grace, to keep the ascetical practices that you embraced. May we meet this second week again with a joyful step and with fortitude and integrity so that our practices, in the light of the Lord’s mercy and compassion, would lead to liberation of enslavement to our sins.
We may ask for the wisdom of the Lord to grant us His holy wisdom. Our expectation may be that He just drop it from heaven. However, it us usually granted to us through the people we already know or those we come to know. Today’s ready from Proverbs makes it clear that our Lord grants us wisdom through our parents, and that we should be attentive to what they have to share with us. As I get older, I remember moments of my father giving me words of wisdom in my teenage years, rejecting it, and then finding it most useful later in life. (Thanks be to God for memory!)
More importantly, though, is to be attentive, to be watchful, to all the various sources through which the Lord will speak.
Keep your heart with all watchfulness,
For from these words are the issues of life.