Our Venerable Father David of Thessalonica; Blessed Hieromartyr Andrii Ishchak, Priest; Blessed Hieromartyr Mykola Konrad, Priest, and the Blessed Martyr Volodymyr Pryjma, Cantor.
Apostle’s Fast. Abstention from meat and foods that contain these ingredients.
Romans 16:1-16; Matthew 13:3-9.
Read Romans 16:1-16
When St. Paul writes to the Romans, he slips in a line that’s easy to rush past: “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” It sounds almost quaint at first, a relic of another era. But sit with it for a moment. This isn’t a pleasantry tucked at the end of a letter. It’s him insisting that love has to show up somewhere: in a gesture, or an actual human exchange. Faith isn’t meant to stay locked inside us, private. It is designed to move outward, to become something another person can actually encounter.
That tension between what we’re capable of and how we treat each other is exactly what Martin Luther King Jr. named in his Nobel Peace Prize address. He marveled that modern humanity had learned to fly like birds and swim like fish, yet still hadn’t figured out the simple art of living together as brothers. We’ve conquered distance and speed and power. Communion, though, still escapes us.
Psychologist Rollo May noticed something similar from a completely different angle. In Man’s Search for Himself, he draws on Dr. Walter Cannon’s research into what’s sometimes called “voodoo death. ” That refers to cases where people in certain communities, once cast out and treated as though they no longer existed, would literally wither and die. Quite a haunting image. We don’t live on bread alone, nor by our own wits. We live, in part, on being recognized, on belonging somewhere. We live on being loved.
All of which makes Paul’s instruction less mystical and more urgent. Someone near you right now may be quietly withering, not dramatically so, but slowly receding into death through neglect. A real greeting, a genuine smile, a phone call returned, a word of thanks, a small visit, a note, a promise to pray: any of these can be a holy kiss as St. Paul referred to. It doesn’t have to be grand, but it must be authentic. The only question worth sitting with today is: who in my life needs to know they haven’t been forgotten? Let your lips answer that question.