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His Holiness Pope Shenouda III
Pope of Alexandria & Patriarch of the See of St. Mark
-An excerpt from His Holiness' book Words of Spiritual Benefit. Revised from the
original for translation and grammar.
To have a powerful effect on your spiritual life during Lent, you need to follow certain exercises.
These exercises, when you apply them to life's situations, will help you benefit from your fast:
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To exercise giving up a specific sin, from the sins that prevail upon you, and which is repeated in many of your confessions.
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To
exercise learning some Psalms from the Agpeya. You may choose one or
two Psalms from each of the seven prayers, especially the Psalms that
leave an effect on you.
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To exercise learning the Bible readings
of the different hours, divide them into parts, analyse them, knowing
that for each prayer there are three or six parts.
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To exercise the mental prayer of what you have learned. You may pray during work, on the road, while with people or at any time.
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Use
these prayers, Psalms and Bible readings as a sphere for contemplation,
to enable yourself to pray them with depth and understanding.
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To
exercise spiritual readings: either by reading from the Bible
regularly, with understanding and meditation, or reading the lives of
the Saints or some spiritual books, so that you gain a profitable yield
of deep readings.
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During lent, you may exercise learning the
hymns of lent and the Passion Week, and repeating them until you are
full of their spirit. The same is true of Advent.
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You may exercise a certain higher level of fasting, under the supervision of your spiritual father.
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There
are many spiritual exercises in the field of dealing with people...
such as gentleness, patience, enduring others' weaknesses, controlling
anger, using words of praise and encouragement, serving and helping
others, kindness and meekness.
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Other exercises in purity of the
heart: Such as modesty, inner peace, love of God, being satisfied
without grumbling, quietness with no disturbance, internal joy in the
spirit, faith and hope.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 07 March 2008 )
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His Holiness Pope Shenouda III
Pope of Alexandria & Patriarch of the See of St. Mark
The 2009 Papal Christmas Message.
My brethren and children in the lands of immigration, clergy
and laity.
Peace to you from the Lord and grace, with my greetings to
you during the Glorious Feast of Nativity.
Wishing you in these occasions a new holy life that is better than what
it was in the previous year.
I wish to say to you that the birth of Christ was an
annunciation of salvation, as the angel said to the shepherds "I bring you good
tidings of great joy ... for there is born to you this day ... a Saviour, who is
Christ the Lord." (Luke 2:10-11) Therefore,
in His birth, His name was called Jesus, for He will save His people from their
sins.
This salvation was promised by the Lord since the beginning
of creation, when God promised our mother Eve that her offspring will crush the
head of the serpent (that is, Satan). This
matter was to be fulfilled through the Redemption. People needed to be prepared to accept the
thought of redemption. This needed time
and passed through stages:
The first matter was that sin revealed to man his nakedness. For God to cover this nakedness, He saw that
the fig leaves were insufficient, so He made for them tunics of skin and
clothed them with these. Of course, these
tunics of skin were a result of a sacrifice.
Thus man knew that sin causes nakedness, and that sacrifice results in
covering.
After this, people learnt about the offering of sacrifices, and
the first sacrifice was the one offered by Abel from the firstborn of his flock
and of their fat. Sacrifices and
offerings continued to be presented and they were for God alone, consumed by
fire as a sign of pleasing God's heart.
They learned to offer the ‘Passover,' and by the sprinkling
of its blood on their doors, they were saved from death according to the saying
of the Lord "...and when I see the blood, I will pass over you..." (Exodus 12:13) The Passover was a symbol of the transfer
from death to life, as it also symbolizes the Lord Christ according to the
writings of Paul the Apostle (I Corinthians 5:7). Through the Passover, they knew the meaning
of redemption, that is, "the innocent dies for the guilty." Then the offerings were explained to them in
the Book of Leviticus; so they used to place their hands upon the sacrifice to
indicate that this sacrifice is on their behalf, and confess their sins over its
head to indicate that the sacrifice carries these sins for them. The summarized concept of the offering was
that an innocent being without sin, carries the sin of the guilty one and dies
instead of them. And this is Redemption. Many generations passed, and this concept was
fixed in their minds, that the Redeemer would die for them carrying their sins. They understood that He must be a Man, for the
judgment of death that we inherited was issued against man.
What was left was the preparation of the pure Virgin from
whom the Redeemer was to be born according to the prophecy of Isaiah (7:14). It was necessary that she is a humble person,
able to bear this glory that God is born from her without her heart being
elevated. It was also to prepare that
righteous elderly man who would protect and look after the Virgin Mary, and to
live with her as a Virgin whose pregnancy was from the Holy Spirit.
Then it was a must to prepare ‘the angel' who will prepare
the way before the Redeemer by returning people to repentance and preparing
them by baptism. Then to prepare the
apostles who will spread the faith in the Redeemer.
Then it was necessary to set up the time that all these
preparations would be fulfilled together.
This is what the Apostle called "the fullness of time." (Galatians 4:4) Then it was necessary that a universal
language be widespread by which evangelism can be fulfilled in all parts of the
lands. This was the Greek language, to
which the Old Testament was translated in the Septuagint.
Thus, the fullness of time came in which the Lord Christ was
Incarnate from the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit; and He was crucified for us
carrying our sins, died for us and resurrected.
May the Feast of Nativity be joyous, a blessing and a
renewal of life to all. Be well in the
Lord, absolved from His Holy Spirit.
(Signed)
His Holiness Pope Shenouda III
January 2009
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 06 January 2010 )
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His Holiness Pope Shenouda III
Pope of Alexandria & Patriarch of the See of St. Mark
-The 2006 Papal Christmas Message.
Peace on the Feast of the Nativity.
We
congratulate you my brethren on the Feast of the Nativity of Christ, to
Him be all Glory. We hope for you all on this Feast a joyous year,
blessed by God, and that He may bless the whole world.
And on
the Feast of the Nativity of Christ, we remember among its many
meanings that the angels sang saying, “Glory to God in the highest and
on earth peace and goodwill towards men.” (Lk 2:14) Today, we hope that
our contemplation will be on peace, which God wills for Earth,
especially as the world and every person needs peace.
There are three types of peace which each person needs: peace with God, peace with people, and peace of heart.
Peace
with God is that a person lives a life of righteousness and stays far
from all sin and evil. Therefore sin is distance from God, and enmity
from God and disobedience of His commandments. If man disobeys his God,
man looses his peace.
He
who lives in peace with God has a pure heart. And when we speak of
peace with God and of purity of heart, we do not imply that man should
live in righteousness against his will, but rather, true goodness is
what the heart seeks willingly, not that which is imposed on him.
He
who lives in peace with God will naturally live in peace with others,
as he does not struggle with others, nor do others struggle with him,
he will not fear others, but love them.
We
pray that peace will spread among people and that they may live far
from aggression, not encroaching on or abusing others. The peaceful
person does not encroach on others, and if he is abused by another,
bears with patience, and pardons and forgives. The Lord Jesus commands
peace and tolerance, and the Holy Bible says, “Do not be overcome by
evil, but overcome evil with good,” and also “if your enemy is hungry,
feed him; and if he is thirsty, give him a drink.”
(Rom. 12:20-21).
When
your relationship with God is shaken, you lose your inner peace, and if
lusts and desires overcome you, you also lose your inner peace. Thus to
live in peace, do not worry about tomorrow.
If
you place your life in your own hands, you will be troubled; and if you
place your life in the hands of others, you will be troubled even more;
but if you believe that it is in the hands of God, you will find rest.
Those
who believe in God’s planning for their lives, are not troubled, but
live continually with inner peace, which fills their hearts. The person
with peace of heart, does not fear evil, for he says to the Lord as
David the Prophet says, “If I walk in the valley of the shadow of
death, I will fear no evil.” (Ps 23:4)
The
faithful person lives in peace, for God exists and acts and manages
all, and is the protector and the helper. However, the one who has lost
peace, even imagines difficulties when they do not exist, and even
though there is Divine power surrounding him, he does not recognize it,
and that is his great crisis.
If
you have an accepted prayer, you shall live in peace, and you will feel
that since you have placed your troubles in prayer before God, and that
He has received your case and surrounds it with His abundant mercies,
He will lift your sufferings.
And
in the beginning of this new year, we pray that God intervenes and
solves the problems of individuals and nations, even if they seem
complicated and unsolvable. “For that which is impossible with men, is
possible with God.”
May this year be a blessed one,
Pope Shenouda III
January 7, 2006
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 03 January 2009 )
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