Dear Fellow Parishioners,

I am honored to have the privilege of leading, for the seventeenth time, our parish in the celebration of our Lord’s Passion and Anastasis.

Jesus Christ’s Passion is a story of death and resurrection. As such, it is one that has been reënacted and relived countless times in the lives of Christians who have been raised from spiritual death by “putting on Christ” and placing their faith in His promise of eternal life.

Nowhere is this more dramatically and poignantly portrayed than in the life of Mary of Egypt, whose life the Church celebrates both on April 1 and on the Fifth Sunday of Lent. I enclose her inspiring story with this UPDATE issue for your spiritual edification. You would do very well to take the time to read it as part of your Lenten discipline.

Mary of Egypt’s story is shocking, even in light of the depravity that exists in today’s world. It’s the story of a runaway who, like many disadvantaged and deluded youths today, shamelessly and perversely sold herself to all comers. For, as yet,she did not know St. Paul’s teaching: “You were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body” (1 Cor. 6:20) and how, in the same letter he says: “You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men” (1 Cor. 7:23).

Though the young, unrepentant Mary, was alive physically — she was nonetheless spiritually dead. The number of years she had left to live — even her alluring, voluptuous beauty — was irrelevant. She was foul and rotten within and “dead as a doornail” in every way that counts.

But through the Cross’ power and Theotokos’ prayers, even Mary, the depraved runaway, was resurrected — just as literally as Jesus raised Lazaros or as Jesus Himself emerged from His own Tomb.

But wasn’t Mary’s “epiphany” on the Feast of Exaltation of the Cross enough? Evidently not. Although she surely could have returned to her family and her old, pre-runaway life, she chose instead to go into the desert wilderness and to spend a lifetime repenting for her misdeeds and asking for the Lord’s mercy.

Most have never sunk to Mary of Egypt’s nadir of sin, depravity and perversion. Does that mean her story has no bearing on our own lives?

Absolutely not! We’ve nominally committed our lives to Christ, but we’ve all “missed the mark” when it comes to witnessing for Christ (the meaning of αμαρτία, Greek for sin.) So are we any better than those who literally sell their bodies on the street? Sin is sin. We either ARE or AREN’T martyrs (μάρτυρες, witnesses) or confessors for Christ — living, breathing advertisements for His Church. Which one of us can say we advertise Christ in all we say and do — even unto the point of death?

During the remainder of Lent and Holy Week, we must recreate in ourselves the conversion of Mary of Egypt. This is why on the 5th Sunday of Lent our Church holds her up as an example of what must happen to us, if we have any hope of appropriating the salvation that Jesus Christ offers to us through His Life-giving Passion and Anastasis.

The cover of this year’s Holy Week schedule features a photo of an infant being immersed in the baptismal font. It reminds us that Lent is the time for all of us to return to the state of rebirth, the state of being created anew in our Creator’s image, those beautiful and unblemished infants we all were before we allowed ourselves to be sullied by temptation and sin.

Join us as we apprehend the wisdom the palindrome inscribed beneath our choir loft — ΝΙΨΟΝΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑΜΗΜΟΝΑΝΟΨΙΝ (Wash your sins, not only your face.) Let’s wash our sins down the drain through that same continual lifetime of repentance experienced by Mary and stand side by side — as did Mary and Zosimos in the desert — and together experience the promise, joy and love of eternal life.

Καλή Ανάσταση!