Second Sunday of Lent

Saints commemorated

• Ven. Gerasimus of the Jordan

  Gerasimus of the Jordan (early 5th century – 475) is one of the great fathers of the Palestinian desert, the founder of a celebrated lavra in the wilderness by the River Jordan and a contemporary and associate of Euthymius the Great. A native of Lycia in Asia Minor, he was formed as a monk in Egypt and the Thebaid before settling near the Jordan about the middle of the fifth century. Briefly drawn, in the turmoil that followed the Council of Chalcedon, into the Eutychian (Monophysite) error, he was recovered to the orthodox faith by Euthymius, whom he thereafter revered as his father in the desert. His lavra combined a coenobium for beginners with cells for the more advanced, under a rule of extreme austerity — five days a week in silent solitude on bread, dates and water, without fire or cooked food. He is loved above all for the lion he healed of a thorn and tamed, which served the monastery, was falsely suspected of theft and did penance, recovered the stolen donkey, and at last, finding its master dead, mourned and died upon his grave. He reposed in 475, shortly after Euthymius.

• Rt. Blv. Prince Daniel of Moscow

  Daniel of Moscow (1261–1303) was the first prince of Moscow and the progenitor of the line — the house of Daniel — from which came the Grand Princes and Tsars who gathered the Russian lands into a single realm. Youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, he received while still a child the small and obscure appanage of Moscow, the least of the principalities, and by a reign of rare peaceableness made it the seed of a kingdom. In an age of fratricidal wars among the Russian princes he shed as little blood as any ruler of his time, refusing to seize lands by force even in victory, and yet enlarging his inheritance — by the peaceful bequest of Pereslavl-Zalessky from a childless nephew, and by the annexation of Kolomna — so that Moscow rose from nothing to the first rank. He founded on the Moscow River the Danilov Monastery, the first monastery of the city, with its church of his patron Daniel the Stylite; took the great schema before his death; and reposed on March 4, 1303, asking in humility to be buried in the common monastery cemetery. His incorrupt relics were uncovered in 1652, and he is honoured as a heavenly protector of Moscow.

• St James the Faster of Phoenecia (6th c.)

  James the Ascetic (6th century), also called James the Faster, was a hermit near Porphyreon on the Phoenician coast whose life the Church holds up as one of her great examples of the power of repentance. After long years of ascetic labour, in which he received a gift of healing, he fell — tempted, he violated a young woman brought to him for her cure, and then, to conceal the deed, took her life. Cast into despair by the double sin, he was drawn back from the brink by the counsel of an experienced elder and gave himself to a repentance so profound — years enclosed in a tomb, weeping without ceasing — that God, in token of his forgiveness, answered his prayer for rain in a time of drought. He reposed in peace. His memory teaches that no fall is beyond the mercy of God for the soul that truly repents. He is commemorated on January 28.

• Antony of the Kiev Caves

  Antony of the Kiev Caves (983–1073) is the father of monasticism in the land of Rus'. Born at Liubech near Chernigov and baptised Antipas, he went as a young man to Mount Athos, was tonsured there, and was sent back by his abbot with the word that he should carry the Holy Mountain's way of life to his own people. Settling in a cave dug in the wooded hill above the Dnieper at Berestovo, he lived on bread and water and drew disciples he had not sought; from that hole in the earth grew the Monastery of the Caves, the mother-house of Russian and Ukrainian monasticism, whose second founder and organiser was his disciple Theodosius. Antony himself never governed it: he appointed abbots and withdrew again into seclusion, and to the end preferred the cave to the church he had caused to be built. He reposed in 1073, and by a providence the tradition has never tried to explain away, his relics have never been uncovered.

• Gerasim of Vologda

  Gerasim of Vologda (early 12th century – 1178) is honoured as the first monastic founder and wonderworker of the Vologda land in the Russian north. A monk of the Gnilets (Dormition) Monastery near Kiev, he came north about the middle of the twelfth century to the small riverside settlement that would become the city of Vologda, and there, in the forest by the Kaisarov brook, built a church and monastery of the Holy Trinity — the earliest religious house of that whole region. Tradition remembers his prophecy that the obscure settlement would grow into a great city, and honours him as its heavenly founder. He reposed on March 4, 1178, the same day of the year on which, long before, he had received the monastic tonsure. He is not to be confused with the desert father Gerasimus of the Jordan, who is commemorated on this very same day.

• Gregory Palamas

  Gregory Palamas (c. 1296–1359), Archbishop of Thessalonica, is the great theologian of the Orthodox spiritual tradition and the defender of the hesychasts — the monks of Mount Athos who, in stillness and unceasing prayer, were granted to behold the uncreated light of God. When the Calabrian philosopher Barlaam derided their experience and denied that the divine light was anything but a created symbol, Gregory answered with the distinction that would become dogma: God is utterly unknowable in his essence, yet truly known and truly partaken in his uncreated energies — the same grace and glory that shone from Christ on Tabor and dwells in the saints. His theology was vindicated by a succession of councils at Constantinople, definitively in 1351, and the Church honours him twice: on November 14, the day of his repose, and on the Second Sunday of Great Lent, where his triumph stands as a "second Sunday of Orthodoxy." He is one of several saints named Gregory, to be distinguished from Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia (September 30), and from the Theologian, the Dialogist, and Gregory of Nyssa.

• Paul and Juliana of Ptolemais

  Paul and Juliana were a brother and sister martyred at Ptolemais (Akko/Acre) on the coast of Phoenicia under the emperor Aurelian (270–275), about the year 273. When the emperor came to the city, Paul openly made the sign of the Cross at the passing of the pagan procession, and was seized; his sister Juliana, seeing him tortured, cried out against the judge and confessed Christ at his side. After cruel torments — in the course of which, the tradition holds, several of the soldiers set to torture them were themselves converted by the constancy of the martyrs and put to death — Paul and Juliana were beheaded, receiving together the crown of martyrdom. They are commemorated on March 4.

• Wenceslaus of Bohemia

  Wenceslaus (Václav, in the Russian books Viacheslav; c. 907–935) was the prince of the Czechs, grandson and pupil of the martyr Ludmila of Bohemia. Raised by her in the faith and educated in Slavonic, Latin and Greek letters, he ruled Bohemia with a mildness his nobles read as weakness — building churches, ransoming enslaved children, and founding the church of Saint Vitus in Prague — until his younger brother Boleslav, drawn into a conspiracy of the discontented, invited him to a church feast and cut him down at the church door of Stará Boleslav on the morning of September 28, 935. The first of the Slavic princes to accept death in Christ-like meekness, he is venerated among the passion-bearers as the heavenly patron of the Czech lands, and his cultus in Kievan Rus' prepared the way for Boris and Gleb.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Owen (Owin) of Lichfield, hermit (c.670)
• Hieromartyr Adrian and Companions, bishop of the Isle of May in Scotland (c.875)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings