The Sunday of Orthodoxy was specially celebrated this year in Chicago. After living a year under many restrictions due to the pandemic, Orthodox Christians in the metropolis of Chicago enjoyed meeting once again, serving and thanking God for His gifts.
At Ss. Constantine and Helen Romanian Orthodox Cathedral, the Divine Liturgy was officiated by His Eminence Metropolitan Nicolae and the Cathedral’s clergy. At the time of the sermon, His Eminence Nicolae explained the history and significance of the feast of the Sunday of Orthodoxy as presented in the Pastoral Letter of the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church on the Sunday of Orthodoxy:
The veneration of the holy icons, as established by the Holy Fathers in the Ecumenical Councils, is an act of confession of the truth of the Incarnation of the eternal Son of God, an act of communion with God and His saints, but also an exhortation to holy life and deeds of merciful love in any place and at any time.
For the confession of the Orthodox faith, we are obliged to cleanse our minds, to become free of passions and perform the good and just deed, to renew ourselves and to enlighten ourselves with the virtues, considering the words of St. James the Apostle: "faith without works is dead" (James 2:17). In this way, we move toward the likeness of the Image of the Holy God, to the deification by grace, of which St. Gregory of Nyssa says: “Each of us is the painter of his own life: the soul is the canvas, the virtues are the colors, and Christ is the model on which we must paint”.
Through today's feast, the Sunday of Orthodoxy or the Victory of the True Faith, we are also called to be victorious, with the help of God's grace, over the passions of greed and pride in us, which always lurk, putting in their place the virtues of humility and merciful love for the people around us, to rediscover in them the image of the humble Christ in them.
After the Divine Liturgy, the children of the Cathedral’s Sunday School organized a procession with the holy icons, from the church to the social hall of the Cathedral where they sang hymns specific to Great Lent.In the evening, Orthodox clergy and believers from the Chicago area met at St. Haralambos Greek Orthodox Parish in Niles, Illinois, for the Pan-Orthodox Vespers. Although organized at the last minute by the Chicago Orthodox Clergy Association, the Vespers service was a moment of Orthodox communion that seemed lost in the last year due to restrictions. His Eminence Metropolitan Nicolae, the clergy and several faithful of Ss. Constantine and Helen Cathedral participated in this pan-Orthodox service.The homilist of the evening was His Eminence Metropolitan Nicolae who recalled the significance of the veneration of the icon:
The veneration of the icon is based on the Incarnation of the Son of God, but also on His Resurrection. In the icon we see the Son of God, the One who took on a human body, who passed with it through death and Resurrection. In the icon we see the image of Christ illuminated by the glory of the Resurrection, and then the image of the Mother of God and the faces of the saints illuminated by the same uncreated glory of the Kingdom of Heaven, expressed in the halo of light around the head. In the icon we discover the restored human face, illuminated by the glory of the Kingdom, as a call to our own sanctification, that is, to the shining of the image of God on our face.
Such an understanding of the icon helps us to penetrate the mystery of our life and that of our neighbor. The icon discloses to us the value of the human person, of our person, but also of our fellow man. Christ and the saints look at us from the icons and call us to pure vision. This pure way of seeing should also be directed at our fellow man, who bears on his face the seal of the image of God, which makes him a unique and unrepeatable person, full of mystery, a being with eternal destiny.At the end of the Vespers service, the Synodicon of Orthodoxy, the common confession of the true faith, was read. A procession with the holy icons ended this service of the Pan-Orthodox Vespers in Chicago.
