On Saturday, October 1, 2022, on the Feast of the Protection of the Mother of God, a series of liturgical and cultural celebrations took place at the Saints Constantine and Helen Metropolitan Cathedral in Chicago.
On Saturday morning, the Matins services was followed by the Hierarchical Divine Liturgy, served by His Eminence Metropolitan Nicolae of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of the Americas together with the Cathedral clergy and Father Archdeacon Adrian Sorin Mihalache.
Father Deacon Sorin delivered the homily at the Divine Liturgy based on the Gospel passage from the Holy Evangelist Luke, chapter 10. It is a significant text because it is the only one across all the Gospels in which our Lord speaks with three women, and also because it refers to the help and mercy of the Mother of God:
Martha is the one who attends to Christ and makes the preparations appropriate for an important guest. This work of Martha has remained in the tradition of the Church as the work of those who labor for God’s sake, but it nonetheless concerns external things: it is a work that pertains to this world and through which we glorify God. The Mother of God exemplifies this characteristic in an exceptional manner, for since her childhood, she lived a chaste life and directed all of her efforts toward sustaining the divine work of her Son. The second person in the Gospel is Mary, the sister of Martha, who sits at our Lord’s feet and listens to His preaching. Mary exemplifies the work that our human nature is called to fulfill in this world, laboring not only for material things, but also for spiritual things by orienting one’s inner life toward Christ and listening to His words. In this case, the person of the Mother of God is fulfilled in an exceptional manner, for the Mother of God was, through her very life and perfect obedience, an example for how our human nature is called to be obedient to God. She gave birth to God and invites all of us to be theophoric – bearers and birth-givers of God for those around us. The third woman, the one from the crowd, exemplifies the third work of human nature, which alongside its physical labors and obedience to preaching, is also called to give glory to God. The Mother of God also fulfills this work within herself, for she offers glory to God when she cries out: “My soul magnifies the Lord.”
After the Divine Liturgy, Father Deacon Sorin Mihalache gave a conference on the theme: “Spiritual intelligence and the cultivation of Christian faith. Several philokalic reflections and scientific perspectives.”
The conference served as an invitation to reflect upon our own lives and upon our children’s lives. Father presented a number of types of intelligence: spatial intelligence, linguistic intelligence, existential intelligence, etc., and the ways in which spiritual intelligence differs from these and facilitates our progress in the spiritual life. Each type of intelligence represents a source of strength. Spiritual intelligence links everything to God: when we see the other, we see him as an image of God:
There are some researchers who study the brain and people’s daily lives. They have concluded that a normal person without any engagement in the spiritual life – who does not have an explicit schedule marking out times for prayer, meditation, reading a sacred text – such a person, throughout the day, is only 10% conscious of the life he/she lives; the rest of the time, he/she is on auto-pilot. The modified states of consciousness that come about with spiritual intelligence are precisely those states in which one’s level of consciousness increases. Which are these, exactly? First, the awareness of life and of the gift received from God. The physicist might be shocked by the world in which we live, the biologist might be shocked by the natural beauty that surrounds us, the mother might be impressed by the beauty of her child. According to scientific studies, people who experience awe are healthier from a cognitive standpoint. We can improve the quality of our life simply by settling into a normal daily flow in order to awe over how many gifts God has offered us at this very moment.
The conference was followed by a Q&A session.
The next day, Sunday, October 2, 2022, Father Deacon Sorin again served during the Divine Liturgy and gave the homily:
This text shows us the “foolishness” of God’s love according to human reason, because God’s love for mankind is “foolish”. And we Christians are called to love others “foolishly”, in the sense that this love is prepared to pay any price, only to remain steadfast before those who curse us, before those who do us evil, before those who hate us, before those who harm us and persecute us.
Father Deacon’s second conference took place on Sunday evening at the ROCO Romanian Cultural Center in Chicago. The theme of the conference – “Great are You, O Lord, and wonderful are Your works! The formidable intersection between a patristic reflection on Orthodox Christian theology and the recent cosmological and neuroscientific discoveries.” – piqued the interest of many members of the Romanian community. The presentation was followed by an interesting dialogue between Father Deacon Sorin and the physicist Marius Stan; it served as a clarification, with patristic foundations, of the necessary dialogue between science and religion, of man’s opportunity to wonder at and be enriched by the search for the meanings of life and of God’s creation. The questions from the audience rounded out the discussion with other clarifications regarding the dialogue between science and religion.
