Imitators of Saint Glicherie of Romania

Bishop Cyprian of Oreoi | June 15, 2011 (N.S.)

 

 

Your Eminence Metropolitan Vlasiē,
Holy and Reverend Hierarchs,
Brethren and Sisters in Christ,

Today, all of us who participate in this holy Feast are greatly blessed by our Lord and God—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And we are blessed because before us we have a true Rule of Faith, a true Image of Meekness, a true Teacher of Temperance.

Before us we have a true Image of God, a true Imitator of Christ: the newly-revealed Saint, Venerable One, Ascetic, Apostle, Martyr, Confessor, and Wonderworker, the Hierarch Glicherie, who calls and exhorts us: "Be imitators of me, as I also am of Christ."

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But how did our newly-revealed Holy Father Glicherie become an Imitator of Christ, so that we also may become his imitators?

Christ our Savior, after His Baptism in the Jordan, being in the Wilderness, on the Mount of Forty Days, faced three great temptations: Vainglory, Love of Money, and Love of Pleasure; and He conquered them and cast them out.

But He also faced a fourth temptation, before His Passion: the Martyr’s Death; He likewise conquered that temptation, when in the Garden of Gethsemane, He surrendered Himself and submitted to the will of His Heavenly Father.

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Our Holy Father Glicherie likewise confronted successfully and victoriously—by the grace of our Lord and the help of the Theotokos—these four temptations.

Throughout his turbulent life:

a. He struggled against Vainglory through humility, simplicity, and prayer;

b. He struggled against Love of Money and Possessiveness through poverty in Christ, non-acquisitiveness, sacrificial love for the sheep of our Christ, tenderness, and compassion;

c. He struggled against Love of Pleasure through asceticism in Christ, temperance, austerity, and suffering;

d. Finally, he struggled—on behalf of Orthodoxy and Her Traditions—against Death many times, in prisons, in persecutions, and in isolation, entrusting himself with complete confidence
into the hands of God, through the Theotokos and all the Saints.

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In this way, then, our Holy Father Glicherie became an Imitator of Christ; and he exhorts us—and will continually exhort us—to imitate Him, by struggling throughout our life against Vainglory, Love of Money, Love of Pleasure, and Death, for the sake of our Holy Faith.

Essentially, however, our entire life is a ceaseless struggle against Death and for Life: against the death brought by manifold sin, which besieges us on all sides, and for the Life which we draw from our participation in the Passion and Resurrection of our Christ, from communion in the Immaculate Mysteries, and from the keeping of the divine Commandments.

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Christ our Savior proclaimed that He is the Truth and the Life.

Our Holy Father Glicherie was a true bearer of the Truth of our Christ, but also of the Life of our Christ.

Let us imitate him, just as he became an Imitator of Christ. Let us persist in remaining faithful to the Truth of Orthodoxy and far from Innovations, but with Love, Compassion, Meekness, and Brotherly Love.

Let us strive continually for the Life of our Christ to become our own life, casting out Vainglory, Love of Money, Love of Pleasure, and the Death of manifold sin.

In this way, we shall become true imitators of our Holy Father Glicherie and shall show that we are his true children.

Then Christ will live within our hearts, and we in our Christ, so that through us the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit may be glorified, now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen!

 

Source: Ορθοδοξος Ενστασις και Μαρτυρία, Vol. III, Issue No. 5, December 2011, pp. 38-39.