Akathist by Mykhayl

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(STAND)

COMMUNION OF SAINTS 240-250 (???)
Meditation 14
(Chanter)
The church in the catacombs “sacrificed mountains of corpses and rivers of blood” * (Patriarch Josyf Cardinal Slipyj) for the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church of the orthodox faith. Straddling selfish empires century upon century. * Witnessing their own blood witness. Validation of any alliance would be understandable, yet they managed to keep the unclean beyond their sphere of influence.

Chant 14
(CLERGY)
Attention! A reading from the book of Saint Luck:

(ALL)
+Glory be to You O Lord glory be to you.
Alleluia, alleluia!

(CLERGY)
[So said the Lord;] What does it credit you if you give to those who you hope to receive from in return? Even thieves give to thieves so that they may expect as much in return. * Is it not is better to love your enemies, and do good to them giving without any expectation of reciprocation? * For this your heavenly reword will be great. You will then be known as the children of the Most High who is good even to the ungrateful and immoral. Be as compassionate as your Father is merciful. (Luck 6:33-6)

(ALL)
Glory be to Our God glory be to You.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

(MAY SIT IF FATIGUED)
(ALL)
240 Rejoice with the preparatory offertory by pouring the cup and arranging the cubed hosts on the pedestal * With nine choirs the saints arrange to the Lamb’s left as angels, prophets, apostles, doctors, ministers, martyrs, monastics, benefactors, and ancestors.

Glory be the queen mother who’s host sits at the Lamb’s right, and below are a row of personal contemporaries, * below are placed for those who has gone before formulating the one Mystical Body of Christ.

241 Rejoice for Alexander Solzenitizen stated in 1917 We forgot God… history is repeating itself… These are the nations the Lord had yet tested (Judges 3:1). * They exchange the truth of God for lies (Romans 1:25). God has not given us a spirit for fear but the power of love with a sound mind (2 Tim 1:7).

Choose this day for yourself whom you will serve (Joshua 24:15). Let every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord * (Phil 2:11). Will You not revive us again O Lord, so Your people may rejoice in You? (Psalms 85:6). Europe must come back to Christ.

242 Rejoice that Tsar Nicholas and family Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei who lived a privileged life, * alas died Christ-like as passion bearers, trading crowns of gold for crowns of glory.

SUGGESTIONS? Favorite 20th century hero, put under comments…

243 Rejoice for I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luck 10:18) as other heroes followed whose only guilt was association. Repeting the reformation * the pantheon of saints were reduced to a solitary role model, keeping us ignorant of how others could influence us providing varied examples (1990).

After Nadezhda Krupskaya married Vladimir Ulyanov her passions shifted to education. Keeping herself above Party politics * library development was her quest for the benefit of poor children, down trotted women and illiterate men in the new empire (1869 – 1939).

244 Rejoice as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb denounce military intervention speaking the truth to the powerful as the conscious of the cold war. * Andrei Sakharov was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize for his persistence of respecting life in a sphere of social indifference (1975).

If Georgian Joseph (Stalin) competed with Austrian Adolf (Hitler) Stalin’s body count would impress Lucifer himself. * As his New York Times Pulitzer wining apologist Walter Duranty excused “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” (1932).

245 Rejoice as a lion roaring in the desert the songs of Volodymyr Ivasyuk echoed through ancestral passageways long forgotten, * like “na Ivana Kupala” (John the Baptist) before him he was served on a silver platter for the good of a contrived nation (1949-79).

From his Golgotha labor gulog Vasil Stus’ verses emanated hope in many. * In order to rob him and Ukraine of a literary accolade he was worked to death for Nobel’s are not awarded posthumously (1984).

246 Rejoice as the nonpolitical facade of the Moscow (1980) Olympic games came tumbling down with an Afghanistan invasion (1979) and boycott called by US President Jimmy Carter. * The reason being in order to placate the spoiled west it’s media’s communication technology would have been at the disposal of the evil empire.

During the Prague Spring Vaclav Havel call echoed, when the Soviet big brother stepped down he assumed the interim Czechoslovakian presidency (1993). * “In light of this dramatist’s mighty pen mankind’s courage of faith in truth nurtured the oppressed with hope” said the French president (Chirac 2003).

247 Rejoice for in the diaspora the Father of Orthodoxy is John Ireland the bishop of Saint Paul-Milwaukee. Using arrogance he proselytises the nonconformist * doing what centuries of Jesuits in the motherland could not depleting America’s Greek Catholic Church.

Tsar Nicholas crowned father Alexis Toth not for converting Greek Catholics to Orthodoxy as their only change was ethnic allegiances. * These Rusyn immigrants in America slid behind this canon lawyer from the Carpathian slopes into the clutches of the two faced eagle of mother Russia.

248 Rejoice for coming from Krakow on a white steed Count Sheptytsky will become metropolitan Andryj of Lviv leading the Greco Catholic Church through seven regimes and two world wars. * After twice visiting his North American protégé churches (1910 & 22) his death signaled the an intensity in the worst religious persecution in history (1944).

After his successor spends 18 years in Siberian gulags he was released only as a clandestine concession of the US Cuban missile crisis negotiations (1962-3). * Visiting the American churches whose streets are paved with gold he secured a base in exile demanding Kyivan primacy as Patriarch Josyf (Cardinal Slipyj, 1977).

249 Rejoice as Sub-Carpathian Rus’ begets autonomous Carpathian Ruthenia begets independent Carpatho-Ukraine headed by a Greek Catholic Priest on the ides of March (15, 1939). * The next day pro-Hitler forces invaded, and Soviet secret police (KGB) arrested Ptesedent Avhustyn (Augustine) Voloshyn who died in a Moscow prison (1945).

“Those ignorant of their history are doomed to repeat it” as post Vatican II (two) Catholicism replaces the Greaco and Latin orthodoxy of central Europe. * Two Basilian brothers Jozafat and Gorazd Timkovic are now forbidden to print (2000) by order of the Slovak Greco Catholic Bishop Jan Babjak (SJ) as was the brother saints Cyril and Methodius before them (861).

250 Rejoice unsurprised who sits in God’s presence. Due to the intercession of others, * it is not so much what we do that grants us entrance as much as how we do or with whom and for who that saves us.

Even God omnipotent cannot save the selfishly blind, though He always grants clarity at the end. * What will be surprising to us is who will be sitting at our right and left in Hell.