Maria Loupidou

 

‘Do you know of any series I can watch, given the time of year? I’d like something romantic, optimistic and warm. I can’t get to sleep for second thoughts and feeling dejected. Something…, you know, that I can believe that there’s something good and beautiful and that we can experience it’. The words of a friend of mine, at the beginning of December, 2022.

I do know something true and good. Something that can make you feel hope and courage. That’ll leave you with the sweetest tiredness, so that you sleep like a baby. And it’ll make you dream that you can change yourself and your surroundings, despite the times, the conditions and the status quo. It’s not a television series. It’s a series of steps that’ll take you out of yourself, away from the ‘update box’, from the befuddlement of disinformation and will make you feel it’s Christmas.

Do something good. Trust your personal intuition and let it guide you. There are so many people who need you and so many others who already do this work properly, with their hearts, who stay in the background and don’t make a song and dance.

Do you know someone struggling with cancer? Find out the details with genuine interest and unfeigned love. You’ll strike diamonds. Is there anything more romantic than a couple renting an apartment opposite the hospital where one of them is undergoing chemotherapy treatment, so that they can see each other and visit as much as possible? Is there anything more deeply loving than a mother who’s gradually slipping away from life and is in a palliative care unit and who says she’s happy there, because her children can slowly get used to her absence? Can you feel their pain  and alleviate it, so that later you can have the joy of seeing the wounds healing?

There are so many things that can move the soul of those who want to feel. You don’t have to go far to find people in pain and do something to help relieve it. A family in need is much closer than what you find in the distant studio of some television station that’s presenting horrific things.

And at the end… humble God. There’s a perspective in our life, provided we see it through the prism of eternity. To love, to help, to give, to believe and to hope are free choices, and have nothing to do with external factors.

Source: pemptousia.com


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Pemptousia Partnership

Pemptousia and OCN have entered a strategic partnership to bring Orthodoxy Worldwide. Greek philosophers from Ionia considered held that there were four elements or essences (ousies) in nature: earth, water, fire and air. Aristotle added ether to this foursome, which would make it the fifth (pempto) essence, pemptousia, or quintessence. The incarnation of God the Word found fertile ground in man’s proclivity to beauty, to goodness, to truth and to the eternal. Orthodoxy has not functioned as some religion or sect. It was not the movement of the human spirit towards God but the revelation of the true God, Jesus Christ, to man. A basic precept of Orthodoxy is that of the person ­– the personhood of God and of man. Orthodoxy is not a religious philosophy or way of thinking but revelation and life standing on the foundations of divine experience; it is the transcendence of the created and the intimacy of the Uncreated. Orthodox theology is drawn to genuine beauty; it is the theology of the One “fairer than the sons of men”. So in "Pemptousia", we just want to declare this "fifth essence", the divine beaut in our life. Please note, not all Pemptousia articles have bylines. If the author is known, he or she is listed in the article above.

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