The Dog Who Waited He lay in the dirt, forgotten by the world. His legs were useless. His coat, once bright, was now grey and matted with dung. His eyes, clouded. The servants no longer fed him. The suitors mocked him when they passed. To them, he was a joke—a broken creature rotting on the threshold. But he waited. He did not wait because he expected reward. He did not wait because someone told him to. He waited because he remembered. Memory had become his whole being. His body failed. His voice was gone. But he held one thing firm: he had a master, and that master was coming home. And when the master came—quiet, bent with age, cloaked in rags and salt and exile—no one saw him. The suitors laughed. The house mocked. The servants rolled their eyes. Even the son hesitated. But the dog lifted his head. He knew. He saw through the disguise. Not with reason, and not with imagination. With recognition. With love that had never moved. And with that final act, his body gave out. He died. But not in defeat. He died fulfilled. That is the moment the story turns. Not when Odysseus strings the bow. Not when the suitors are slain. It turns the moment the dog sees. The world is still upside down. The throne is still stolen. But justice has begun—quietly, at the edge of the gate, in the dying breath of the one who remembered. The dog is not cute. He is not a literary device. He is the first witness. He is the only faithful one in the house. He is watchfulness. He is loyalty. He is suffering made sacred. He is the noetic stillness of a soul that waited in silence, unthanked, unseen. The house is full of men. None of them see. The suitors are men of appetite and words. They claim to love the house, but only because it feeds them. They flatter the bride. They pose as heirs. But they have no memory of the king, and no fear of his return. They are not monsters. They are comfortable. They drink from sacred wells and call it progress. They confuse delay with victory. They mistake silence for surrender. The son bears the name but not yet the likeness. He is full of questions. He has heard stories. He is not evil, but he is untested. He does not yet know what it costs to become a man. When the king returns, the son must choose: obey, or remain a child. The wife is not faithless. But she is weary. The years have worn her down. Her cleverness is her survival. She weaves by day, unwinds by night. Not out of guile—but to buy time. Her hope is buried under years of mockery. She dares not name it aloud. When the king comes, she tests him. She must—not to challenge him, but to protect what little memory remains. And the kingdom? It is the house given to you. Your soul. Your household. Your Church. Your nation. Whatever was handed down in blood and sacrifice. Whatever was once whole and is now full of strangers. Whatever was yours to guard, but now lies in ruins because you—because we—forgot the king. The house still stands. The roof is on. The food is being served. But the structure is hollow. The names have lost meaning. The suitors think it belongs to them. And the men of the house have grown bored, distracted, passive. And the king? He returns in rags. Not in force. Not yet. He returns veiled—to expose hearts. The one who sees him first is not the strongest. Not the smartest. Not the most eloquent. It is the one who waited on the dung heap. The one who kept faith in suffering. The one whose love outlived usefulness. That is the line. There are men who feast and mock. There are men who hesitate and delay. And then there are men who wait in silence. Who suffer. Who remember. Who will lift their heads when the Master returns, and say—nothing. Because it is enough to see. The bed is the secret. The rooted place. The hidden covenant no imposter can fake. When Odysseus speaks of it, Penelope knows. Not by argument. But by shared life. Real things don’t need to be proven. They recognize each other. That is how judgment works. When the King speaks, your soul will know if it belongs to Him. Not by deduction. But by love—or by its absence. So now ask yourself: Are you the suitor? The son? The wife? Or the dog? Because the King is already in the house. And justice is coming. And the only men who will survive it are those who never stopped watching the road. Even from the dung heap. Even when everyone else forgot. Even if no one ever says your name. He will know you. Wait for Him.

☦️ "Our faith is not about information, it is about transformation" Also.... "Grace" is deeply misunderstood in Western Christianity 😌

GM☦️ Jesus Christ is Lord

Based ☦️

Friendly reminder that the U.S is, at least, complicit in the genocide of the Palestinians.

• Drink where the horse drinks: The horse never drinks bad water. • Fit the bed where the cat sneaks in. • Eat fruit touched by the worm. • Feel free to pick the mushrooms the fly is on. • Plant a tree where the mole digs. • Build the house where the snake heats. • Dig a well where birds nest when it’s hot. • Get up and lie down with the hens – you’ll have the golden grain of the day. • Eat more green, and you will have strong legs and a strong heart, like a beast. • Swim more often, and you’ll feel like a fish in the water. • Look to the sky more often than under your feet – and your thoughts will be clear and light. • Be more silent than talkative – Silence will settle in your Spirit, and your Spirit will be peaceful. • Remove sin and disease will be removed because they are given to us because of sins. • Who overcomes illness with patience and gratitude? By doing so, she changes place with a feat or even more. • On bread and water, no one has complained yet. • One can take communion on earth and remain as without communion in Heaven. • Buy a broom to sweep the cell more often because as your cell is cleansed, so will your soul be cleansed. • There is no worse sin, and there is nothing more terrible and more pernicious than the  spirit of sadness. • One should move away from the sorrow and make sure that one has a joyful spirit, not a sad one. • From joy, one can do whatever one wants to do, from inner tension nothing. • True faith can not be without good deeds: whoever truly believes surely does good deeds • .If a man knew what the Lord had prepared for him in the Kingdom of Heaven, he would be ready to spend his whole life in a worm pit. • More fasting and prayer is obedience. It is effort. • Peace can subjugate the whole world. • The abbot (and even more the bishop) should have not only a paternal but also a maternal heart. • The world lies in evil. We need to know it, remember it, and go beyond away from it as far as possible. • Thousands of people live with you in the world, but reveal your secret to one in thousands. • If the family is destroyed, then the country will collapse, and the people will be perverted. As an iron is to smith, so did I surrender myself and my will to the Lord God: as it pleases him; I do not have my will, and what pleases God, I also convey. St. Seraphim of Sarov.

Beauty is objective. ☦️

As to the fatalism of those who believe that man must be a slave to the “spirit of the age,” it is disproved by the experience of every Christian worthy of the name, for the Christian life is nothing if it is not a struggle against the spirit of every age for the sake of eternity. Man’s freedom has been given him to choose between the true God and himself, between the true path to deification whereon the self is humbled and crucified in this life to be resurrected and exalted in God and eternity, and the false path of self-deification which promises exaltation in this life but ends in the Abyss. These are the only two choices, ultimately, open to the freedom of man; and upon them have been founded the two Kingdoms, the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man, which may be discriminated only by the eye of faith in this life, but which shall be separated in the future life as Heaven and Hell. It is clear to which of them modern civilization belongs…The old commandment of “Thou shalt,” says [Nietzsche’s] Zarathustra, has become outmoded; the new commandment is “I will.” In the Christian life, the old self with its constant “I will” must be done away with and a new self, centered in Christ and His will, be born. Christian compromise in thought and word and negligence in deed have opened the way to the triumph of the forces of the absurd, of Satan, of Antichrist. The present age of absurdity is the just reward of Christians who have failed to be Christians. It is futile, in fact it is precisely absurd, to speak of reforming society, of changing the path of history, of emerging into an age beyond absurdity, if we have not Christ in our hearts; and if we do have Christ in our hearts, nothing else matters. ☦️Fr Seraphim Rose

Hypocrisy is the mother of lying, and often its occasion. For some define hypocrisy as none other than meditation on falsehood, and an inventor of falsehood which has a reprehensible oath intertwined with it. ☦️St. John Climacus

"This is only the beginning of sorrows. A fierce war will come, and after the war there must be thirty years of peace, after which the Antichrist will be crowned. But the war has already begun. We are already in a climate and biotronic war. Don’t you see how they can now cause earthquakes, floods, droughts, and fires? But the Good God will protect His chosen ones. Their intention is to incite conflict between nations, so that—God forbid—a world war may erupt, aiming to destroy the majority of mankind. What is interesting is that those who take part in this machinery of destruction never stop to ask themselves: how long will they actually live, if they destroy everything around them just to live as a single “chosen” nation? How far will they go, and how long do they think they will survive? For the pit you dig for another, you will fall into yourself." Elder Justin Parvu (From the Volumes “Father Justin Speaks to Us”)