Student Grierosu Vasile Anul IV pastorala

Orthodox Holy Fathers The ultimate goal of the saint is to imitate God and live the life of deification (theosis). St. Maximos the Confessor (seventh century) writes that the saints are men who have reached theosis; they have avoided unnatural development of the soul, that is, sin, and tried to live the natural way of life (i.e., living according to created nature), turning and looking always towards God, thus achieving total unity with God through the Holy Spirit.

Holy land

Icoane si fresce Orthodox Icons and Frescoes Iconography began on the day our Lord Jesus Christ pressed a cloth to His face and imprinted His divine- human image thereon. According to tradition, Luke the Evangelist painted the image of the Mother of God; and, also according to tradition, there still exist today many icons which were painted by him. An artist, he painted not only the first icons of the Mother of God, but also those of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul and, possibly, others which have not come down to us. Icons are precisely the union between painting and those symbols and works of art which replaced icons during the time of persecution. The icon is not simply a representation, a portrait. In later times only has the bodily been represented, but an icon is still supposed to remind people of the spiritual aspect of the person depicted. An icon is an image which leads us to a Holy, God-pleasing person, or raises us up to Heaven, or evokes a feeling of repentance, of compunction, of prayer, a feeling that one must bow down before this image. The value of an icon lies in the fact that, when we approach it, we want to pray before it with reverence. If the image elicits this feeling, it is an icon.

Holy relics Holy Relics These were people so close to God, that they aquired the Holy Spirit both in their hearts and in their bodies, physically. This is why their bodies preserve the way they do, and also smelling chrism and healing the sick. [...] The relics of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Obadiah, Zachariah and several of the apostles remained incorrupt. The relics of the Holy Prophet Elisha, as we see from the Fourth Book of Kings, were preserved as bones. By piously venerating the Holy relics of the Saints, the Church reveres them as temples of the Holy Spirit, temples of the Living God, in which God dwells by Grace even after the earthly death of the Saints.

Miracles in the orthodox church