A Short Film of the Life of Saint Sophrony of Essex By and For Children

A Short Film About the Life of St Sophrony of Essex

Made for the Sunday School of the 

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Manchester

St Sophrony was born in Moscow in 1896. He had a big family with many siblings. He loved painting from a very young age. He started painting before he could say mum and dad. As a boy, he was watching his parents praying.

His nanny was taking him to the church. There, she spent hours praying while he sat next to her. This is how he started praying since he was a child. Prayer was a natural part of his life.

As he was growing up, his love for painting was growing too. He studied fine arts and began a career as an artist. During this period, he started having doubts about God and he tried to find the truth in other eastern religions. The warm prayers of his mother and nanny helped him return to Orthodoxy. He repented deeply for this period of turning away from God in all his life.

Little Kyriaki Tells the Story of Saint Kyriaki

A Revolutionary Spirit for our Youth Today

By Monk Moses the Athonite

Young people in Greece today have a number of weaknesses. They don’t like hard work, they’re indifferent towards matters of real importance, they reject concepts out of hand and they’re easily led astray with trivial ideas. On the other hand, however, they retain a great desire for truth, they hanker for authenticity, they’re sensitive in a good way, spontaneous, bright, self-restrained and humane.

They’re wary of the Church, which they associate with the mistakes of its representatives. They’re somewhat wary of patriotism, after the anti-patriotic harangues of certain modern non-patriots. They make fun of politicians, who have displayed more than enough incompetence and iniquity, but they also include politics itself, which is a pity. The sacred past doesn’t inspire them and they’re rather afraid of the future. To a large extent, the attitude of our young people is justified, since they’ve seen the hypocrisy of the “great and good”, who’ve said one thing and done another.

The Beautiful Tale of Argyro

My Childhood Introduction to the Bible (2 of 5)

...continued from part one

A few years passed, and now I was at a point where I knew many Bible stories at a very basic level, especially from the Old Testament, and they moved me, but I didn't know how to theologically tie it all together. After all, I was in elementary school with no one to really teach me, but I was discovering these things on my own. I was also growing up, had just left all my friends when I moved to a new town and entered a new school, and I was often alone. Then something happened that forever changed my life and tied everything together for me. It had to do with that one part of the Bible I needed to hear that I never understood before.

When I was ten years old, my temperament was somewhat nihilistic and angry. My mind was often occupied with death and the meaning of life. Though I was born and raised a Greek Orthodox Christian, theologically what made most sense to me was that life was but a dream within a dream, that I was living outside of reality, and my real self was some cosmic entity who imagined my present reality; it was all nothing but a figment of my imagination. Trouble often found me, and if my parents punished me for it, then all I could feel was hatred for them. They were even ready to send me to military school, since to them my future was bleak. If left unchecked for long, no doubt I would have grown up to be a model rebellious teenager.

At the time I was forced to attend Greek school twice a week after regular school. The previous year I had a horrible Greek school teacher, who was very verbally abusive to me. This eventually got her fired after it was exposed, but my experience with Greek school was not that great before this, and it just made a bad situation worse. Now I was in the fifth grade, and my teacher was a young seminarian named Yianni (he never gave us his last name) from Greece who was studying at Holy Cross School of Theology. He was actually very kind, patient and had a particular fondness for me. This was because every week for one of the two days he never taught us the Greek language, but instead talked about our Greek Orthodox faith and heritage. To me this was refreshing, and I always listened attentively, while everyone else was practically snoring. This I think is why he liked me so much.