On the 27th Sunday after the Descent of the Holy Spirit, HG Bishop Ioan Casian was present at the Divine Liturgy in All Saints Parish in Scarborough / Toronto.

Addressing those present, the hierarch said:

St. Paul shows us that in the Church the Christian's fight with evil is not a warfare as a person belonging to the fallen world. The first people in Paradise fell from the obedience and the knowledge of God by bending their ear to the whisper of the evil that darkened their minds and shaken their conviction, influencing their choice. From a knowledge, a path and a battle togther God against evil and from the spiritual growth all become a search for God but without the means to reach Him. And this is confirmed by the mourning of the Old Testament prophets, rulers and kings who witness this fundamental inability of man fallen away from God to approach Him through their own powers.

The Christian's fight is not against 'the body and blood', that is, against the neighbor but 'against rulers, the authorities, the powers of this dark world, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.' This struggle is done by taking on those things of God given in the beginning – ‘the belt of truth the breastplate of righteousness, the readiness come from the Gospel of peace. the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit.’ They are the ones that make man capable of facing ‘the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.’

The fact that the battle is not ours as a whole but of God through the collaboration of our will is shown by the very presence of the Sacraments in the Church. We are vested in the baptismal robe first and then we receive the power of the Holy Spirit for this battle. We are fed with the Holy Eucharist the food that helps us to keep on the path to the kingdom. We receive the Sacrament of Marriage and for those called by God the Sacrament of the Ordination, one who re-embraces and consecrates human relations according to the ordinance of God and the other through prayer bring down the heavenly manna of the kingdom and leads us to human dialogue with God. And through Confession and the Holy Unction we are restored and restablished after the confrontations with the evil that leave visible or invisible traces and in which God provides the medicine necessary for the healing. All this prepare us for what we live in the Divine Liturgy in which the eternal kingdom is present in a mysterious but true way, and in which we are risen to a 'face to face dialogue' with God clergy and faithful as one people of Him who speaks to Him similarly to the first people in Paradise. Through these we live a restauration and rehabilitation of the deep fundamental structures of the person - man or woman -, tuned to the kingdom from which they fell away.

After the Divine Liturgy, Fr Radu Ioan Trifon, Educational Counselor in the Diocese of Deva and Hunedoara, with the blessing of HG Bishop Ioan Casian and HG Bishop Gurie, held concert was held a concert - conference "Light from Bethlehem: the feast of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ between tradition and modernity". The conference, together with the musical pieces inspired by the tradition of carols, follows the story of the Birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, trying to answer some essential questions: Who is Christ and His Mother? Why did He incarnate becoming human? What is His work in the world? What does the Orthodox Church (with its teaching of faith and tradition) mean? The significance of the Nativity of the Lord in history and the significance of this feast today.

With the same occasion, a group of children sung carols in the presence of HG Bishop Ioan Casian and of those present.

At the end, the people were invited by Fr Vasile Giulian

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