A Church Service in Balgareevo and the pilgrimage
of the Holy Cross
Today was a blessed day, Praise the Lord! The day started with a
holy Liturgy in the Church Holy Trinity in my hometown. A brother
in Christ and a friend of mine invited me to join him and his
girlfriend for a pilgrimage journey to Balgareevo, a village in
Bulgaria situated 6 km. away from Varna. What made this place so
special was the blessing to worship a small particle a Holy remnant
of the Cross on which our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ was
crucified. Besides that in the Church st. Archangel Michael in
Balgareevo some other relics of a saints were exhibited for
veneration. Thanks God, we have traveled safely to Balgareevo and
back with Ceco's car. We were accompanied by a cute old lady who
made the travel time quite enjoyable singing old Romanian songs and
telling us some of her nice poems. She also blessed us numerous
times throughout the trip and expressed her deep gratitude that we
took her for the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage was wonderful, the
cross itself to which the particle of the Holy Remnanant of our
Saviour's Cross was embeded was filled in with huge spiritual power
and joy. After we worshipped the holy relics and the our Lord's
cross. We followed the priest who had triumphantly went from the
church wherein we were to the cloister where a lot of delicious
food was awaiting us. The metropolitans who were present
(Metropolitan Ilarion and Metropolitan Kiril) with the other
priests present served a consecation service and blessed the food.
After which we again honored the holy cross to which the remnant of
our Lord's cross was attached and had a great time eating the
blessed food. We spend like 2 hours in which we also had the
pleasure to meet the main priest who is responsible for
Balgareevo's church. He told us a few of his ingights he gathered
as interpretations of Revelations of the Holy Bible. And how we the
Orthodox Christians should be careful in what kind of food we eat,
he stressed out that a lot of the food we devour nowdays is
spiritually contaminated and how does the devil exercise control
over us through the control he is granted by the many non-natural
home-grown food and drinks we consume daily. Even though this
teaching is not officially recognized by the orthodox church, he
probably has some point about it, and there is certain truth in
that priest sayings. However it's to everybody to decide. Later on
with God's help we traveled back to Dobrich and I went to see my
grandma after which I went to my aunt Zlatina to configure their
new wireless router as well as to fix her two notebooks running
Ubuntu Linux. The two Linuxes had some annyoing problems with
auto-connection to the wireless networks, on one of the two
machines the connetion problems were probably a consequence of the
malfunction of the gnome-keyring daemon. On the other one the
system had some weird problems with remembering the passphrase for
the TPK-PSK WPA2 2 wireless connction. Another really weird problem
in Ubuntu on the amd64 Ubuntu 9.04 on their Toshiba L300 PLSBGE
laptop was that randomly the screen size changed. Sometimes
displaying the default resolution in a Fullscreen sometimes
narrowing the screen? I guess a bug probably in the 64 bit release
of Ubuntu). The day as I said earlier was quite dynamic, I met a
friend of mine for a chat mainly discussing about faith issues.
Laters I went out to see the New Rock Club they which was recently
opened here in (Dobrich). I also had a discussion with another
friend concerning the desperating situation in which we oftenly
fell and how partly this is caused by the country politics and
social system.