Posts Tagged ‘confirmation’

Why does Orthodox Christian priests and monks wears long beards and why Roman Catholics does not

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

A really Long bearded Orthodox Christian Priest

One might question why does Orthodox Christian priests wear beards? and why does the long beards of our Orthodox priests makes differences with the Roman Catholics?

Here are the few reasons:

1. Long beards wearing's tradition among Orthodox Christian priests and monks comes after Christ

Christ himself had a beard as it was normal and considered proper for a man to wear long beard.

The fact that our Lord Jesus Christ had a long beard himself can clearly be observed on all our Orthodox Christian icons:
The Lord Jesus Christ Sinai monastery ancient icon Pantocrator from the 6th century

The Lord's Pantecrator Icon (Pantocrator / Pantecrator ) from the 6th century

2. Long beards priest wearing comes as a natural tradition from the Old Testament's times and the tradition of early Church

If one reads thoroughfully the old testament, he will find out that even from Moses and Aaron and onwards the tradition is the same.
All the Godly man and the priests had their long beards unshaved as a mark for their belongship and dedication to God.
To generalize the long beards wearing is according to ancient old testamential ancient tradition.
The long beards tradition as an ancient Jewish religion (Old testamental) tradition can still be clearly observed in Jewish rabbis (nowdays the jewish priests), who still wears their beards long, like for example you can see in the picture below:

Jewish Rabbi weiss picture
A modern day Jewish Rabbi notice the beard 🙂

The long beards tradition later was adopted by Muslims when Islam emerged as a religion and more specificly by the muslim priests the Hodjas:

Sait Muslim Hodja Picture

One very interesting historical source of information which proofs that the ancient Church's priests had the tradition not to cut their beards is given by the historian Egezit who writes in his Chronicles that st. Apostle James, the head of the Church in Jerusalem, never cuts his hair.

A source of confirmation that the long hear and beards wearing was an established tradition that dates back to the old testament is found in the old testament in (Ezekiel 8:3)

Here is what exactly we read there:

He stretched out what looked like a hand and took me by the hair of my head.
The Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and in visions of God he took me to Jerusalem,
to the entrance to the north gate of the inner court, where the idol that provokes to jealousy stood.

3. Long hair and beards wearing by the Monks


Hieromonk_Sergij_Monk_Pomorie
An interesting fact is why does the Monks and novice neophyte lay brothers also stick to the ancient tradition.
It appears long hair and beards wearing traces back to the holy life of the ascetics of the deserts (e.g. the hermits).

The reason why ascetics did not shaved their hairs or bears as a way to avoid vanity and therefore this old hermitage practice has also had a spiritual reason.

4. The Nazarite old testament tradition

In the old testament in Numbers 6:1-21, we read about the term nazarite which means consecrated / separated

Each boy or man who was to become a Nazarine has been devoted to God for a certain period of time or in some cases for his all life, one of the many conditions for one to be a nazarite is not to shave his beard or hair.
One can read about this in the old testament in Leviticus 21:5

Leviticus 21:5
"They shall not make baldness upon their head,
neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard nor make any cuttings in their flesh."

There are some other prohibitions relating to Nazarite's one of the most notable ones is found in Numbers 6:4:

All the days of his Naziriteship shall he eat nothing that is made of the grape-vine,
from the pressed grapes even to the grapestone.

One example for people who gaves vow to become temporary Nazarites is found in 1 Maccabees 3:49 (this book is only available in the Orthodox Holy Bible).
One of the most important figure in Christianity that used to be Nazarite is Samson, his life can be read in the old testament in Judges 13 – 16

As we read in Judges , Samson's great God given power consituted in a prohibition to shave his hair and not to drink wine.

5. Reason why Roman Catholic Priests and monks abandoned the ancient tradition of wearing long hairs and beards

In the early Roman Empire it was a customfor a men to shave. The "enlightened" Romans believed that only the barbarians did not shaved themselves, and as you can imagine Jewish people and early Christians were of course considered to be barbarians, e.g. being unshaved was a sign for a cultural inferiorness in according to Romans comprehension.

The long hairs and beards tradition in the Western Church has started disappearing and consequentially completely lost with the Tyranny of Charlemagne at the end of the eight century.
With his massive 'barbarian' inferiority complex, it was his desire in all things to imitate pagan classical Rome.
It was therefore under him that Western clergy were ordered to shave regularly.
For example at the Council of Aachen (816), it was stipulated that priests and monks were to shave every two weeks.

By the beginning of the 11th century the tradition of wearing long beards was already completely torned apart and almost all the Roman Catholic clergy was regularly shaving.

In the sixteenth century beardlessness for Roman Catholic clergy was enforced by further canons,
which appear to have been dropped since the Second Vatican Council.

6. Why does protestants does not wear beards

As we all know protestant Church denominations has emerged as schismatics from Roman Catholic church and therefore mostly the influence they had was from Roman Catholics which already had the tradition within their clergy to regularly shave, thus pastors shaving was completely out of question and never come to an established reality among the Protestant Church pastors.

7. Is the Orthodox Christian layman obliged to wear beards

Absolutely not! The layman within the Orthodox Church can choose for themselves, if they want to wear their hair and beard and through that possess an image physically similar to Christ.
In my view it's more righteous for us the layman to wear our hairs and beards as I personally believe long hair and beards demonstrates mans dignity and God's dedication, but this is my own private opinion.
At many cases wearing beards or long hairs is an obstacle for a good integration in nowdays society, so if wearing a beard or hair as laymans does become an obstacle for our normal daily lifes then I believe cutting a long beard or hair is perfectly acceptable.
Moreover even the Orthodox Christian priests are not enforced to wear beards and in some cases where the priest's wife is against the beardness the Orthodox priest is allowed to shave himself, though as a matter of fact having a completely shaved priests in our Orthodox Churches is rare and less common today.

In conclusion wearing of beard and long hair by Orthodox Christna clergy, has come from the desire to physically resemble Christ.
This physical resemblance is a symbol of the spiritual resemblance of Christ's humility, which is the ultimate aim of our life.

Start Event Viewer from Command Line (Prompt) – eventvwr.msc to Debug Windows server issues

Friday, November 6th, 2015

eventvwrmsc-event-viewer-windows-7-screenshot-view-windows-log-and-dianose-errors

If you’re a sysadmin which needs to deal with Microsoft Windows servers locally or remotely via Remote Desktop RDP client (MSTSC.EXE) or inside a Windows Domain Controller, you will have to frequently debug Windows isseus or Application caused errors by reviewing debug information stored in Event Logs.

Event Viewer is a precious tool to debug often errors with missing libraries or failing programs on Windows boot and thus on M$ Windows it is the Swiss Army knife of sysadmin.
However as staring Event Viewer using the GUI menus, takes a lot of step and looses you time, e.g., you have to navigate to menus:

1. Start button Picture of the Start button
2. clicking Control Panel
3. clicking System and Security
4. clicking Administrative Tools
5.then double-clicking Event Viewer.‌
6. Granting Administrator permission required If you’re prompted for an administrator password or confirmation

It is much handier to just start it with a shortcut:

Press Windows (Button) + R
– To invoke run prompt

and type:

eventvwr.msc

In case if you’re running eventvwr.msc to connect to remote Windows Server run from command prompt (cmd.exe):

eventvwr-run-from-command-prompt-with-a-smart-shortcut-to-save-time-when-administrating-windows-servers

eventvwr.msc /computer=OTHER_Computer_Name

event-viewer-log-reader-and-debug-tool-for-windows-PC-and-windows-servers-adminsitration

What’s goin on recently

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

At Saturday I had my first driving license. The instructor let me drive on the road for Balchik. Happily the driving went smoothly of course I made a lot of mistakes which is pretty normal for a first time driving. In the afternoon we went out for a walk with Niki. We just went out when Vlado (Hellpain) called, he came back to Dobrich for a day, we met for a coffee after which we stayed for 2 hours in the central park. Today as usual I attended the liturgy at the orthodox Church. Today it’s a big Christian Orthodox holiday, it’s the day in which the Our Lord Jesus Christ send the Holy Spirit to the early Church fathers (the apostles). The apostles heard a great noise and they see the Holy Spirit descending from heaven in a form of burning tongues, each tongue coming above the head of each of the apostles and the rest of the first believers in our Lord and Saviour Jesus. I’m still in doubt should I decide to go or not to the Netherlands. I applied for a room there through http://vivare.nl yesterday. But still haven’t received a confirmation for approval and I haven’t send a deposit for a room. I made research about the Arnhem Business School (ABS) and talked and I’m talking with a friend who went to study in Holland the last year. In the afternoon I watched an old russian movie which is marked as a SCI-FI genre (Kin Dza Dza), I got the title from the top 20 in IMDB. Yeah I can say that the movie was pretty freaky :). Vladi did call me again and said one of the servers in the office had crashed I spoke with of my colleagues with a request to go to the office and restart the box but it seems the box isn’t booting. Tomorrow I’ll catch an early bus for Varna and went to the office to see what’s wrong with the machine (hope it’s not a serious hardware problem). That’s most of it. To be honest although God grants me a lot of his divine grace I still feel a bit of lost and pathless and struggle to fight my lack of faith, and bad habits. I’m praying everyday for a physical healing but I still haven’t completely recovered from my sickness. I have sinned badly in my past and I deserve to have that sickness but still I honestly I’m repenting day after day for my bad life in the past and the near present … Another think I should say is that a friend of mine has died I saw his obituary hanging on a tree 🙁 , His name was Alexander (Sashe) known among us by the nickname (Saketo), he was a drug addict and that killed him I hope he is with God know peace be upon him. END—–

How to fix “Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons” SSL certificate lighttpd troubles

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

Firefox SSL Pro could not verify for uknown reasons solve error

I’ve been issuing new wildcard multiple SSL certificate to renew an expiring ones. After I completed the new certificate setup manually on the server (a CentOS 5.5 Final running SoluSVM Pro – Virtual Private Manager), I launched Firefox to give a try if the certificate is properly configured.

Instead of my expectations that the browser would just accept the certificate without spitting any error messages and all will be fine, insetad I got error with the just installed certificate and thus the browser failed to report the SSL cert is properly authenticated.

The company used to issue the SSL certificate is GlobeSSL – http://globessl.com , it was quite “hassle”, with the tech support as the first certficate generated by globessl was generation based on SSL key file with 4096 key encryption.

As the first issued Authenticated certificate generated by GlobeSSL was not good further on about a week time was necessery to completethe required certificate reissuing ….

It wasn’t just GlobeSSL’s failure, as there were some spam filters on my side that was preventing some of GlobeSSL emails to enter normally, however what was partially their fault as they haven’t made their notification and confirmation emails to pass by a mid-level strong anti-spam filter…

Anyways my overall experience with GlobeSSL certificate reissue and especially their technical support is terrible.
To make a parallel, issuing certificates with GoDaddy is a way more easier and straight forward.

Now let me come back to the main certificate error I got in Firefox …

A bit of further investigation with the cert failure, has led me to the error message which tracked back to the newly installed SSL certificate issues.
In order to find the exact cause of the SSL certificate failure in Firefox I followed to the menus:

Tools -> Page Info -> Security -> View Certificate

Doing so in the General browser tab, there was the following error:

Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons

The information on Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons on the internet was very mixed and many people online suggested many possible causes of the issue, so I was about to loose myself.

Everything with the certificate seemed to be configured just fine in lighttpd, all the GlobeSSL issued .cer and .key file as well as the ca bundle were configured to be read used in lighttpd in it’s configuration file:
/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Here is a section taken from lighttpd.conf file which did the SSL certificate cert and key file configuration:

$SERVER["socket"] == "0.0.0.0:443" {
ssl.engine = "enable"
ssl.pemfile = "/etc/lighttpd/ssl/wildcard.mydomain.bundle"
}

The file /etc/lighttpd/ssl/wildcard.mydomain.bundle was containing the content of both the .key (generated on my server with openssl) and the .cer file (issued by GlobeSSL) as well as the CA bundle (by GlobeSSL).

Even though all seemed to be configured well the SSL error Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons was still present in the browser.

GlobeSSL tech support suggested that I try their Web key matcher interfacehttps://confirm.globessl.com/key-matcher.html to verify that everything is fine with my certificate and the cert key. Thanks to this interface I figured out all seemed to be fine with the issued certificate itself and something else should be causing the SSL oddities.
I was further referred by GlobeSSL tech support for another web interface to debug errors with newly installed SSL certificates.
These interface is called Verify and Validate Installed SSL Certificate and is found here

Even though this SSL domain installation error report and debug tool did some helpful suggestions, it wasn’t it that helped me solve the issues.

What helped was First the suggestion made by one of the many tech support guy in GlobeSSL who suggested something is wrong with the CA Bundle and on a first place the documentation on SolusVM’s wiki – http://wiki.solusvm.com/index.php/Installing_an_SSL_Certificate .
Cccording to SolusVM’s documentation lighttpd.conf‘s file had to have one extra line pointing to a seperate file containing the issued CA bundle (which is a combined version of the issued SSL authority company SSL key and certificate).
The line I was missing in lighttpd.conf (described in dox), looked like so:

ssl.ca-file = “/usr/local/solusvm/ssl/gd_bundle.crt”

Thus to include the directive I changed my previous lighttpd.conf to look like so:

$SERVER["socket"] == "0.0.0.0:443" {
ssl.engine = "enable"
ssl.pemfile = "/etc/lighttpd/ssl/wildcard.mydomain.bundle"
ssl.ca-file = "/etc/lighttpd/ssl/server.bundle.crt"
}

Where server.bundle.crt contains an exact paste from the certificate (CA Bundle) mailed by GlobeSSL.

There was a couple of other ports on which an SSL was configured so I had to include these configuration directive everywhere in my conf I had anything related to SSL.

Finally to make the new settings take place I did a lighttpd server restart.

[root@centos ssl]# /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart
Stopping lighttpd: [ OK ]
Starting lighttpd: [ OK ]

After lighttpd reinitiated the error was gone! Cheers ! 😉

The Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ feast in Bulgarian Orthodox Church

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

Ascension of Christ Orthodox Icon, Voznesenie Hristovo ikona, Vyznesenie Hristovo icona

On 2 of June this year 2011, our Bulgarian Orthodox Church has marked one more bright feast (one of the 12 chief (God’s) feasts).

The Spiritual Joy is great as our Saviour has Ascended to Heaven 40 days after his Glorious Resurrection in front of the amazed desciples, and crowd of people who were with them.

An Angel has also told the people testifing our Lord’s ascension that the Second Coming of our saviour will take place in the same manner as his Ascension.

Here is some passages from the Gospel of Luke 24:50-53

50 Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them.
51 hile he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven.
52 And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy,
53 and were continually in the temple blessing God.

It’s a tradition in some Orthodox Churches that the Paschal Greeting (Christ is Risen / Hristos Voskrese / Hristos Anesti etc.) is substituted with the greeting:
Christ has ascended by the person greeting, while the respondant confirms answering with Truly he has ascended

This Ascension greeting is not that deeply routed among Christians as the Pashcal greeting, though it’s very truthful and beautiful, to use it instead of the standard daily Hi greeting 😉

The whole following week after Ascension’s feast has been arranged by the Church to be a feast week commemorating our Lord Christ’s glorious Ascension (in his glorified body) to Heaven and sit in the right hand of God.

There is a local village hear in Bulgaria near a village called Spasovo – Saviour’s which has a Church called The Ascension of Christ

In this small village there is a spring which does start flowing only on the date of the Ascension (celebrated on a different date every single year)!!!
That’s amazing God miracle given to strengthen our faith as a confirmation that the Ascension of God’s Son and our saviour Christ is a real event that happened!

There is a false belief seriously accepted in many non-devoted Orthodox Christians who does not know well the Orthodox Christian faith, that on the date of The Ascension the so called Spasov Den (in Bulgarian) – Day of the Saviour , the dead who are in heaven and hell are allowed to get out of Heaven or Hell (for a temporary break) and be a bit closer to the living.
Many people who believe this insanity instead of visiting a Church and being joyful for the Ascension of Our saviour do go to the city graves and spends few hours, crying or remembering the dead …
This kind of believe is firmly non-orthodox and is taken from ancient paganism beliefs.

With all this said I find it important to say few words on why the Lord Jesus Christ has ascended?

The answer to this question gives Christ himself, as he says in the Gospel of John – Chapter 16

7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth;
It is expedient for you that I go away:
for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you;
but if I depart, I will send him unto you.

Here is a part of the Troparion for Ascension that is being sing in the Church:

When You fulfilled the dispensation for our sake,
and united earth to heaven:
You have Ascended in Glory, oh Christ our God
not being parted from those who love You,
but remaining with them and crying:
I am with you, and no one will be against you!

Christ has Ascended to all Orthodox Christians!

Orthodox Christian Saints Incorruptable bodies, A Miracle proof of the truthfulness of Christianity

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

There is a miracle of incorruptable holy relics (Incorruptable Bodies) of many of our Orthodox Saints in the Orthodox Church.
Little or none is actually known in the non-orthodox christian realm about this great miracle proof of the truthfulness of our faith.

The incorruptability of saints has been a phenomena longly known to exist, some of the incorruptable bodies of saints are still preserved already for more than 10 centuries.

The phenomenon of incorruptable bodies is a sure sign for saintship in the Church. There are dozens of orthodox christian saints whose bodies are still intact.
Our Orthodox Church teaches that the incorruptability of the saints body is given by God’s grace for all us the believers as a confirmation of the Resurrection of the Dead, which is about to come in the Great day of the Lord as the scriptures teaches.

A good example for incorruptable body which exists for 10 centuries in the bulgarian lands are the incorruptable holy body of St. John of Rila.
St. John of Rila is the greatest known Bulgarian saint also officially recognized by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as the patron saint of Bulgaria (protector of all Bulgaria).

In below’s videos I present you the antiphon of St. John of Rila:

Antiphon translated to English means (Song of Praise) dedicated to some Christian saint and is actually an Orthodox well-known Church term.

Saint John’s incorruptable bodies is still kept in his established monastery The Rila Monastery .
Each year on the saints feast his incorruptable body is being bringed out of the monastery for a procession around the Church monastery.

On that day all the pilgrims who are looking for St. John’s spiritual intercession in front of God (The Holy Trinity) are lined up to venerate the great God servant St. John of Rila.

Unfortunately there is no video that has video-taped the incorruptable body of Saint John of Rila. However there are plenty of videos which shows a lot of incorruptable bodies of saints some of which are even Roman Catholic.

Along with the saints bodies incorruptability, many of the saints bodies does emit a specific a flower like odor, nevertheless the body is a thousands of years old.

Here is an example of a saints remains which is considered incorruptable, his body is preseved for more than 60 years without any special chemical threatment.

What is most important is many believers does receive a spiritual blessing or get healed from various spiritual or bodily diseases, when they look up for the holy intercession of the saint, who has been honoured by God with incorruptableness.

Before a saint’s body is recognized as a saint and his body as incorruptable, usually there are testimonials by christian layman for healings by his holy prayers during his earthly living.
Some of the saints which are found to have incorruptable bodies has happened after a few years they have been put in a normal earthly grave.
In holy mount athos there is a tradition that (if I remember correctly 5 years) after a monk’s death and burial, his grave is being digged out to collect his remains and put it in a ossuary.

After this 5 years some of the holy monks remains are found to possess this miraculous graceful incorruptable bodies.

As we know from Holy Bible, the body is the temple of the holy spirit my logical interpretation of some of the saint’s incrorruptability is rooted in there saint’s way of living as they have achieved the Holy Spirit (The Spirit of God) in an immeasurable quantities that, the Spirit of Truth that’s being flowing out from their incorruptable bodies is still sustaining the body and prevents the natural laws to destroy it.

The bodily incorruptabilities of our Orthodox saints is also a clear sign for the truthfulness of Orthodox Christian faith.
The incorruptability is also a direct violation of the natural laws by God’s great providence and mercy and I guess is given as a stimulator of us whose faith in our saviour Jesus Christ and in God the Holy Trinity – The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit, to whom be glory now and forever and ever Amen!