Thursday, February 14, 2013

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51:1-17; 2 Cor. 5:20b-6:10; Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21

Commemoration: Cyril and Methodius (9th c.), St. Valentine (Valentinus, 3rd c.)

 

Psalm 51:10 "Create in me a clean heart, O God."

      On this day the church commemorates Sts. Cyril and Methodius, brothers from Thessaloniki, who were monastics sent to the area south of the Caucasus and to Moravia. There they developed a 32-letter Glagolitic alphabet, now called Cyrillic, based on the Greek, to use for transliterating Slavic. Cyril, also trained in philosophy,  used the alphabet to translate the Gospels,  Acts, the Pauline epistles, and liturgical texts into  the Slavic languages. The earliest known Slavonic hymn "Hospodine pomiluj ny", stemming from the 10th or 11th c., was used by Antonin Dvorak in the third part of his oratorio, Svata Ludmila (Saint Ludmila), which depicts the era during which the brothers were bringing Christianity to Bohemia, when Duke Borivoj I and Ludmila were baptized by Methodius.

 

Lord, have mercy. Christ have mercy. Savior of the whole world, have mercy on us and hear, O Lord, our voices. Amen   (Hospodine pomiluji ny, excerpt)

 

·         Make an altar, a place for prayer. Listen to the Introduzione e coro from Dvorak's Saint Ludmila, Part III (availableon YouTube).