Two years ago, we began to collate a British & Irish Synaxarion. There are so many Saints we know nothing about, whose names regularly crop up in the Liturgical Year, that it seems expedient to start to collate information. A big issue with the published Online material is that it has often not been thoroughly sourced. Consequently, you can find three separate accounts or more of one saint with conflicting accounts of their life. It is also important that we contextualise the account in terms of place and relationship to other events at that time, and that we also try to find out what happened to the shrines and relics after the Reformation.
It is a long time since Britain was Orthodox. To reclaim our inheritance we must reclaim the Saints of the early Church in these Islands. As St. Arsenius of Paros (1877), the spiritual father of Saint Paisios, said: “The Church in The British Isles will only begin to grow when she begins to again venerate her own Saints.” St. Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvitis spoke of the bones of the saints hidden beneath the earth in Britain. We must fearlessly renew the traditions of the early western church, in context of our times, if Orthodoxy is to become mainstream in the British Isles.
We are looking for Orthodox who would like to collaborate on this project, either to write lives of the saints, contribute to those which are inadequate or incomplete, or peer review of authenticity of material submitted. Please be aware, however, we are not writing academic treatises but hagiographical pieces, which need to inspire and engage devotion. To keep focussed on the story of the saint we often have to choose the most likely storyline, then justify this by sources in footnotes.
The method is to try to write/collate all we can for the following month’s Synaxarion and then, at the beginning of the month, send the (very incomplete) pdf around to those who are working on the project or would like to receive it. Please contact Sister Theovouli if you would like to be put on the list.
