By Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos
I think that from today's Gospel (of the Prodigal Son) we can understand, by studying carefully, how the only joy of man, the great joy, from which all joys spring, the only joy of man, is God. That is why our Church is overwhelmed by this joy.
This joy is not a common joy, at Easter, it also has Great Friday prior to it. It is not a common euphoria, it is the joy of repentance.
We must be careful not to understand repentance only psychologically and individually. Repentance is not just a change in self-awareness, as the Western Theologians, first of all Augustine, taught us. It is not just a change in our knowledge of ourselves. It is something that concerns my very existence, my ontology. We would say it is something that concerns the event, the being, the existence - it is communion.
